Ludovic Philippo, Expedia
With millions of buyers, Ludovic explained the great challenge for large companies like Expedia to truly understand what is going on in their customer-base. We first met Ludovic via his blog, where he had mentioned NPS, and we invited him to join us in Paris.
They have been using NPS for 18 months, and integrating it with their operations for 12 months now. From his point of view, it's all about making it operational.
They start with 2 questions based on the Net Promoter metric, then ask another 6 questions or so. They believe it's critical to keep the survey short...and have limited it to 8 questions total.
Ludovic stressed the importance of communicating NPS to the front line employees. It's not about him "controlling" the feedback. Basically, the teams own it, and they define their own follow up. This is very much in line with where the process should be, but it is amazing to me how many companies are not able to make this transition...they just hold NPS hostage in a centralized group! I guess that's because of the long history of operating feedback programs from a central research group. In fact, this is the biggest difference between NPS as an operational discipline, versus adding the recommend survey to existing market research studies that are "owned" by a central team only. Ludovic really hit that nail on the head!
Expedia uses NPS across a variety of touchpoints. The main ones being:
--Telephone sales
--Telephone, email, and partner channels
--Complaint management
--Back office processes
When they ask for feedback, they ask passives and detractors about what they can do to improve. And for promoters, they ask "what can we do to maintain the score you gave."
He discussed how they approach analysis of all of the verbatims. Over time, by studying the verbatims for promoters, passives, and detractors separately, it gives an incredible richness to understand what you can do (specifically) to change and improve the client experience. With the high volumes that Expedia has, they also find it critical to associate the feedback with other internal data about the customers, particularly by segmenting and looking at differences by segment.
He talked about how incredibly important it is to follow up with detractors. Clients are just amazed when they follow up. And they keep track of exactly who has contacted the client, so they can track agent-level NPS and contact-center NPS. They connect NPS to things like first contact resolution, call monitoring, and other data points. And they see that some agents have scores of 80% while others have negative scores. This also allows them to focus their training programs and priorities where it is needed. You have to target your training, because it gets better results, and it also helps to save money and time.
How do they get the entire organization involved? To do this, you need to boil it down to some simple management practices. These are the ones that they focus on at different time frames:
1. Having supervisors call back detractors, every single day.
2. Every week, they do calls with all the supervisors to discuss new issues that are coming up, and how to prioritize and elevate key issues.
3. On a monthly basis, they get together all of the key teams, and discuss their quality dashboard, which includes NPS alongside all other key indicators for quality and financial results.
4. Every quarter, they look at agent performance, and they give out free trips to the top performers. And people look forward to this. What's great is that it's not the manager who awards this. It's the customer!
What about performance management? What they found is that for some sales reps, for every 100 new customers they were generating 60 calls to customer support. So when you start to put the data together, from end to end, you can understand how practices in one silo are impacting the overall customer experience. They may be optimizing their operational sales metrics, but creating problems for the customer that spill over into the service operation (and more importantly, cause hassles for the customer).
What results has this generated for Expedia? They have been able to improve their transactional NPS by 35% in 1 year, which is a pretty amazing outcome. They also have a repurchase rate of 60%, which has increased with NPS improvements and allows them to spend less on marketing to get to their growth targets. But their success in France is really due to the communication they have done internally. When it comes to other countries, they are just starting to adopt it. And it's not as easy as just adding the ultimate question to a survey. It's really about how you communicate internally and use the information to manage your teams.
What they are moving to next is to take their best agents, and start to drive the most complex and difficult customer questions to those people. I was thinking about this, and realized that as a customer, you sort of know when you have a difficult problem to solve. So if I call, and I get someone who can handle the difficult situations, I really notice it more because it stands out relative to what I expect. So my personal take is that they are going to differentiate their service even more by segmenting their agents in this way, and leveraging their strengths.
What about new products and services? Well, suggestions for this show up right away in their customer feedback. As soon as products go out, they can tell if the products are winners or not based on the feedback they get from customers.
One company in the audience mentioned that they also use Net Promoter to track the success of new products...and in one case they completely withdrew a product line because the feedback was so negative. They realized that the profits from that product, while important financially, were much less important than the negative word-of-mouth and brand impact for the rest of their product line...the brand's reputation is something that they work for years to build, so Net Promoter gives them an important way to know if new revenue streams are contributing to long-term profitability, or destroying it.
A great question came up from the audience about whether Expedia provides all of their service internally, or whether they outsource as well. They do both, and Ludovic discussed how critical it is to use NPS for the outsourced vendors also, to ensure that they are achieving the right level of service.
He concluded by mentioning that they have now started measuring employee NPS. There were questions about whether they measure this at the individual employee level, or link it to the customer NPS, and Ludovic gave the same answer I typically give. When it comes to employee NPS, you are typically going to look at results at the group level, to ensure sufficient anonymity to protect employees and solicit their honest feedback.
I must say, this is one of the fastest adoption stories I have ever encountered. And Ludovic's passion for the core principles of Net Promoter was evident to the audience. I hope Expedia has great success in taking what he has done in France and replicating it in other countries. Bonne chance!
