How My M&Ms has bucked the trend and grown their business

Speakers: Tom Kehler, Satmetrix, and Claudio Pugliese, MARS Direct

How do you get your customers to feel that your brand is important to them?  Claudio Pugliese, who manages the Customer Care center for MARS My M&Ms, found first-hand that by genuinely engaging your customers in a conversation, your brand becomes more important to your customers, you create more Promoters, and the business grows.

When My M&Ms first started their community reading the Detractor comments was “emotionally” difficult, but they were full of insights. And the comments from Promoters were also invaluable, yielding improvement ideas for both product and go-to-market. The critical element in both cases was around engaging their customers in dialogue, and to demonstrate through effective action and communication that they listened to customer feedback. Taking action – and then demonstrating that they listened – is critical to their success.

The results My M&Ms has achieved from taking action on feedback speaks for itself. Over 8 time periods since they started this approach, My M&Ms not only improved their NPS from 25% to now 58%, and even more significantly they’ve significantly grown sales. They’ve found that creating a superior customer experience leads to:

• Enlisting more brand Promoters
• Building brand loyalty
• Activating positive Word of Mouth

Bottom-line is that by listening to the feedback from their customers they were able to grow their customer base (which also ordered more!).

As illustrative examples, the My M&Ms team implemented a few changes based on customer feedback:

• They listened to customer complaints about pricing and adjusted it, resulting in larger orders per customer
• They responded to customer requests for higher quality by introducing new inks and new capabilities
• They adjusted their service policies, for example “no-questions-asked” returns

They started off averaging 14% repeat customer-order rate per period, and that has now grown significantly to a 25% repeat rate. More customers are ordering more, and in this economy My M&Ms has grown where their competitors are losing money.

How do they do it?

1. My M&Ms established their online community with the important element to enable customers to join a club of influencers. And by demonstrating that the company listened and took direct action, customers talk more and provide further insights. Once you’ve established the relationship with Promoters, you have the ability to influence many more through those indirect connections
2. NPS is part of everything they do. It tells them where to invest marketing dollars to get the greatest returns. It tells them which employees are creating Promoters. And it tells managers where to invest to ensure they are keeping their employees as Promoters.
3. They are constantly looking at how they create more engaged customers, and they know that this is a measure of how important My M&Ms is to the customer.

In other words, Claudio tells us that they found that customers are looking to influence the companies they do business with.  If you talk to your customers they will talk to you.  Through their online community, My M&Ms has created a direct-to-consumer experience that allows them to engage. This works by asking open-ended questions and allowing customers to contribute ideas or select the ideas of others through the community platform.

Tom Kehler reminded us that engagement with your customers drives three major benefits:

• Better products that your customers want to buy
• Better marketing by letting your best customers tell you what resonates
• Better word of mouth from engagement

Incidentally, Claudio started his talk by stating a critical success factor: “Make it easy.”  Claudio also closed his talk with a similar comment:  “Work across the internal organization, and make it easy for them to work with you on this important effort.  Put the information into terms that they need and understand.”

Well said.  Congratulations to the My M&Ms team for driving real business results through Net Promoter!