Net Promoter Community

Tony Hsieh - CEO Zappos.com

Building a Brand that Matters

How many people have bought from Zappos? That’s a good question. According to the Net Promoter® Conference audience, a lot.

And the reason is because Zappos is focused on providing the best customer service and creating the most loyal customers. It is a mantra that is the corner stone of its corporate culture.

Word of Mouth is Key

This is a business based on customer focus, creating repeat customers and driving Word of Mouth. They tried a large advertising campaign once but found they saw little rewards. Now the company takes the money that it would have been spent on advertising and puts it back into the customer experience.

Where a lot of companies are trying to lessen the amount of contact/calls from customers, Zappos wants to speak to the customers. They take about 5000 calls a day plus live chat, twitter, and emails. They want to create a complete word of mouth experience. One thing they’ve noticed is that when they do a random survey their Net Promoter Score (NPS)  is 83, but when they do the survey via phone their score raises to NPS 90. So Zappos is going to keep speaking with its customers as much as possible with the goal to build long term customer relationships.

To this end, everyone in the company goes through the same training as customer service, plus 2 weeks on the phone and training on twitter. Zappos believes that if the company is going to focus on customer service then everyone needs to be focused on customer service. Culture fit is key to the organization and every employee needs to believe in the core values.

Four things to building long term brand:

1. Vision- chase the vision not the money. Their vision be about the very best customer service.
2. Repeat customers- choose and focus on great product and great service
3. Transparency - Be real and you have nothing to fear
4. Culture - Committable core values:

  10. Be humble
    9. Be passionate
    8. Do more with less
    7. Build a positive team and family spirit
    6. Build open and honest relationship with commendations
    5. Pursue growth and learning
    4. Be adventurous, creative, and open minded
    3. Create fun and a little weirdness
    2. Embrace and drive change
    1. Deliver WOM through service

Zappos is owning the 3C - Clothing, Customer Service, and Culture and Zappos is all about delivering happiness to the customers and its employees.

Richard Owen - CEO Satmetrix Co-author of Answering the Ultimate Question

Richard started us off with a view on the economy and what are the most important steps companies can take during this slow down.  I think Richard asked a good question, “Is flat the new up?” But really, the most important thing companies can focus on is their customers.

Key things companies should look at:

1. Are you focused on customer retention which is a lot easier and more cost effective then custom acquisition
2. Are companies making the right cuts, rather than cuts that will hurt customer loyalty long term
3. Do you understand the economic value of Word of Mouth (WOM) or your promoters for your business.

Let’s Look at Advertising vs. Word of Mouth: Today Can advertising really be effective for long term growth? Companies can’t advertise their way out of trouble they have to focus on the customer’s experience. You can see this hold true when you look at the US auto industry and companies like Sprint both of which spend large advertising dollars but it has not resulted in increased sales. Today, the best customer service is now online retail where companies who invest in the customer experience, not advertising, are leading the way.  For example look at companies  like Overstock, Amazon, and Zappos.Deploying a Successful Net Promoter® Strategy: One theme that is consistent among the leading companies is that Net Promoter is really about a holistic approach that is part of the entire organization, not just the score. To truly be successful implementing a Net Promoter discipline requires change across the organization. Based on our findings, companies that are able to implement change management will be successful with their Net Promoter programs. Companies need to move away from business processes that do not work for them and learn how to create a radical shift in the organization.

Click here to download the presentation.

Aman Verjee- CFO, eBay

Kellie Cobaugh - Senior Manager Loyalty Insights- eBay

Why Net Promoter® and what are the benefits?

When ebay first began looking at their customers they started with measuring customer satisfaction but the data was not actionable and not intuitive for the customer. Today, eBay is using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) which they see as pivotal to linking the customers, and their experience to financials. They believe future company growth will migrate from their traditional customer acquisition model to customer retention through a deepening of customer relationships.

As many of the sessions covered, eBay has found that having a cross functional team dedicated to driving the Net Promoter program and support from senior management has really made the program successful, and has help to get engagement from the whole organization. eBay also has spent a great deal of time looking at the economics of the program and from this developed the Net Promoter Economic (NPE) program

Using predictive modeling - these analytics let you predict the score someone would give you based on others like them. They look at core data like dollars spent each month, churn rate, etc. in each case Promoters had better numbers. In some cases while you may not see spend increase with top promoters, you may see churn reduce. The largest lifts come from moving Detractors towards Promoters, for eBay it means moving Detractors to Passive will bring the greatest results. The critical thing is to look at customers that are detracting and really focus on why

eBay’s Advice

• The NPE program - If I knew then what I know now
• Bring in NPE efforts as soon as you start an NPS program
• Be clean about how long it takes to get these programs really working
• Have a consistent data gathering process