Net Promoter Community: San Francisco Conference Blog 2009 : Authors : StevenB

San Francisco Conference Blog 2009

2 Posts authored by: StevenB

Improving Net Promoter Scores in B2B Relationships

Posted by StevenB Jan 26, 2009

Deborah Eastman has a wealth of experience in running Net Promoter programs, from being both a direct practitioner and also helping clients optimize their own programs.

Deborah started off by reminding us that business buying decisions are complex – much more so than B2C experiences – since there are often so many more people involved in the buying decision. Understanding the strength of those relationships can be challenging when so many people are involved. When B2B customers leave, it’s often a big surprise; an effective Net Promoter program will fix that.

Create a Program, not a Survey. Customers don’t care about surveys. It is critical to show them that you care about the relationship and that you and the account team will take action. In determining from whom to get feedback, Deborah advocated taking a hard look at the 80/20 rule: Since 80% of revenue often comes from 20% of customers, it’s important to give bigger customers a bigger voice. And also make sure to understand the word-of-mouth effect inside a company – for example, end users are often important influencers of any buying decision and might have something important to say.

Part of a programmatic approach is to establish when the surveying process will take place. In general, getting feedback only once a year is not a good practice as the approach fails to drive customer-centric thinking throughout the organization. So Deborah instead has found that by splitting up the customer base into segments, and surveying “slices” of each segment (keeping in mind to not over-survey individual customers) on a regular (e.g. quarterly) basis. This approach drives stability in the NPS while also ensuring NPS is top-of mind for all employees. And role-based surveys, for example to differentiate end users from executives, are another important dimension and segmentation strategy to get he right feedback from the right people and drive the right results.

Deborah next advised that a communication strategy be a critical part of any NPS program. Communicate both internally and externally what is happening, how the feedback will be acted upon, and how employees will be engaged in the process. For example, by taking this approach within Satmetrix’ own Net Promoter program, account teams are much more engaged in the process, and so are clients. Effective internal communication should ideally highlight the “wins” from the program: Since account teams benefit from a Net Promoter program through improved relationships and generating cross-sell opportunities, it is critical to make sure everyone knows the real-world examples of where the program has produced new sales wins.

You’ll benefit from high response rates by recruiting responses through effective communication from both account teams and executive. Effective recruiting includes:

Positioning the intent – why are you soliciting feedback?
Setting expectations about what you’ll do with the feedback

And finally, don’t forget the closed-loop process as a key part of the program. An effective follow-up process drives action both operationally – within the account – and structurally – across the organizational silos – to prioritize overall investments. Alerts from surveys generate the awareness for urgent operational follow-up, and then allow the account teams to improve relationships that ultimately improve your account teams’ top-line.

Effective governance drives effective behavior

There’s a tendency to link compensation to NPS, yet it is critical to make sure that gaming is avoided by instilling the value of the program vs. individual performance management. Deborah advised a strong focus on getting the contact data right and driving high response rates, and that this is balanced with using the data for employee performance management in order to avoid gaming (or, in fact, de-prioritizing the employee performance aspect in the early stages). Don’t be tempted by linking NPS to compensation too soon – find the behavior you want to influence, and link accordingly to avoid gaming.

At the end of the day we care about revenue more than scores. Link Net Promoter Scores to the value of the customer in order to know where to optimize the relationship by applying the right resources to the right accounts.

Deborah shared a few examples programs done right:

Orange Business Services realized a 150% increase in orders from accounts engaged in the program
Another large B2B company found a 39% improvement in follow-up meetings (sales opportunities!)
And HP found a 2x increase in sales from the participating account teams

While a Net Promoter program is not an easy task, the phenomenal results like these certainly provide the pay-off!

4407 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: satmetrix, b2b, compensation, hp, loop, orange, b2e, eastman

Improving your Net Promoter Scores Across the Business:

Posted by StevenB Jan 26, 2009

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?

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
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.
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!