For those that missed the Net Promoter Conference in San Francisco I wanted to follow up my pre conference blog with some random thoughts and lasting impressions that I have. In my blog before the conference, I asked the question:

What part of Customer don't we understand?"

In our Customer Experience consulting practice, we have encountered way too many customers who do survey their customers but do not or cannot use the feedback effectively. So, it was gratifying and impressive to see such a large turnout of customer zealots, especially in this business climate. I have opined in my blogs before that this is actually a great time to invest in improving your customer experience as your customer base is the path to future growth.

It was good to see the large turnout and that Richard Owen ( CEO of Satmetrix ) led off the conference talking about the importance of retaining customers as the cost of retention is far below that of acquisition of new customers. Save money, grow your business at the same time, how good is that? Equally impressive was the lineup of key executives from leading companies reiterating the same core principles. More importantly, we heard story after story that the Net Promoter score was not the goal; it was the fundamental business improvement that was facilitated by NPS programs that was the key. There were great examples of the Net Promoter economics as people had matured in their programs.

Some other themes were repeated by various speakers and attendees talking off to the side. Here are a few that I noted and whole heartedly endorse:

• NPS and customer experience requires the focus and endorsements of the C-suite executives to really be effective and enduring. Those that do embrace NPS have seen the results.
• Net Promoter Score is not the goal, fixating on great customer experience will give you a good score. The process is what helps you get better.
• NPS can be sponsored by the C-suite but still not be effective if you do not get engage your employee in the process
• NPS is about a journey and not a destination. It is not a program of the day. It requires commitment to the long term and lots of hard work to get the largest gains.
• Your customers are kind enough to give you the gift of feedback when you survey, you better darn well return the favors by ensuring diligent follow up.
• The C-suite cannot dictate good customer experience, it must be a part of the DNA, in must be nurtured and it needs to be a core part of the corporate values and operating principles.
• Survey may be a bad word. NPS is trying to encourage customer conversations. It is about how you listen to your customer and how you respond.

In the research that we have done around adaptive organizations and how companies survive for 50-100 years, the same factors emerge. While innovation is important, innovation does not happen without first listening to your customers. The more global that you are, the more that we use new media channels to connect with customers, the more diligent we need to be in listening to our customers. Like we heard many times during the conference, quite often the employee is the key channel from which we can gain customer insight and best influence the customer experience. Customer experience is not one job or one function; it is role of everyone in the company to drive positive, value added experiences.

The lasting impression that I took away from the conference is that interest in customer experience is growing, especially in B to B companies, and more companies are starting to understand the word “Customer” when it comes to their success.

Laura DeSoto, Experian; Dr. Laura Brooks, Satmetrix; Desirree Madison-Biggs, Symantec; Diana Dykstra, San Francisco Fire Credit Union

“The customer is always right.”

Wrong, according to this panel. That’s how our first session of conference day 2 began. Our panelists did not agree on all topics, but on this one they seemed united on the idea that a much better mantra would be “Do the right thing for the customer.”

Seems like a subtle distinction, but it’s not. As Diana Dykstra pointed out, you can certainly have customers with unreasonable demands. What matters is that the employee does the right thing for the customer.

The panel discussed several different topics, but I’ll highlight a few of the big ones here:

First: Break the shackles of corporate policies.

Desirree Madison-Biggs of Symantec talked about how Symantec had created a “Myth Busters” website to help employees let go of old policies and corporate myths about what was and was not acceptable. From my perspective, it’s sort of like cleaning up your desktop. When you are driving change into an organization, make sure you don’t just hit “delete” on the obsolete files, but also be sure to “empty trash” and then restart the computer.

Diana Dykstra agreed. Get rid of the policy book. Her policy for employees is to do the right thing for the customer. They have 4 core values: Creating Elationships; Be the Member; Done in One; and Listen, Learn, and Innovate.

Laura Brooks commented on how action oriented and descriptive those value statements are, and I wholeheartedly agree. Don’t underestimate the power of good, descriptive language…especially when they see leaders and other team members also living it out in their actions.

Second: Hire or Train for Customer Focus, but Do It

Hire or train? We had different opinions on that. Laura DeSoto of Experian rightfully pointed out that “you’d better hope you can train for it,” because most organizations already have a lot of great employees on board, and you want to leverage their knowledge and expertise. Diana Dykstra took the other angle. At her company, they hire for it. And she admitted that when they were changing the culture, a lot of employees who didn’t fit with the new values left over time…which allowed them to bring in new people who were more naturally inclined to customer-focused behavior.

Whatever your strategy, be sure to do it. You won’t get change if you don’t invest in different hiring practices, training, or both.

Third: Get Leadership Commitment

Employee behavior follows cues from company leadership, especially when you are trying to make change happen. An audience member asked, “What do you do if you don’t have leadership on board.” And Desirree Madison-Biggs summed it up nicely in her response: you’re hosed! I couldn’t have put it better than that. Companies try to dance around this topic, especially passionate customer experience advocates at mid-management level who really want to make Net Promoter work in their organization. But ultimately, long-term success is intimately tied to having your top management on board.

Desirree made the point that showing execs the economics of promoters and detractors can sometimes help to sway opinion. But ultimately, most executives either have a belief system that lends itself to believing in customer first, or they are likely to remain skeptics. Find the right exec to spearhead this.

Fourth: Tell Stories

All the panelists agreed that stories were an extremely effective way to drive home the importance of customer-focused behaviors, both to make change happen and to reinforce behavior and culture.

Laura DeSoto told a story about Experian’s CEO, Kerry Williams, who personally followed up with a disgruntled detractor. The purpose of his call was simply to confirm that the account manager had closed the loop already, but when the customer said “no,” the next call was a personal one to the account manager. What drives change faster…a couple of stories like that, or a corporate email memo advising account managers to close the loop with detractors? You get the point. Stories matter….a lot. As do actions from top management.

Desirree Madison-Biggs explained how Symantec uses peer awards to get the stories out there. Not necessarily for “grand” heroics, but for the day-to-day heroics that represent a regular rhythm of customer focus in the operations.

For Diana Dykstra, the employees at San Francisco Fire Credit Union evaluate great customer-focus stories, and how they fit with the organization’s core values. Moreover, their entire performance review process is based on the core values, which drives home the importance of these stories to the company’s culture.

Fifth: Compensate, At the Right Time

Laura Brooks closed the session with a hot topic of debate: should you link compensation to NPS or not? We got three very different answers…from “yes, I did it right away” to “it took us 6 years,” and one smack dab in the middle.

I was waiting for Laura Brooks to chime in and break the tie…but we ran out of time. What was obvious from the discussion, and what we teach in the Net Promoter Certification, is to make sure you have trustworthy data and buy-in before taking this big step. Tying compensation too early introduces a lot of risks, including gaming, an overly strong focus on “the score” instead of changing customer experience, and the potential for a major crash and burn if the underlying response rates and data quality are not representing the customers or segments who matter most to the business.

Brad Smith, President & CEO, Intuit

Brad Smith of Intuit gave us a preview of what a mature Net Promoter Discipline can look like in a company…and how it can be an underpinning of transformative work that is focused on delighting the customer. He opened by explaining that 81% of new sales for Intuit are attributable to Word of Mouth…so this isn’t just a nice to have. Having more promoters is central to their growth strategy. How did Intuit get to this point? It was clear from hearing Brad’s talk that he personally, and Intuit as a whole, had been using NPS and the core concepts of Net Promoter since the early days. He gave a compelling and concrete description of the phases of NPS adoption that they had passed through since starting with it in 2003. These phases may sound familiar to many companies who have been using Net Promoter: Phase 1: focused on the score. This is the ideas that most companies here about first…the Net Promoter Score. It’s obviously just a tiny part of what the concept is about, but it is the starting point for most companies who hear about Net Promoter. Phase 2: the verbatims. Brad pointed out that the next thing they did was dig into the verbatim comments. The big takeaway from this was that the customer experience was not just about the product. It was about the end-to-end experience for the customer. That’s the view from the outside in.

Phase 3: process mapping. Fix those detractors! That’s what happens next in nearly all companies. They see the feedback, and the squeaky wheels obviously need grease. In Intuit’s case, Brad described major investments they made to map out processes, improve them, and drive down the number of detractors. Nothing bad here, but it’s not the end of the story.

Phase 4: how to get more promoters. This is a big shift, and it requires a different mind set. Employees need to think about the things they can do to delight customers and generate more promoters. It’s usually hard for companies to focus on this until they have detractors under control. But it is crucial.

So, at this point, I would have thought the story was over. These are the four phases most companies talk to me about. But I think Brad appropriately added a fifth phase of adoption, which is critical to getting things right out of the gate (rather than going back to diagnose, fix, and improve)…

Phase 5: innovating with customers. Intuit focuses today on getting customers and employees to participate together in innovation. What’s interesting about this is not only the outcome you get in terms of the product and the customer experience, but also the fact that you can build more promoters by having them involved with your company in this process. They know they have a voice. It can also be a huge motivator for employees.

As a takeaway, Brad stressed three things to consider. The importance of leadership, the power of harnessing employee creativity, and the impact that co-innovation can have on word of mouth. Where is your company on this adoption path?

Click here to download the presentation.

Deborah Eastman, CMO at Satmetrix

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!