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Net Promoter Community > San Francisco Conference Blog 2009 > Tags > kehler
 

San Francisco Conference Blog 2009

2 Posts tagged with the kehler tag
mkirschn

Tom Kehler, Vice President and GM Community Solutions, Satmetrix

Stephen Blundell, Senior Manager Vendor Partner Relations, Intuit

 

Tom Kehler, VP and GM of Community Solutions at Satmetrix and Steve Blundell, Customer Advocate at Intuit, talked about improving NPS through online customer engagement. About one half of the audience said they had an online community initiative underway. Tom presented a strong case for ‘continuous customer engagement’, especially in B2C and B2SMB. For example he asked, “Do you have the ability to contact your Promoters in the next 24 hours?” Promoters can be activated to support other customers, help in a marketing campaign, defend or back a corporate position, etc. In support of this Tom referenced a recent HBR article written by the cofounder of Intuit, Scott Cook called “The Contribution Revolution”. He talked about the need to create a Return on Engagement through better products (the best innovators are users of the product), better marketing (get Promoters to help form the message), and better word of mouth (comes from a trusted relationship and starts with listening). The customer’s return is the ability to influence the company and product direction and to play a role in creating a better customer experience – for themselves.

 

Tom stressed that the primary goal in a customer engagement program is to demonstrate that you are listening. He then shared a case-study on the Intuit TurboTax Inner Circle program, a micro-site for customers to have conversations with Intuit. Tom walked through an innovative technology (Adaptive Conversation) for identifying the best ideas from a large customer group. He also explained how the system is able to build robust customer profiles that leads to better CRM and support a closed-loop process. When combined, these capabilities allow a company to demonstrate that they know their customers, know their needs and are able to actively help improve the customer experience.

IMG_2228.JPG Steve then showed how the ProSeries and TurboTax product teams were able to use the Satmetrix platform to engage customers in product improvement. Customers provide ideas in their own words, vote on statements provided by others and then rank ideas by importance. The process extracts ‘wisdom from the crowd’ by turning qualitative feedback into quantitative results. Intuit is able to take action on this data since it identifies what’s important to the most number of customers. Steve shared other best practices for listening to customers including a customer council where customers are asked how Intuit can improve its products and services. These customers spend two days at Intuit’s offices paid for by Intuit. Steve found that if they involve customers in the beginning of the development process then they get a better product in the end. He referred to the successful launch of a payroll product due to this method of customer engagement. In another example, he shared a situation where Intuit thought the customer priority was to have a faster, easier TurboTax experience. After using the Satmetrix Customer Engagement platform Intuit realized this not to be the case and instead, to their surprise, found that the #1 problem was with rebates. This caused a significant shift in focus that eventually led to the elimination of rebates.

 

 

Tom concluded by stating that engaged customers create measurable results including increased loyalty, WOM and repeat purchases.

1 Comments Permalink Tags: b2c, w-o-m, blundell, kehler, conversation, satmetrix, intuit, adaptive
StevenB

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.

 

DSC_6515.JPG

 

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!

0 Comments Permalink Tags: w-o-m, my_m&ms, satmetrix, mars, pugliese, kehler

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