San Francisco Conference Blog 2012

Guitar Center - Playing to a Tough Crowd

info@netpromoter.com — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:51:24 GMT

Guitar Center is comprised of a family of brands. They help people make music. They have over 220 retail locations with a wide selection of musical instruments and accessories. They have knowledgeable employees and provide a hands-on and interactive in-store experience. They also offer lessons, rehearsal studios and instrument repairs.

An interesting story from Pittsburgh. Four months into Guitar Center’s NPS they took a call from one of their top performing store managers wondering why his NPS score was so low. Together they looked at the metrics. The high traffic store experienced higher sales, but a closer look uncovered issues of product availability, long checkout lines, etc. They went back to their store team and really pushed the CSAT (NPS) program and realized immediate improvement.

In this unique market, Guitar Center has 85% industry awareness and 50% of the market visits their stores. In order to maximize sales, they needed to improve relationships with their current customer base. This is often difficult due to the diverse nature of their customers, including beginners, seasoned veterans, semi-pros, professionals and even grandmothers. It is challenging to understand their skill and knowledge levels and immediately scale conversations to where they are at. The ultimate goal is to provide a hands-on expertise to walk customers through their purchase, determine how to expedite the sale to get customer in and out quickly, and maintain a knowledge of a wide variety of equipment like guitars, drums, recording, DJ, accessories, etc. Don't assume you know what to measure. Prioritize customer service attributes. Make sure you get the big picture. It is also important to gain feedback from shoppers that don't purchase so that you can understand their pain points. Find out what is important to your customers through qualitative comments. Measure attributes that drive the highest levels of satisfaction. They developed their “Open Ears” program to capture feedback and promoted it in their stores and on their websites. In the first month, this program tripled calls to Guitar Center’s customer feedback department. Customers talk and GC listens. Recognize that information comes in many forms - get as much as you can. Inbound calls, emails to customer service, social media, outbound calls, random sample surveys all provide valuable insights. The power of voice (telephone) surveys should not be underestimated. Guitar Center partnered with Direct Opinions to create a CSAT program using NPS as one of their primary metrics. The online tool delivers tiered views by functional roles within the organization. The dashboard features scores, differing views, rankers and a deep dive to each individual survey. This is a “one stop shop“ for all stakeholders to evaluate how a store, a district, a region or the entire organization, is performing. They created a “Heroes” tab where success stories are selected and posted, often including a picture of the employee and customer featured. “We listen, we act, we fix.” All customer feedback creates a customer service ticket if negativity is attributed to it. Serious issues are handled by GC’s customer service ninjas. All tickets must be entered into the reporting tool so that they can track how issues are resolved. Involve everyone in your program. Tailor training programs and celebrate heroes. Share their stories and they should be celebrated by the company. Prior to implementing their CSAT program, Guitar Center had a universal training program to address the “flavor of the month” issues, such as how to greet a customer, Now their training programs are tailored by store to focus on the top two areas that need improvement based on their CSAT scores. They found a direct correlation of individualized training to store improvements. The heroes program has also been used as inspiration for a new advertising campaign.

The result? A culture of customer satisfaction was born, met with widespread acceptance and involvement at all levels of the organization, fostering a competitive spirit amongst the stores.

Idaho Central Credit Union - Creating a Service Focused Culture

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:43:49 GMT

Idaho Central Credit Union boasts $1 Billion in assets, 107,000 members, 18 branches and 334 team members. They recognized that culture change is a journey. Start small and build on successes. Know that everyone in the company is responsible for the culture of your organization.“The way management treats their associates is exactly how their employees will treat their customers” - Sam Walton.

In 2008, while recognizing many positive attributes, there was a culture that lacked trust, high turnover and processes and procedures that were beneficial to the back office, but not the front line or customers. Employees were not empowered to make decisions. Only 35.5% of employees “Strongly Agreed” that they were satisfied with their work experience at ICCU, and 39.7% would recommend ICCU as an employer. A transition to new CEO proved a good opportunity for culture change. Senior management buy in would be critical. ICCU prioritized projects that had the most impact on customer service above all others. ICCU understands and believes in NPS and the value of excellent service. Their member experience analyst reports directly to a top level executive. Everything they do is tied back to service. When a new idea is proposed, always ask, “how does your proposed change or idea impact service and members?” Without a definitive answer the idea cannot be considered. Training, new employee orientation, goals and awards were implemented. Each and every team member must promote and be an example of trust and compassion. All negative wording was removed from their HR policies and handbook. Left out were rules that targeted specific employees. Show employees that you assume the best by how you approach problems. Hire the right people. Identify optimum talents for each position and make sure employees fit your culture. In some cases, ICCU had to transition people to different roles where they could be happy and successful. They now conduct annual culture surveys and share results. Individual and organization action plans, as well as periodic reports are critical. ICCU’s back office has a tremendous amount of influence on how the front line delivers service to members. If they catch the vision, service levels will significantly increase. Changing the mindset is key. Employees should ask, “Did I make a difference today?” Every team member must understand how they impact service and discussions should happen to help team members figure it out. Measurements are a part of the process. For example, to better understand the experience, IT members personally delivered new PCs personally to better understand the frustration of employees that get a new PC that doesn't work. Excuses for poor service are not acceptable. Learn to adapt and not let service levels drop. Be proactive instead of reactive – think ahead. ICCU modeled their VOC program after Experian’s. Identify problems in processes or products and analyze the issues. Be sure to rebuild the process from the members’ perspective. ICCU’s goal is for team members to naturally look at processes through their members’ eyes and make improvements on their own. There are a lot of good books out there as your resource: The Energy Bus, Knock Your Socks Off Service, the Simple Truths of Service, the No Complaining Rule, etc. Get the “energy vampires” off your bus. Make sure everyone is engaged - Daily HDLs to discuss NPS comments, service story of the week, performance reviews. Create detailed action plans for the bottom tier of service scores. Publish service scores and goals for all to see. Send recognitions to team members. Involve all team members in changes that have a big financial impact. Monthly NPS reports should be distributed to all managers. Annual service awards are given. The result? Satisfaction with the work experience increased and turnover dropped. Decisions are made in the best interest of the member and the company. It’s important to recognize that everyone impacts culture.

Getting social: How can social media create a better customer experience?

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:30:36 GMT

The second session of Thursday’s “Getting Social” track, chaired by Raj Bhargava of Satmetrix, was “Tweet, Like, Comment, Connect: How Can Social Media Create a Better Customer Experience?”

This panel discussion was moderated by Deborah Eastman of Satmetrix, and featured Chris Carfi from Ants Eye View; Kim Celestre from Forrester Research; Tristan Bishop from Symantec; and Wendy Lea from Get Satisfaction.

Kim Celestre noted that though social media use by companies is lagging use by consumers, it is rapidly gaining currency – not only with B2C companies but with B2B ones as well. The difference is in the type of environments employed. B2C companies and their customers are (as might be expected) active in more passive (for social media) “content consumption” channels such as Facebook which is closer in spirit to more traditional marketing means. B2B companies and customers, by contrast, engage more heavily in peer-to-peer channels such as support and discussion forums; B2B customers, Celestre said, look to these venues to get information about companies and their products and services.

Wendy Lea discussed how social media is helping to deliver on the promise of CRM by allowing customers to build relationships with companies (rather than the other way around), engaging on their own terms (not the company’s) and pushing openness and transparency in interactions. That means, as Lea pointed out, that companies have to be “up for that” – ready to interact. Social media gives companies a big opportunity, one that if ignored is going to present challenges to growth.

Tristan Bishop noted that with all the money and effort companies spend on CRM, trying to find out how customers think and feel, they often ignore the fact that in social media customers are already telling you – without having to ask – you just have to pay attention! The big challenge with listening – and responding – in social media is the signal-to-noise problem: finding out, amongst all the chatter, the small percentage of activity that really matters. Symantec (where Tristan works) even built closed loop processes based on identified critical social media activity.

Chris Carfi emphasized that it is as important to secure “internal engagement” (within a company) for social media initiatives as it is to have “external engagement” (interaction with customers in social channels). The best way to do this is to build over time – to map and initiate a “journey” that develops over time. Finding the “native engagers” – people already fluent and comfortable with social media – within your company and use them to put a toe in the water; give them guidelines and training that can be improved and optimized as your social initiatives grow. Chris cited the Microsoft MVP program as a model of how such programs can be successful.

Kim Celestre outlined six key phases that companies go through in developing social media initiatives:

· listening (an initial, essentially passive phase);

· talking (starting to get involved with customer discussions);

· energizing (empowering customers to further activity);

· spreading (expansion of interaction);

· supporting (leveraging social media channels for customer support);

· embracing (building a community for customer interaction, creating useful feedback that enhances the development of products and services)

Each of these phases can be measured discretely and each can be used to build success in successive phases.

The session concluded with each panelist imparting some final “words of wisdom”:

Wendy Lea: define social media engagement from the outside-in – try to approach things from the customer’s point of view

Chris Carfi: social media engagement is a journey; it’s not “you weren’t social, now you are” – it requires experimentation and time

Kim Celestre: Measure, Act, Repeat

Tristan Bishop: Net Promoter and social media are complementary, not competitive; considering and practicing each side-by-side can produce powerful results. And if you ignore social media, or don’t engage properly, your competition will take advantage.

Getting social: Measuring social media behavior with Net Promoter

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:29:24 GMT

The first session of Thursday’s “Getting Social” track, chaired by Raj Bhargava of Satmetrix, was “Measuring your Social Net Promoter: Methods and Techniques.”

During his morning keynote, Satmetrix CEO Richard Owen announced Satmetrix SparkScore In this session, Dr. Laura Brooks of Satmetrix and Erick Watson of Metavana covered how social media activity can be measured in the context of a Net Promoter program using SparkScore.

Dr. Brooks emphasized that survey data (derived from existing Net Promoter program) and social media data may have differences – anchored data (i.e. the data has a Net Promoter score attached at collection vs. unanchored data); structured vs. unstructured; easily tied to CRM data (knowing who the respondent is) vs. not; and so on. However, despite these differences, survey and social actually yield complementary, not conflicting, information – especially if viewed through a common lens. Satmetrix SparkScore is the first product to put social media activity in a Net Promoter context.

Erick Watson of Metavana – creator of the sentiment engine that powers SparkScore – provided an overview of how the product works. The engine is focused or “trained” by industry (or “domain” in Metavana’s lingo), first collecting pertinent data through “focused web crawling” from a variety of sources – popular social web sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. But it can also draw from review sites such as Amazon.com, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, as well as public and private customer communities (peer support and discussion venues).

The data is then analyzed and classified, attaching sentiment and polarity (a continuum of scores from very negative to very positive sentiment) to each data point. This sentiment engine is the most accurate available, and its output is coupled with Net Promoter methodology, to calculate a SparkScore, or social Net Promoter score. SparkScore can be calculated by industry, data source, and even individual expression. The engine has been “tuned” so that a SparkScore can be related to survey-based NPS calculations, but may not yield the same score. Satmetrix and Metavana’s research has developed reliable algorithms across a number of different industries, including airlines, computer software, laptops, printers, hotels and motels, and coffee and tea brands.

Dr. Brooks continued the session by presenting more detailed findings from one particular industry: airlines. SparkScore is dynamic (it was calculated daily during the research phase), so it is able to capture the impact of discrete events and occurrences that might be missed in solicited surveys. For example, Dr. Brooks demonstrated how SparkScore reflected immediate impact in social media following Alec Baldwin’s run-in with American Airlines over not turning off the “Words With Friends” game he was playing on a mobile device (he was kicked off the flight). There was an immediate score impact on Twitter (Baldwin’s tweet following the incident was widely retweeted), and a subsequent impact on Facebook following Baldwin’s appearance on Saturday Night Live the weekend following the incident. SparkScore captured this effect in social media for both events (the incident itself and the Saturday Night Live appearance).

Dr. Brooks concluded by stressing that SparkScore is not a replacement for survey-based NPS, but rather a powerful complement that brings additional richness and power to a Net Promoter program. SparkScore is dynamic, so it can reflect the immediate impact of events (product introductions, publicity, mergers, and so on). SparkScore can provide detailed insight by source (for example, are Facebook comments different than Amazon reviews?) and theme (service, transactional experience) that provide context and depth to similar information solicited through more traditional channels.

In short, SparkScore – the expression of Net Promoter behavior in social media – adds a powerful new tool to the Net Promoter toolbox, one no company should really be without.

Lanham Napier of Rackspace discusses fanatical support

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:17:54 GMT

Rackspace was founded in 1998 and now has about 4000 employees or Rackers. Their vision is “to be recognized as one of the World’s greatest service companies”. They are committed to greatness, which leads to being big. The odds are very high against becoming a big company. Lanham loves Apple, The Ritz-Carlton, Google, Southwest, Lexus and Nordstrom. Net Promoter is Rackspace’s *greatness* question... and that is defined as ‘10’ scores from rackers and employees.

The trigger for the NPS journey at Rackspace was reading Fred’s HBR article...”The one number you need to grow”. Lanham launched an NPS program despite some opposition, but it was a big failure. The company committed many of the pitfalls that Fred talked about earlier. Lanham went to Vegas to see Fred and figure out how to get him to help them to recover the program. He persuaded Fred to join the Rackspace board. That allowed them to do a complete reset, with the help of Fred and Satmetrix. Lanham says you have to decide to go “all in” with Net Promoter and put NPS at the center of your business. He reads a report every day that says how the company is doing according to its customers. Lanham himself will ring detractors on that report!

The program is definitely working now…the company’s NPS is about 50-60% and they close the loop with 100% of detractors. The company has a map of its “army of the promoters” and it shows where all their promoters are. But despite the success, the journey will never end. They continue to obsess about getting 10’s from both employees and customers, and avoiding failures which can cause a rapid decline in customer loyalty. A truly inspiring story, thanks Lanham!

Great Ideas for Mature Programs

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:35:01 GMT

My track on Friday afternoon, “Refining Your Program Strategy”, had 3 engaging presentations which spoke to NPS programs that are beyond their first few years and entering into maturity. As the Account Management Director at Satmetrix, I commonly see the challenges programs have after losing their initial momentum of a new customer program and initial quick wins of identifying and resolving low hanging fruit, and asking, “What’s next?

Oliver Bendzsa from the Export Development Canada, and classic movie buff, started us off with his witty and insightful “The Seven Year Itch.” He set us up with a few iconic photos of Marilyn Monroe, and described the protagonist, as played by Tom Ewell, going on vacation with his family, and after happily married for seven years, starts questioning his marriage after seeing the girl played by Marilyn. The metaphor? EDC adopted NPS seven years ago, and recently faced an internal struggle of remaining true to NPS, or placing more of an emphasis on Sustainability/Profitability metrics.

Unlike the movie in which the protagonist stays true to his family, EAC decided to keep NPS, but also place emphasis on sustainability. Perhaps that is an easier position to take when scores are in 60s and 70s as they are for EDC. The story is how they had to segment their customers and develop business processes that were appropriate for the segments, allowing them to operate more efficiently.

Next up was Dan Roup from Alcoa. Dan had an entertaining presentation, “Keeping it Real – Net Promoter in the Trenches.” Alcoa is an extremely complex organization with 25 business units, from commodities to high end design. Dan shared some approaches to making his program effective, including stack ranking BU’s not by NPS, but by NPS change, as well as, showing where they rank relative to their competitors. Another example Dan shared was maintaining an internal NPS portal to keep a very large organization updated on NPS progress.

Finally, Rick DeLisi from Corporate Executive Board focused on activating Promoters with his, “Getting Promoters to Speak Out – Driving Advocacy with the Right Targeting Strategy.” I started out asking a crowd of about 60 how many followed up with Detractors, and nearly all raised their hands. When I asked how many felt like they were mobilizing their Promoters, one person raised their hand. This is a green field opportunity. Based on studies and research, Rick’s observations were: Not all Promoters actively promote, many Passives do actively promote, and companies need to figure out how to get as many customers to promote as they can. But, wait!, you can’t “get” customers to promote, but you can making it easier by creating opportunities.

Rick shared a really interesting study where a guy was parked on a busy street in NY and appeared to be struggling to load a sofa in a truck. He asked people on the street if they could help, and about 80% offered. He then offered to give people $5 to help load the sofa and less than half took the offer. The point is that a person’s decision making process is very different in a social environment (the first scenario) than in a business exchange (the second scenario). The point? Create a social context, and less business exchange, to help customers advocate for your brand. He then used examples of how companies are doing this with Ford, American Express, Intuit, and Westpac.

Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company discusses Employee Net Promoter

info@netpromoter.com — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:30:47 GMT

The Ultimate Question 2.0 is the new platform book behind the whole Net Promoter philosophy. Fred thinks that about 35% of companies today globally are measuring NPS, but less than 5% of companies are using the whole Net Promoter System approach. So there is still a long way to go. Core to Net Promoter is closing the loop at the front line. This is working well on the customer side, but not as well on the employee side. That said, there are still a lot of challenges with implementing a successful Net Promoter system.

Today, Fred wanted to chat more about Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS)...as you cannot have happy customers if your employees are not inspired to do great work. Apple is doing a great job at energizing its employees and making it a great place to work. They survey their employees and ask the Recommend question. They share the results in the store meeting as a group and decide as a team what the top things are that they want to work on to improve the employee experience. Then later they close the loop on the improvements that were made. In addition, they always connect the customer NPS and employee NPS. JetBlue is another leader in terms of ENPS. It is one of the few airlines that is not unionized. Rackspace is focused on delivering outstanding service through passionate employees. Bain is also a great place to work and attracts great people. We shouldn’t separate employee engagement from customer engagement. What makes a great place to work is empowering employees to give a “10” experience to customers as part of a focused team.

Today, employee surveys are where customer surveys used to be...run out of HQ, dense, and run sporadically. In ENPS leaders, they focus on simple surveys and giving focused feedback to the organization so it can improve the employee experience. Employees want to be a valued member that is part of a winning team with an inspiring mission. Key questions to measure the employee experience are “How likely is it that you would recommend our company as a place to work? And “How likely is it you would recommend your team leader as a person to work for?

In summary, Net Promoter is a measure of Greatness...maybe it is a Greatness Positioning System!!

CenturyLink: Communicating the Big Picture in Small Increments

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:30:39 GMT

Renee Karson and Brad Hughes of CenturyLink shared with us the details of how they aligned a large and disparate set of internal teams, post-merger, around one common Net Promoter concept and program.

What was interesting about their journey with Net Promoter is that it all started within the Qwest team before the merger with CenturyLink, Embarq, and Savvis. Former Qwest CEO Ed Miller, who had come from Williams Sonoma, started the focus on placing the customer at the center of corporate strategy. Renee and Brad then worked closely with CenturyLink EVP of Corporate Strategy, Stephanie Comfort, to extend the strategy to include all of the CenturyLink businesses post-merger.

Starting with Insights about the Customer

Renee shared with us 7 key insights that they uncovered through a lot of research at Qwest, prior to the CenturyLink merger. These 7 insights formed the basis for their transformation efforts within the business.

1. It's about the experience, not the technology. As Renee explained, customers say "I want a higher speed broadband because I want to download the movie faster." It's not because of the broadband speed itself.

2. People are information-savvy, and use new ways to get more of it. The customer is becoming much more knowledgeable, so CenturyLink realized that the way they talk to the customer needed to change.

3. Technology feels fragile, threatening and confusing, which creates reluctance to change.

4. People feel disappointed and abandoned during the experience. Renee gave an excellent story from their ethnographic research. They found that almost everyone had a "cord drawer" with all the old cords that were left over from previous devices in the home. The cords were an analogy for how complex and confusing everything had become.

5. People feel like they are treated like a number, not a person. This came through in subtle ways, such as the scripts and processes used in call centers.

6. People don't feel they are valued for their ongoing relationships with service providers. Many companies suffer from this challenge: they are focused on acquisition of new customers, while ongoing customers were not getting all of those benefits.

7. The baseline for good service is broken; expectations are vey low. This, ultimately, was where they saw a huge opportunity. When they spoke to customers, they simply were asking for things to go as expected....expectations were really low, so CenturyLink viewed this as an opportunity to exceed expectations and delight customers.

From Transactions to Relationships: Like Dating to Marriage

As they reflected back on these challenges, it became apparent that many of the underlying challenges came from viewing everything in the busienss as a transaction, instead of a relationship. "It was like the difference between going out on dates, versus getting married" as Reneed pointed out. They believed they needed one over-arching approach to break down the silos and help them get to the overall relationship that would lead to the business outcomes they wanted.

To make this come to life for the organization, they developed proof points based on NPS that linked to customer churn and word of mouth.

Churn and renewals: People who were severe detractors were 3 times more likely to churn than promoters. They have been looking at this for many quarters, and they find that this pattern holds true in the business consistenly over time. So they were confident that by reducing the number of detractors, they would reduce churn significantly.

Word of mouth: They also studied word-of-mouth, and found that nearly all of the negative word of mouth was coming from detractors, especially those scoring 0-4, and the positive word of mouth was skewed toward the passives and promoters, especially the promoters.

Re-Selling the Complete View

Brad Hughes explained how they communicated the value of the Net Promoter program to the new executive team.

Brad pointed out that it was critical to explain why a complete program, including both relationship-based and transactional feedback, was key for success. As Brad explained, if you are only looking at transactions, then you are missing the big picture. The converse is also true: if you are only looking at the relationship, then you may have difficulty understanding the details behind the key touch points that are the opportunities to delight.

When it came to getting people on the bus, they focused first on groups that were most engaged, to help develop case studies of internal success. For example, the service assurance (repair) group was very engaged, and they were able to collaborate with this team to identify and understand key drivers that were correlated with the touchpoint NPS. But they went one step beyond this to try to anticipate issues by reaching out to customers who had not yet complained. For example, they reached out proactively to customers who they could tell were not getting the pomised broadband speeds. They contacted the customers, helped them remotely, and even sent out technicians proactivley to ensure service quality. These efforts led to a major improvement in touchpoint NPS, and demonstrated management's commitment to the vision of customer-centricity.

They also developed systems to proactively share relevant data with managers around the company, through "push reports" including monthly scorecards and weekly verbatims, as well as quarterly presentations and access to the Satmetrix portal for deep dives into performance trends and attributes.

For internal communications, they use a combination of leadership communications, management reinforcement, and front line rewards and reinforcement. These programs include sharing of customer feedback in the "pathways" program, a management-led program that shares on a monthly basis the key themes that are most critical to the business. And at the front line, they have included awards and recognition to congratuate representatives for creating promoters, rather than focusing the closed loop activity solely on detractor follow up.

Renee and Brad showed some of the intial results of these efforts in terms of the touch point NPS results, which were all moving in the right direction. Their approach came across as extremely thorough and thoughtful, and it shows the depth of planning and effort that sits behind effective transformation efforts.

Zappos - Building a Customer-Focused, Customer-Centric Culture

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:30:13 GMT

Our third guest in the "Getting Employees in the Game" track was Jim Carrillo, Customer Loyalty Team Manager from Zappos. He oversees “ToolBox”, leadership development, Live Chat, Work-from-home and Graveyard teams. He has been with Zappos for 6 years, and has seen the company grow into the customer service icon it is today.

The company was founded in 1999, and Tony was originally an investor. Tony was passionate about creating a company that he actually wanted to work in, whence the culture we know and admire. As they say, “we’re a service company that just happens to sell shoes, handbags, etc.”

Zappos Core Values were created by the employees, and are used for any decision, from hiring, to communication, to service. The secret is to actually stick to your core values, no matter what they are.

· Deliver WOW through service

· Embrace and drive change

· Create fun and a little weirdness

· Be adventurous creative and open-minded

· Pursue growth and learning

· Build open and honest relationship with communication

· Build a positive team and family spirit

· Do more with less

· Be passionate a determined

· Be humble

Finding the right team members is critical to get right

Recruiting team first interviews for culture

o What your theme song is, how lucky you feel

o Tour of the space – what’s the look on their face?

Managers interview for technical fit, HR interviews for culture fit – has to pass both
Hire slowly, fire quickly

On-boarding Experience is unique

4 week new hire training class
In Week 2, they get The Offer – everyone in the class gets offered $3K to quit. Is this person committed to working with the organization? Less than 1% take it.
Those who do actually get $4K as a sign of good will
1 week of Kentucky Hero Academy (for the Vegas teams, they need to understand what it’s like on the other side)
3 weeks of Incubation – transitional period between training and full-time teams – extra coaching, extra help – get The Offer again.

Training is crucial

Everyone is a customer service rep – EVERYONE goes through the initial CSR training (finance, HR, merchandising, etc.)
Every manager at Zappos started as a CSR – the management understands the challenges, helps to inspire them to do well – they know there’s a path up

There are various elements of coaching support that the team members receive, chief among which is progression in their careers:

Skill sets in Specialty teams (e.g. fraud, training, etc), Mentoring, Ambassador program (working with folks in Incubation)
Culture: Culture clubs (e.g. Beautification club for decorating the office), Team building & relationship building (e.g. monthly team building events with a $100 budget)
Growth and Learning: Pipeline classes, Tech seminars (manufacturers they deal with gives overview of brand and products), Senior rep program (via certification & training period), internships

How to support the team members:

Workspace personalization – creating comfortable work environment
Create an environment of empowerment
Provide continuous feedback – lead-to-team member is about 1:10

How to WOW the customers:

Website is what the customers see first – 1800-number is on every page!

o Free shipping both ways

It’s all about the experience

o Fast, accurate fulfillment – typical time to shipment is 1 hr

o PEC – personal emotional connection

o Above and beyond – assist with finding item elsewhere if they don’t have it

Inside message needs to match the outside message

o Phone reps are not tracked on call times

§ Longest call was 8 hours and 28 minutes

o Their only job is to deliver wow. Period.

o Inventory all product – no drop shipping

o Team members empowered to create cards, send flowers – go beyond the moment

What does Zappos get out of it?

Inspire employee happiness & engagement
A sense of ownership and pride
A workforce who make business decisions based on customer happiness
Results: >75% of purchases are from repeat customers

The questions they ask in their surveys are:

The ultimate question
The ultimate question about the specific Customer loyalty team member
Verbatims

Logitech and TeleTech: Partnering Around NPS to Bring the Vision to Life

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:32:53 GMT

Logitech is a world leader in person peripherals, driving innovation with 75 to 100 new products introduced each year.With over 400 agents handling thousands of interactions in 27 different languages each day, their customer support experience was complex and disconnected. This was further complicated by the fact that Logitech was managing 14 different vendors at 20 locations worldwide and their customer support program lacked consistency in measuring, monitoring, training and performance. Customer support costs were increasing with no direct benefit to the customer experience.A historical focus on minimizing call average handling times (AHT) to reduce costs was not driving the right behaviors. To begin their transformation, Logitech set a goal to become an industry leader, using NPS as the primary metric of success to measure the total interaction experience. The first step was to define the mission of customer support.

Answer the customer’s question
Minimize support costs
Create a Logitech customer for life

The challenge at hand was to find the right balance between driving the best customer experience possible with financial efficiency and change their charter from regional to worldwide. The first step toward achieving their vision was to find one partner that shared their vision and embraced NPS, and TeleTech fit the bill. TeleTech has 40,000 employees in 90 countries, and intend to have all them Net Promoter certified over the next 5 years. TeleTech designs, builds, implements and manages superior customer service across the customer life cycle with the goal of driving shareholder value. Customer-centricity is in their DNA. TeleTech’s 4 pillars are:

Customer Experience
PI/Business Intelligence
Ops Standards and Compliance
Workforce Management and Training

They have created better staffing models which enables them to handle more calls with less agents and faster processing times. Their process improvement group evaluated and prioritized process improvements, making it easier for customers and associates to find what the information they needed with improved help tools and FAQs in additional languages, which resulted in dramatic positive implications. Training was critical and they streamlined technical content for associate training. A 30/60/90 day review was developed, and they centralized on call center metrics and NPS as key factors for success. This resulted in a significantly reduced churn rate. Training curriculum was re-designed to minimize the anxiety of taking calls for the first time. More role playing was incorporated. An ARC (Agent Resource Center) was created, along with a newsletter featuring tips and a feedback center providing feedback on the feedback. Operational changes were adapted to cultures and needs while also addressing the individual differences of each country. Since all customers cannot be treated the same, they created a White Glove service for escalated or VIP customers. Empowering agents was key to success. Social Media was the next frontier. Online forums were started 6-7 years ago. A multi-level system to monitor and respond to posts was implemented. After 24 hours of community self responses an Agent will respond. Logitech Labs provide a safe environment to innovate. Agents are big Promoters of Logitech products. It is critical to align QA program with NPS methodology. What you measure your agents on is what you are going to get. Continuous improvement based on detractor analysis is key. Structured associate skill profile enables better success in each channel. There is a weekly calibration process for team members. It is important to educate front line employees on how to create Promoters on every interaction. All verbatims are read and all Detractor surveys are reviewed. They don’t recommend text analytics, which may dilute the value of customer comments. The end result of these efforts? Logitech’s NPS Score increased from 40 to 68. AHT (Average Handling Times) improved by 22%. FCR (First Call Right) improved by 6%. Be data driven. Don’t just collect data – act on it! Move the needle! Listen and empower your associates. Focus on things that matter to your customers – they are telling you what’s important to them!

Merchants and iiNet - Delivering "Awesome"

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:30:18 GMT

The "Getting Employees in the Game" track’s second speaker was George Todd, the General Manager of Operations for the iiNet Business Unit at Merchants SA. His presentation, Delivering “awesome”, centered around the company iiNet, an ISP in Australia that has call centers on four continents, to make sure all CSRs are

It is a customer-centric organization that hires customer service employees and trains them in technical expertise, not vice versa. They adopted NPS in 2007. The transactional NPS is the call center’s only official transaction quality measure. There are no other measurements on whether they are delivering good service.

A few key elements of the call center:

· NPS is tracked real-time, and by everyone – from the individual CSR to the senior team

· Closing the loop – doesn’t just come to detractors, anyone with a negative comment

o Often comments are responded to within 1 hr, 48 hours at most

o Sophisticated mechanisms in place to make sure folks aren’t gaming the system

But customer loyalty starts with employee loyalty.

I’m proud of where I work
I feel a strong connection to the people and place
I have loyalty to the brand (though I never have had an experience with it)
I am loyal to my customers

Employee loyalty starts with respect - respect for ideas, opinions and beliefs

There is a respect room / prayer room set aside
The share wall is in one of the main boardrooms for feedback and comments

o Ideas stay on the walls for 30 days – makes sure that something is done about the suggestions

o Responses are also put on the wall

o Every month, all suggestions are sent around by email

Democratic forum – call center is governed by the people. They have a say in how they do things here.
eNPS is officially tracked by a third party, and is anonymous

Results have been incredible

3% absence
16.5% attrition (which for a call center is extremely low)
Employee loyalty is very high – 83% would recommend it as a place to work

The economics from these stats are highly accretive

· AHT, ACW, FCR all improved as NPS doubled.

Delivering Awesome: “This is not a customer support center.. this is a customer happiness center!”- employees have to think on this level every day:

I think this is an awesome place to work

o Make it beautiful – get rid of the blinds (gorgeous view!)

o Make it fun – playrooms, game-zones

o Make it relaxing / healthy – “smoothie” bar

o Different rooms have different themes – passion, sharing, etc

I know how to deliver an awesome experience to my customers

o Always patient, always friendly, always take ownership, always deliver on promises – big or small, always see the customer through until they are happy.

o Not enough to define “awesome”, it has to be known and clearly understood by every person who touches a customer – has to be in the culture

o They created the Awesome brand as a superhero – superman t-shirts

§ They are customer service superheroes

o Golden Rule is everywhere - “treat others as you would like to be treated”

§ Emblazoned in enormous letters across the wall

Reinforcement through incentives

o Awesome comments of the week, of the month – prizes are monetary, and voted on by all the staff

o Awesome me, awesome team, awesome day – defining awesome for them

I want to deliver an awesome experience for my customers every time

o Coaching model from sports coaches – side-by-side, confidence-building, focus on positive aspects

o Recognition – awesome comments displayed on screens along with the picture of the employee who delivered the awesome service

o They get rewarded for making customers happy – up to 25% boost in salary

o “Thirsty Thursday” every month – food, drink, celebration of successes

Philips Healthcare: Aligning Systems and Processes to Enable the Net Promoter Method

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:44:54 GMT

Regina Hancher joined us form Philips Healthcare to explain how she used Net Promoter in conjunction with Xperience software from Satmetrix to develop a complete Net Promoter system across their software customer service business.

Background on Philips Healthcare and Net Promoter

Philips is in many businesses, from consumer lighting to shavers and televisions, through to high-end machines for medical imaging. Her division provides software to manage information assoicated with medical imaging. The division had grown through the acquisition of several independent specialty software providers. They had 15 products, 7 support organizations, and 10 unique office cultures worldwide.

From a customer feedback perspective, these diverse acquisitions brought with them multiple systems for getting feedback: different surveys and key metrics, different scales, and different processes. Regina established a 3-person customer experience team to align these various efforts to introduce organizational and cultural change for service excellence associated with their software products.

While all of Philips had been using NPS as a key KPI at the corporate level for some time, each division operates with relative independence, and was at a different stage in their adoption of Net Promoter. Philips corporate had been conducting annual top-down surveys to benchmark the business performance across all units. So when they launched their full operational Net Promoter program, their challenge was to ensure that the entire methodology of Net Promoter best practices was understood as something different from the annual research benchmark.

Aligning Around the Net Promoter Methodology

Gina explained three key steps they followed to align their organization around the Net Promoter Methodology, all with a goal of driving improvements in software renewals, which is one of their key financial metrics.

STEP 1: They started by partnering with all of the key internal stakeholders, including their executive sponsor and the functional management teams. They integrated the survey process with existing workflows and involved the "consumers" of the data in designing the reports they would need to manage their business.

STEP 2: They mapped their customer lifecycle next, by interviewing the service and maintenance employees to identify the key touch points and interactions. Based on this, they were able to describe the full software customer lifecycle and link key touchpoints to transactional surveys.

STEP 3: Once the customer lifecycle was well defined, they focused on aligning the questions on their survey to ensure consistency and efficiency in the data collection process.

To measure their success, they asked internal stake holders how helpful their previous survey platform had been, then went back to them 6 months later and asked the same question. The median response moved up from 4.5 to 8, so they knew they were on the right path. But they felt that the goals and alignment among leaders and managers had not yet converted into changes in behavior at the front line.

Focusing on Customer Experience Improvement

To kick-start front line changes, they started by assessing attitudes at the front line. They learned that front line employees didn't think that management was behaving in a customer-centric manner, and most of the issues were related to lack of communication. It turned out that senior management was very focused on customer loyalty, but they were not communicating this effectively to the front line.

With only 3 people on the program team, they found that they were spending almost all of their time on data management and processes. This left little time for soft skills training, trending analysis, root cause analysis across the different businesses, or a relationship survey to understand the overall experience.

To improve their effectiveness and focus time in the most critical areas, they moved their system to the Satmetrix Xperience platform, which automated much of the work that was happening manually using Access, spreadsheets, and manual intervention with ad-hoc survey systems.

In the new Xperience system, they are able to access the information directly in Microsoft Outlook for closing the loop. They can also easily trend data and drill down to specific ad-hoc queries to explore questions and ideas raised by management. They found it a "breath of fresh air" because it allowed them to shift their focus on the most important actions that were needed to improve their customer experience.

The Results

They are trending higher on both Net Promoter overall and transactional measures of service quality. The reports and trends that they see internally now give them an advance view of the results they get from third parties that track the service quality of all vendors in their space, and they have re-gained the leading position in one market thanks to active closed loop efforts from the business team leading that product line.

They now include their service quality index, which is their internal name for NPS, in all of the employee goals to improve visibility. They are also getting requests from other parts of Philips Healthcare organization to share their experience.

We are delighted that Regina was able to share her experience with us at the conference, too.

Carolina Biological - What's the Buzz? Keeping Customers in the Conversation

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:30:31 GMT

We were joined for the first session of Getting Employees in the Game by Jim Parrish and Tom Graves, CEO and Director of Customer Service of Carolina Biological, respectively. Jim took us through how Carolina uses NPS, and Tom gave us some concrete examples.

Carolina is an 85-year-old company, and creates products for science classes and curricula – microscopes, chemistry sets, frogs, insects, etc. When Jim joined the company, it was in a state of relative disarray. They weren’t living up to their service standards. They ran an assessment, and understood the high level issues – but the results – percentages, numbers, etc - weren’t sharable with the front line. That’s when they started looking into NPS. And that’s when they started calling their detractors – that was the fuel that drove the virtuous cycle of change. And they complimented the revolution with new metrics: delivery time rather than call time. What gets measured gets done!

When they started focusing on the issues, they saw improvements in NPS immediately. The customer feedback that they get has an authority and legitimacy to rally the company behind the right thing. It’s when you read and listen to the customer, in their own voice, that you are motivated to do the right thing.

A few examples of how Carolina made the changes that made a difference:

· Share and recover – close the loop

o NPS surveys are done 4 times a year. They go over every single verbatim every morning. Each gets assigned to a CSR or supervisor.

o They shared the verbatims with the front-line staff, and there was shock

· Customer accolades – gets employees excited

o The ratio of good to bad started out at 1:2, now it’s reversed

o The best comments are shared with the entire company – from the CSRs to the president

o Sharing is a very simple thing to do, and it makes such a difference

· Saturday workshops – a group that shares, cares, and are passionate about each other

o Every CSR gets handed an envelope with a negative comment, and throughout the morning everyone has the chance to read theirs

o The CSRs have a chance to experience the products and relate to the customer – e.g. dissecting a frog

o Tie your financial results to errors attributed to each individual CSR – unbelievably powerful moment

· Training

o Use the Internet! TED Talks are inspirational.

o Training inventory – let CSRs tell the company what they know, where they need help

o Other resources:

§ The Power of One

§ Simple Truths

§ Telephone Doctor

· Hiring – have to have the right people

o Carolina takes pains in determining the right cultural fit, the right personal fit

o The current employees are heavily involved in hiring their future peers

o Partnered with FurstPerson – help with assessing the candidates – first hurdle

§ Shows the likelihood that they would be successful with Carolina

o Next is a phone screen, then a panel interview – stressful but indicative of success!

· Rewards

o Giving people kudos (shirts, pins, anything!)

§ Comes with the question “who else in the company helped you achieve?”

o Send the best CSRs to customer service conferences

§ They are then responsible for integrating at least one learning from the conference

o Incentive plan based on performance: error rates, post call surveys (each CSR has an Net Promoter Score based on the voice of the customer), etc

Employees feel empowered by the training, by the feedback. They know that they can make a difference in the lives of their customers. They are not held accountable for their time on the phone, only for how well they solve their customers’ problems. They feel like a family. And since these changes went into effect, all metrics – NPS, churn, errors, etc – have improved drastically.

MetLife: The Proof is in the Program

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:29:26 GMT

Sanjay Mehra of MetLife discussed how they used Net Promoter as a tool to help assess the effectiveness of new direct channels for purchasing life insurance, and how this program within one division has served as a proof point interally to support a broader rollout and adoption of Net Promoter across the MetLife organization.

As background, Sanjay explained the challenge facing his division. Historically, ownership of life insurance has been declining since the 1970's. MetLife set out to understand how to make the life insurance purchasing process more customer-centric to grow in a declining market. They built and launched a new direct product for term life insurance in late 2009, and have used Net Promoter to track their progress.

When they started this program using Net Promoter, there were a few other pockets of NPS experimentation within the company. But their story has received particular visibility because of the importance of this new initiative and success they have had. After starting in late 2009, the business quickly grew in 2010, their first full year of operation with the new product line. Then in 2011, they tripled sales over 2010.

How have they done with Net Promoter?

From a starting point of 5, they made a variety of improvements to move up to 25 and are continuing to focus on further improvement in an industry which typically garners quite low scores. In addition to feedback following specific interaction points during purchase, they also follow up for feedback 6 and 12 months later to understand the ongoing policy ownership experience.

Sanjay offered some perspective on how they used closed loop processes to identify improvement opportunities. In their first year, they focused primarily on detractors to identify process and customer experience improvements. Every single customer who comes in through the direct sales channel gets a survey within 2 weeks of purchasing the product. They survey by email with a completion rate around 15%. When they have detractor responses, they are routed directly to a customer retention representative who calls back within 24 hours.

But before calling, the rep does research in their CRM system on everything the customer has done throughout the purchasing process, combined with the feedback provided on the survey. In addition to the primary focus on resolving the customer issues, the representative also documents what was learned. This database gives them a rich catalog of learning to define and implement improvement opportunities to drive better experiences.

They have also focused the organization on creating more promoters, and leveraging the promoters to drive growth. Internally, they have run quarterly contests in the sales department to award agents who get the most 10's. And from the customer perspective, they have introduced the option for promoters to "like" them on facebook after completing a survey, and they have found that 65% of promoters click on it.

Finally, Sanjay described how the U.S. business is now rolling out this process across the business, with the following goals:

to create a state-of-the art closed loop VoC process with Net Promoter as the key measure of success
to identify and act on "quick hits" to enhance the current U.S. customer experience

The new system will include all customers and intermediaries at all touchpoints, moving way beyond the initial pilot in the life direct sales channel.

Thank you, Sanjay, for sharing your experiences with the group. We wish you continued success as Net Promoter rolls out across the U.S. business at MetLife.

Mark Grindeland of TeleTech discusses how to value the social customer

info@netpromoter.com — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:12:28 GMT

Mark took us back to the early days of media when companies talked *at* customers. With more channels then came massive complexity. Companies didn’t know how to engage with consumers so they blasted them with messages...the age of spam. Then came the idea of segmentation and focusing on higher value customers. We used demographic, psychographic and financial models of segmentation. Just as segmentation was maturing, the landscape was dramatically changed by social. Now the company is no longer in control of the conversation. Social media tools helped companies to listen to these social conversations...but listening is not really adding value. Also, a mistake that is made by companies is using social media as a broadcast medium. There are many examples of people harnessing the power of social media to drive change, and often forcing companies to do the right thing.

Companies are now thinking about social graphics...What are our customers doing on digital? Where are our customers going? What is their social footprint? What social information do they rely on? What is their influence? The magic ticket now is connecting Social ID to Personal ID. Return on Investment is now the sum of Return on Experience and Return on Influence. The Return on Experience is a combination of customer behavior, interaction, the impact of the interaction. Return on Influence comprises customer behavior, recommendations and behavior, WOM, and Social Return on Investment. For certain, it is an interesting time…and more to come in terms of evaluating the power of social influence!