Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Satmetrix: Increasing retention and repurchase through and integrated account management

Jonathan_Greenwood — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:54:20 GMT

Deborah Eastman – Satmetrix

It’s always a please to hear Deborah speak. In the past I’ve been fortunate enough to have her teach part of my NPS Certification class. One of the great things about Deborah is that she has really walked the talk. When she speaks it’s from real experience of implementing NPS programs in complex, international B2B environments prior to her joining the Satmetrix team.

During this session we heard a about Deborah’s time with Bearing Point and the successful NPS-based key account program she introduced. It was a really interesting insight to hear that when returning there some years later on a consulting engagement she saw exactly the same issues and customer feedback were still present in the business. They had been unable to leverage all the excellent feedback they had and move to action.

If there was one thing Deborah wanted us to catch it was the need to act.

Deborah outlined that B2B account relationships are complex. In B2C everyone is (mostly) equal but in B2B we have to focus on who is the decision maker, who are the influencers, who are the end users. In addition, often overlooked, your account management organization is often equally complex. Stitching those two organizations together in an operational program is really the key challenge:

this complexity gives us multiple points of potential failure, that can impact the whole account. But also lot’s of opportunities to delight.
We have to be cautious that without an NPS program we have a biased view of B2B relationships -> Account teams are not always facing the reality of the health of the relationships

In that context Deborah emphasized again that this is not a research project – it must be an operational program to open the dialogue, and one that’s not related to a sales opportunity or a service intervention. It’s not a survey to calculate a score; it’s a way in which you engage with customers in a continuous improvement cycle:

1. Contact selection and recruitment

2. Non-response alert follow-up

3. Team review and action planning

4. Account closed loop

5. Structural action and communications

Coming back again to the internal account team structure, Deborah then spent time highlighting that the account team is not just the sales organization – we have to include all the key players that interact with the accounts, e.g. service and support organizations, regional/general management, etc. Looking at the typical concerns amongst those different groups really gave an insight into how the success of the account is a shared responsibility.

Towards the end Deborah pulled out a few key points that we’d do well to track in our own programs:

Active recruitment of customers into the program is key to drive response rates from the right contacts. Don’t drop a survey on them without warning. It has to be described in terms of how it’s part of the ongoing relationship, and that it is not just a survey.
It’s about engaging employees to collect and exploit the feedback - not about having them sit on the side lines watching the score. Be cautious in tying compensation to the scores too early – it will just drive employees towards gaming the system
Watch response rates carefully – less than 50% response rates means your teams are not engaging and you are not capturing a good picture of the real situation.But take care it’s representative of the different roles also (decision maker, influencer, end user) - it’s no good if all responses are from one population.

In summary:

these programs are here to drive to growth (it’s not about a survey, so change your vocabulary)
it’s about dialog not the score, the score comes from the actions we make
action has to come at all levels throughout the organization to be effective at transforming the relationship

So, another great session and a good close to today’s B2B track!

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VeriSign: Refining the feedback process to enhance your customer relationships

Jonathan_Greenwood — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:49:36 GMT

Michele Berman – VeriSign

For more than 10 years VeriSign has been at the heart of developing a secure Internet. I think most of us have at some point seen the VeriSign Secured Seal - it was amazed to hear that it’s served over 150 million times a day!

VeriSign’s program journey resonated very strongly with my own experience. Michele outlined that when she began to work on NPS program in VeriSign in 2006 she had to transform an existing loyalty program that just wasn’t working. A proprietary loyalty formula was confusing employees and nobody knew what to do with the results. So in 2008 Michele began implementation of NPS after recognizing the value coming from its simplified model.

Adoption into the organization at all levels was rapid. Launching a customer 1^st initiative Michele highlighted that the program was endorsed at the most senior levels, including with the CEO level, and supported by action planning teams across the business.

The Wave 1 rollout, under the leadership of a central team, focused on quarterly surveys across the complete VeriSign business.They paid particular attention to the trigger for closed-loop follow up. The small size of the central team meant they had to project the resources and time required to implement the follow up, to be sure they could cope with the volume. I think that was a really smart move and would strongly encourage you to do the same – it’s simple to start a survey process but if you’re not prepared to manage the follow-up it can rapidly have the opposite effect on customers whose expectations you’ve just raised, and overwhelm your program before it’s begun.

Michele then highlighted what I though was a great simple and effective economic model that analyzed the impact of their Detractor management processes:

first track the number of customers triggering follow up
then track the percentage of those where successful re-contract was made
then track the percentage of those where a improvement of the customer relationship was felt during the contact -> calculate their current economic value revenue protected
finally track the percentage of those where additional financial commitment was realized -> verify the additional revenue = revenue generated

Key learning points discussed by Michele from this Wave 1 included:

involvement across the whole business was really needed. The small central team would never be enough to keep pace with the speed of feedback and the need follow-up
‘Would you like a follow-up’ is not a good question. If people say ‘no’ you can’t go further!
$1.2 m on revenue protected/generated on the initial closed-loop actions gave people a taste for what could be realized if they pushed harder to recall all Detractors

The Wave 2 described by Michele incorporated those points, plus industrialized the process further:

Strong process flow was setup with clearer roles and responsibilities
improved training was enabled by real data + case studies and scripts made employees more comfortable
frequency was moved from quarterly to twice a year -> there wasn’t enough time to really develop actions and make progressive on a quarterly schedule
the follow-up process was made more robust, with guidelines on how to probe for root-cause + an increased emphasis on empathy during the follow-up

At the conclusion I was really impressed by the how rapidly VeriSign had optimized their speed of follow-up we saw that they moved from a 2-4 week closed-loop timeframe to a 5 day period with the vast majority within the ideal 2-day range. You could really see the positive effect of that in their updated economic model.

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Government Services: the need to be great

Jonathan_Greenwood — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:43:27 GMT

Oliver Bendzsa - Export Development Canada

I’m very pleased to see that this year’s conference is making the split between B2B and B2C, allowing us more time to focus on the unique challenges we face in a B2B environment.

Oliver’s case study of a governmental financial services organization certainly resonates in today’s context of low confidence in the efficiency of many of those institutions. EDC is Canada’s credit agency dedicated to helping exporters and investors develop their overseas business. What’s unique about EDC in their domain is that they operate on commercial principles. Highlighting how advocacy has driving growth during EDC’s journey towards ‘Customer Centricity’.

Oliver commented on the key benefits from their program:

constructive feedback has allowed them drive diversification of their portfolio and broaden their offer

they’ve been able to validate that customers are repurchasing more and buying more of their wider portfolio
they’ve seen a strong boost in customer referrals. Previously 20%, the referral rate has now reached 50% allowing EDC now to be more selective and effective in their marketing efforts
employees love working with Promoters. Employee moral has grown sharply, attrition rate is down and EDC is now consistently one of the top 100 employers in Canada.

Likening it to snowball effect where employee engagement has grown rapidly, EDC found that putting the information in the hands of employees plus liking it to employee compensation has strongly supported their engagement. However, Oliver cautioned that the link with compensation can in some cases push people to focus too much on the validity of the measure and not enough on the actions.

Looking at the main action areas we heard about several key initiatives at EDC that has resulted in a progressive growth of ~ +40 points during the 3 years since launching the program:

speed was identified as a key driver for the exporters; being able to get a fast answer from EDC is critical for their ability to catch market opportunities. Adoption of ‘Lean’ methods helped to optimize EDC processes and remove the ‘wasted space’.
multiple legacy systems often obscured the real customer picture causing inefficiency and inconsistency in following-up the feedback. Oliver highlighted that ‘cleaning’ the customer database has to be a priority so that you can be clear on who you are talking with. A dedicated project to implement unified CRM helped EDC a lot there.
recognizing that EDC’s initial sample approach wasn’t working (250 accounts but only 25 responded) Oliver migrated to a census approach guaranteed a more representative picture that could really be used to drive the right actions.

Oliver ended on a very interesting note. We heard from him that closing the loop means more than calling back detractors (which they do, of course). It also means thanking customers for taking the time to give their feedback. Oliver ran a short video message, prepared by EDC’s senior leaders, that will be shared shortly with their customers. It seemed a great way to demonstrate the sincerity of the company to really act on their customer’s valuable feedback.

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linking NPS to employee compensation – a good idea?

Jonathan_Greenwood — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:40:33 GMT

I'm late in posting. I promised to make it before the conference. I fully intended to do it weeks ago.It's just been such a busy start to the year…I’ve been finalizing our satisfaction/loyalty KPI performance for 2009, which in itself that’s maybe not so unique - I’m sure those of you with active NPS programs have been doing the same. However I find what makes it an especially challenging exercise is that our customer survey results are linked to employee compensation

Certainly making the link drives employees to pay attention to the program, a key goal of any deployment, but I wonder if it’s ultimately the most productive kind of engagement?

I notice that a lot of discussions focus aggressively/exclusively on the details of how the KPIs are calculated rather than on what we can/are doing to improve the underlying customer experience. The discussions can be time consuming and demanding. Clearly we need to ensure reliable and trustworthy KPIs, so many of them are very valid, but I think we also have to accept there’s an inherent level of uncertainty in exploiting survey data. Not surprisingly that uncertainty can frustrate employees when their compensation is at stake, and presents a risk of undermining the general drive towards customer-focused behavior.

So, what about you?

Are you making the link and if so is it driving the behavior you expected? How have you communicated your organization? How have your teams reacted?Looking forward to discussing this further with you during the next few days...