Rob Markey and I had the pleasure of speaking with Intuit CEO Brad Smith this week in preparation for our upcoming NPS CEO roundtable. (The roundtable will be taking place in late September, so keep an eye out for video highlights shortly thereafter.) We asked Brad if he could comment on some of the benefits Intuit has achieved with the Net Promoter system. His response warmed our hearts.
"In my 25 years of experience in business, I have never seen a more powerful approach.“ Brad explained why it’s so powerful for Intuit: “NPS breaks down the silos and organizational boundaries so everyone can focus on the customer. From the board of directors and external audiences all the way to product engineers and frontline phone reps, NPS helps drive our culture toward our True North. It helps us stay on mission—to be a growth company that improves people’s lives.”
Rob and I had read an article in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review by Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, entitled “The Innovation Catalysts.”
Dr. Martin wrote, “Intuit’s transformation arguably began in 2004, with its adoption of the famous Net Promoter Score . . . developed by Fred Reichheld, of Bain & Company.”
So we asked Brad if NPS had indeed played a role in Intuit’s accelerated innovation process. Brad replied, “Our product guys have completely embraced Net Promoter, but they don’t usually call it that. They call it the love metric. They use it as a threshold to determine if a product design is good enough. Will customers love it so much that they will recommend it to friends?”
I can’t wait to hear more from Brad about the love metric at the September CEO roundtable. In the meantime, I hope readers will visit our website to learn about the other exciting developments that will be taking place around the September 20th launch of our new book, The Ultimate Question 2.0. In particular, I recommend viewing a brand-new three-minute video in which we provide a sneak preview of the book’s contents.
