Blog Posts From Jeanne Bliss' Blog Tagged With bliss

6 Conditions for Considering a Chief Customer Officer

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:52:00 GMT

Suggesting a Chief Customer Officer may seem frivolous to leaders who believe they already focus on customers. There’s often a proliferation of tactics and projects underway…the problem is they don’t amount to anything significant for customers.

1. Will leaders be okay with someone (other than themselves) driving consensus on customer strategy and deliverables? You may be saying, “We have consensus now.” I’m sure that you’ve had some good meetings, but how much of it stuck? When they were over, did everyone return to their respective corners and business as usual?

→ Critical checkpoint: Company alignment around customer experience. Getting company alignment is tricky. You may need someone full time to ensure it exists for your direction with customers.

2. What about sustaining the work? After the first and second meeting of what I call the funky task force on the customer work, people start to lose interest. You know these meetings. The kick-off has forty people at the table. One month later, six regularly show up. And the person who got the job to run the task force layered on top of his/her “regular” job? Well, they’re losing interest fast.

→ Critical checkpoint: Driving this work needs reliability and hard-wired participation. Do you have headcount and staff time commitments to drive customer work forward?

3. Do you have a central roadmap that everyone follows on how you’ll drive the customer work and measure progress? I didn’t think so. How about consistent metrics everyone agrees to? We have metrics galore in our companies and of course the ‘customer’ is now on our scorecards. But these are typically neither clear nor connected down to the operational level.

→ Critical checkpoint: Clear metrics are connected to the operational level.

4. Are roles and responsibilities and holding people accountable a slippery slope? This is all about mechanics and the hand-offs between the silos.

→ Critical checkpoint: A unified task list that clearly states what each part of the organization will do and when to get the priorities accomplished.

5. Is funding customer projects like pulling teeth? This may be due to duplicate spending across the organization. Everything is pitched as an individual program from inside the silos. At planning time these investments are often vulnerable in the first round of budget cuts. Why? Because each project shows up as a one-off tactic.

→ Critical checkpoint: An annual plan for understanding and managing customers as a key corporate asset (This means knowing how many were lost and why, and pooling resources to keep and grow profitable customers.)

6. Are you at the lip service stage or is there true commitment? Are leaders committing to customers, but not changing the metrics or the motivation to realign business priorities?

→ Critical checkpoint: Associates’ success and career paths are tied to their accountability for how their actions impact customers. Most leaders wouldn’t refute that any of these actions are important. They want them to happen. They’ve always wanted them. Their failure has been in assuming the company could miraculously defy the laws of the silos to make them a reality. Separate motivation, the metrics and the mechanics have stayed firmly rooted in each silo. And they will continue to stay there until someone duct-tapes the silos together in a unified and executable customer plan.

The 5 Customer Experience Competencies

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 10:32:45 GMT

As has been the case with nearly every incarnation of customer focus activity, this focus on "experience" is inadvertently randomizing corporations, sending people out on tactical missions to map customer touchpoints with no future relevance to the operation and making a lot of consultants happy. To make customer experience stick as part of your operation, you need an organized and phased approach for how to integrate this new competency into your organization. Without it, “CX” becomes one more customer focused “hoopla” event that your company tried for a while and then abandoned. So here, based on working with scores of clients around the world…is the REAL world approach for how to integrate the discipline of customer experience into your operation – in a way that will make each competency change how you do work.

These five competencies need to be embedded into the DNA of a business to ensure that “customer experience” becomes part of how you do business.

The Customer Experience Leader has the responsibility for uniting leaders and the operation in understanding the need for these competencies and for building them in the order most relevant and pressing order.

The key here is to do as much in each competency as needed to provide clarity for the competency, get action moving and build the bridge when required between one competency and another.

These competencies don’t need to be tackled in order. Relevance to your operation is most important. Getting traction is paramount. Don’t “boil the ocean” as we used to say at Microsoft.

You will find this framework will “demystify” the actions and the end state, which you should be able to recognize when your company and operation become proficient at “customer experience.”

Three Ways to Use Your Frontline to Increase Your NPS

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:50:50 GMT

Increasing your customer loyalty, and NPS, by investing in your front line employees

The latest US Net Promoter Benchmarks for 2012 are in! USAA, Trader Joes, and Wegmans, all topped the list with some of the highest scores in their sectors. So what makes these companies so effective at creating a loyal, happy customer base? A common thread between these top-scoring companies is not just how they treat their customers, but also how they treat their front line employees. Here are three ways these companies work with their front line to ultimately increase their customer loyalty, and achieve some great NPS as well.

1. Employees who know your customers’ lives can better serve their needs.

USAA was again one of the top brands in this years NetPromoter Benchmark study, with an NPS of 83 percent, the highest NPS recorded across all brands and industry sectors. One of the factors behind their success is USAA’s commitment to understanding the unique lives of their military customers. USAA invests heavily in their new hires’ orientation, so they can truly “describe a day in the life of their customer”, even if they are not from the military or military background. USAA does this by requiring all new hires to go through basic training, right down to eating MRE’s, wearing a military helmet and feeling the weight of the soldiers packs during their extensive orientation program.

2. Invest enough time in training your front line to trust them, and free them, to do the right thing.

Wegmans decided to eliminate the behind the scenes rules that interfered with the customer experience when the frontline staff had a restrictive list of “do’s” and “don’ts” when serving their customers. Wegmans instead decided to invest heavily in training their frontline, over 40 hours per year for employees, with the skills to take action on their own, free from management oversight. There is simply one rule: that no customer is allowed to leave unhappy. The result? Low employee turnover, and a NPS toping the list of the grocery sector.

3. Involve your front line in your products.

Trader Joes develops an enthusiastic, and committed, sales force for their products by directly involving their front line in product tastings and development. Frontline employees enthusiastically run “tasting huts”, talking candidly with customers sampling new products. When the front line feels passionate and about what they are selling, they pass this passion and commitment along to the customers they serve.

7 Inhibitors to Delivering “Promoter” Experiences

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:41:09 GMT

Want to make sure your Customer Experience Work Stays on Track?
Manage these Seven Inhibitors of Customer Experience Success

1. Starting with a mantra, not an action plan.

Often companies decide that they want to get some early traction by telling everyone to “focus on customer experience” What happens next is that people realize this is a big corporate priority and begin taking actions, making plans and creating new scoreboards and taking action.
This advances the silo based approach to actions that is contrary to the discipline of experience development and management. A lot of action occurs, executives get a “false positive” that action is occurring and traction is happening, but it eventually stalls out because the actions don’t aggregate up to improve complete end to end customer experiences.

2. Not first defining the customer experience and gaining alignment on the path of actions.

This is similar to first point, but I am stressing it separately because defining the experience consistently and gaining alignment has major downstream implications if it is not done correctly and if the time is not done to get alignment.
The organization needs to agree on the stages of the experience and the definitions of success.
The importance of this is because we want to give leaders a new language set for which to ask and drive the business, and we want to establish the key cross-functional metrics for the development of key KPIs for priority touchpoints. This is critical also to database management, as the stages of the experience interrelate to one another.
Without creating this framework first, the risk is to experience the same failure as what happened when (most) corporations around the world rolled out CRM.
They automated current processes without rethinking the business.
The business of customer experience is about redefining the operation of the business to be driven from the customers’ point of view on how they experience the company .
This new attitude and approach to talking about and managing the business is key to achieving the cultural transformation. It’s only when we drive the experience from this vantage point, and hard-wire this approach into language, leadership and operations that it will become sustainable.

3. Not breaking the work into actionable pieces and not understanding what “success” is.

Initially the work on the customer experience journey should be considered successful when “enabling infrastructure” actions occur, such as
- Aligning the databases to be able to manage customer data to know the value of the customer asset
- Engaging leaders in personally becoming connected to customers’ lives by calling customers, visiting employees
- Teaching the organization the competency of working together across the silos to solve and improve one (or two) customer experiences end to end
- Changing the communication from leaders to drive customer experience accountability
What often happens is that instead of building in (and celebrating) these new competencies so critical to the long termed sustainability – is that people want to attach a score.
- “we will be successful when our satisfaction rates are x” or “we will be successful when our net promoter score is y”

4. Attaching early metrics to outcome metrics rather than operational metrics people can impact

It’s very enticing to jump to the outcome metrics such as survey scores.
The challenge with this is that the outcome of a survey score is impacted by numerous factors, not all of which can be impacted by areas of the organization who are given the outcome metrics as their performance score.
It’s more powerful to, for example, identify the operational kpis that people can impact
If the outcome metrics are added to early, before the underlying processes and culture change and coaching and development are put into place – people WILL want to achieve great scores – but they will rely on involving the customer in helping them to achieve a better score (follow up – any reason you can’t give me a ten?, etc.)
They will also focus on actions so minute that it might move the needle a little on the score, but the overall approach to sustaining that skill or even building that skill is compromised. It’s very hard to sustain this type of “go get a good score” approach.

5. Not having executives engaged in the effort.

Often executives will say that they want to focus on the customer experience – but they hand off the work to a department or area to work on.
This work is not like a typical project. Setting up a great project plan and executing on tactics and actions will get the infrastructure built (such as VOC systems) but it won’t drive the change in culture and the development of cross-silo competencies.
Leaders must commit to being personally involved – beyond a perfunctory monthly “check in” meeting. They need to engage in the process of the work. Without executive involvement driving the new prioritization, driving out the actions that are in the way and giving people permission to work together – it is hard to sustain this work.

6. Not having clear communication to the organization that walks people constantly through the roadmap, and actions, and behaviors to model

It’s not enough to do the work behind the scenes. The organization needs to be constantly kept up to speed on what is happening and what it means to them.
As new decisions are made that focus on customer experiences – people must be kept apprised of these decisions – and given permission to model this type of decision making.
Leaders must emerge as constant communicators of why we are taking the actions we are.
The organization must be kept up to speed on actions and successes.
Without this constant communication and “permission setting” and “decision guidance” the organization will view the cx work as another in a long string of exercises or programs that will go the way of the others – away.

7. Taking actions based on what they think, not based on understanding what customers need.

Many companies, especially those long entrenched in their business, believe they know what customers need.
Even when they do research, they make the research about “validating” their plans rather than beginning open minded and asking the customer about their lives and what they need.
This approach will compromise the outcome of the new experiences that are built – and in some cases will completely backfire.
The recent Walmart case is a great one to bring up. Walmart did “research” and got from it that customers said that they wanted less cluttered stores. So they set upon a plan (led by a past Target executive) to declutter the aisles, etc. Then they asked customers if this what they wanted. It backfired. They have lost millions on this. Look up this example --- it’s a good one!
Customer experience differentiation comes when the experiences are based by truly understanding customers’ needs – rather than beginning with current processes and asking customers what they like or don’t like. Many companies fall into this trap – from experience building to customer satisfaction scores that indicate that “they are doing ok”. Customers are forced to react the box of the experience you are currently giving – they aren’t given the change to really talk about what they need.

Customizing the Experience to Complement the Customers’ Day

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:27:11 GMT

Umpqua Bank Decided to Support People’s Lives, Not Execute Banking Tasks.

Umpqua Bank is committed to delivering an experience customized for each customer. Steve May, Umpqua’s executive vice president of “cultural enhancement,” has a goal that everybody in every store is able to do every task. Umpqua wants a teller who can take a mortgage application and a loan ofﬁcer who is pleased to help with a safety deposit box. Beyond the banking experience, Umpqua believes in customizing experiences by community. The company leaves it to the managers in each community bank to customize their offerings based on their customers and their interests—from yoga classes in one “store” location (they don’t use the word “branch”) to movie nights or a knitting club in another. Each has its own fund to enable it to customize the experience based on the lives of the customers in its community.

Make Umpqua a Community Destination.

Umpqua’s mission is to become a destination for customers. By offering a warm environment customized by community interests and a banking experience personalized to every customer who walks through their doors, it wants customers to think of the Umpqua bank in their community as their store, their gathering place. An unexpected place where they can go to listen to music and have a cup of coffee, or take a yoga class! Umpqua stores should feel more like a neighborhood gathering place than a bank.

Staff Turnover Is Half the Banking Industry Average.

As Umpqua changed its approach from a traditional “banking”-style service to a customized experience for each customer, employees had to learn to juggle many duties. It meant more work initially, but now they can’t imagine being limited to the individual tasks their jobs were deﬁned as previously. As Umpqua has grown from 6 to 184 stores, with staff increases from 350 to 2,154, it has retained its focus on the customer and the values that built the bank. And the company has retained its employees. Umpqua’s voluntary employee turnover rate is just 8 percent, compared to the banking industry rate of about 40 percent. In 2011, as a testament that this change in focus was not only good for customers but also great for employees, the company made, for the fifth year in a row, Fortune magazine’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.”

How good are the jugglers in your business? Does your environment embrace and welcome customers? How can you make a visit to your business a welcome oasis during your customer’s day? Do Customers Look Forward to Seeing You? “Umpqua Bank is part Internet café, part community center, and part bank. The coffee’s good and it’s not a bad place to sit and read a book.” Umpqua’s goal was to make walking into their bank something people look forward to.

Are your operating decisions based on executing tasks? Or delivering an experience that complements your customers’ day?
Does your front line have the freedom to customize experiences for customers?
How would you rate your ability to make customers look forward to seeing you, to interacting with your people?
Do customers rave about how you customize the experience for them?
Do your decisions for delivering an experience earn you “beloved” status today?

Top Ten 2012 Resolutions to Become a Beloved and Financially Prosperous Company

info@netpromoter.com — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:07:34 GMT

Companies who have grown in this economic downturn did so because their customers become an army of advocates who grew their business for them. They made decisions in business that were congruent with the decisions they would make in their personal life – in other words, golden rule decisions. They “earned the right” to their customers’ rave and the growth that ensued because they deliberately made decisions that moved their operation in the direction of their customers and employees.

Here are ten resolutions companies should follow in the New Year to move toward earning financial business prosperity and “beloved“ status in the eyes of their customers:

1. Believe in the integrity of your customers.

The majority of business policies and rules are created to protect business from the minority of customers. Be bold, like Connecticut Griffin Hospital who began sharing hospital records with patients and saw claims against the hospital drop by more than 43%! Take a leap of faith and believe that trust is reciprocated by customers when they feel that you trust them. Find one rule or policy to relax and watch what happens.

2. Invest in employee trust.

Show your employees that you believe in them. Beloved companies Wegmans and The Container Store invest in their employees by training them in the skills that remove rules, regulations, policies and procedures that pen employees in. This enables Wegmans to throw away the rule book and live by this: “no customer goes away unhappy.” As a result their margins are higher and profitability more steady because they turnover only 7% of employees versus the average in their industry of 19% employee turnover.

3. Practice democratic decision making.

Make sure the best ideas of your company have a way to see the light of day. Give good ideas a chance to prosper no matter what rank they come from inside your organization chart. Innovation and marketplace differentiation comes when employees are respected as part of achieving a mission greater than their set of tasks, and that their voice counts. W.L. Gore has become a $2.7 billion dollar company; named by Fast Company as “pound for pound, the most innovative company in America;” and earned a place on Fortune Magazine’s best companies to work for list since its inception because of how they unleash the spirit and ideas of its people.

4. Grow and invest in customers as a primary asset of your business.

Talk about customers lost and gained in real numbers, not percentages, to bring home the vast number of lives your business impacts. Understand what drives customers out your door, and begin the relationship by investing in your customers by realizing their long term potential. Zane’s cycles in Connecticut has experienced 23% Growth every year for 29 years, with 45% percent margins because they never lose sight of the fact that their average lifetime value is $12,500. And they manage relationships bearing that in mind. Valuing customers makes it easy to make decisions about how to treat them.

5. Know your power source for bonding with customers.

Regularly connect with customers as they experience your products and services. Surveys and reports are great – but the beloved customers are also avid “customer watchers.” Take a page from Trader Joe’s who use employee taste buds at their testing kitchens to determine what items should first make it to their shelves, but employ customer “tasting stations” inside their stores combined with sales to determine what items stay. This closeness contributes to Trader Joe’s ability to generate $1300 in sales per square foot – twice the supermarket industry average.

6. Have clarity about how you uniquely serve customers’ lives.

Unite your operation to ensure that decisions connect to deliver an experience customers want to repeat and tell others about. This ties cross-silo decision making together and releases the organization from excess bureaucracy. IKEA for example, designs the price tag first because they know that they serve customers who have less money in their pocket than sweat equity to put together their items themselves at home. Across IKEA, the understanding that the price drives design, innovation, and what they will and will not do drives their growth…sales that increased even in 2009 by 7.7 percent.

7. Deliberately walk in your customers’ shoes.

You need to know your customers’ life to serve their life. Yet as people rise through the ranks or even join organizations, orientation is often more about process and policy than learning about the customer at the heart of the business. Be deliberate in establishing a process for new hires, such as USAA, who require new ‘recruits’ to wear the flak jacket, and helmet many of their enlisted customers wear and to read their letters. All this is done so that at USAA when calls come in, they begin with connecting with the customer first then the process of the business second. 98% of their customers stay with them year after year.

8. Hire partners – make employee selection one of your most important decisions.

Select your employees as you would customers – for lifelong value. At Chick-fil-A, operators and employees are selected based on their values, ability to build grow and sustain partnerships in all areas of their lives, and then their technical skills. As a result, Chick-fil-A has operator turnover of just five percent, and they just achieved 43 years of consecutive sales growth. Hire people who you want to become a part of the story of your business and then watch how your social media story improves.

9. Proactively solve mistakes when they occur.

When mistakes happen (and they will) get out in front of customers and admit the flaw – then make peace with your customers. Repair the emotional connection, reduce the concern, and solve problem. Southwest Airlines reviews every flight every day to know when they interrupted their customers’ lives, whether it was their fault or not. And they contact customers to explain what happened and when warranted send out LUV bucks for a future flight. Being proactive earned them a net revenue increase from those bucks of $1.9 million in 2010. What can you be proactive on?

10. Accept the order and the accountability.

In a world where customers are holding a megaphone in their hand where they broadcast on the internet the experience you are delivering, invest in reliability. Don’t make the customer wonder where the order is, how long ‘til it gets there or what happens when it backorders. If a customer can’t tell another customer what they get from you, how they get it or how it feels when they receive it, they you don’t have a story to tell (at least one you want heard). Invest in reliability…earn the right to grow.

“Beloved companies never lose sight of the people affected by everything they do. Their reward is an army of beloved customers who urge friends and colleagues to try these companies and embrace them as well,” notes Bliss.

USAA Grows Promoters by Walking in Their Customers Shoes

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:03:24 GMT

Understand Customers’ Lives to Serve Their Lives.

At the upcoming Net Promoter 2.0 Conference, one of the esteemed presenters is USAA. USAA (United Services Automobile Association) is a San Antonio company offering auto and home insurance to a customer base of military members and their families. While new hires are not required to be from the military, they must understand military life. So new USAA employees wear the military helmet and feel the weight of the backpack and flak vest as it is strapped to their backs. And they eat the same meals, the MREs—“meals ready to eat”—that soldiers eat in the ﬁeld. They get to know the people behind the uniform by reading letters from soldiers and their families. As orientation ends, USAA’s intent has been realized. They have made their customers’ life a reality for their new recruits. And that sets the stage for how customers will be served.

Company Proﬁtability Increases with Customer Growth.

USAA knows that an empathetic and caring workforce that understands the unique lives of their customer base is fundamental to their ongoing success and proﬁ tability. That means walking in their customers’ shoes, literally. USAA calls their approach to connecting employees’ lives with customers’ lives “surround sound.” Elizabeth D. Conklyn, USAA’s former executive vice president of people services, said, “We want to cover the light moments, the heartwrenching moments, what it’s like to be bored in the ﬁeld.” The company takes that understanding beyond orientation. For example; USAA call center reps are called “troops” and use military time on the job. And they commit to ongoing training with military precision and follow-through. Hourly employees receive seventy-five hours of training per year. Salaried employees receive at least thirty-seven hours.

USAA Retained 98 percent of Their Customers in 2010.

By walking in the shoes of its customers, USAA breaks down the impersonal barrier that often exists between companies and customers. As a result, USAA customers love and reward them with growth and validation; 98 percent of USAA customers stayed with them in 2010. And they have achieved an 82 percent Net Promoter Score, meaning the majority of customers are passionate supporters. What is your version of receiving orders and wearing a ﬂak jacket so you can recreate your customers’ lives during employee orientation? Beloved companies have their new hires (no matter what job they’re hired for) work in retail or in their warehouses or wherever the customers are at so they can understand customers and get to know their lives. Do you?

Do You Walk in Your Customers’ Shoes?

Walking in the shoes of the military personnel and families they serve keeps USAA delivering the service they are known for. New hires get “orders” to their assignment and eat the “ready to eat” meals served to enlisted personnel.

Can you describe a day in the life of your customers?
Do you know what keeps your customers up at night? You need to understand their lives to serve their lives. Do you?
How would you rate your intent and ability to walk in your customers shoes?
Do customers rave about how well you understand them?
How does your decision to walk in your customers’shoes compare with this beloved company?
Do your decisions for understanding the lives you serve earn you “beloved” status today?
Can you identify your version of wearing a flak jacket so you can re-create your customers’ lives during your employee orientation?

The Container Store - Flames of Trust

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:30:40 GMT

The Container Store Grows Because they Trust their People

Trusted Employees Feel and Act Like Partners.

The Container Store, which provides storage and organization solutions through an “uber” friendly and helpful retail experience, is a privately held company. Over 3,300 employees work in 47 stores across the United States and in a distribution center and home office in Coppell, Texas. And every single one of them knows the company’s detailed financials. The Container Store’s hiring philosophy is “One great person equals three good people.” So once the company brings someone on board, that person is considered a partner. This partnership commitment with employees equals absolute trust. “The Container Store’s goal is to be able to provide all employees with as much information as the executives have,” according to Chairman and CEO Kip Tindell. To live up to this promise, two or three times a year its full proﬁt-and-loss status and all other financial topics are shared in a 30-page briefing given to each and every employee.

Open Communication Breeds Employee Passion and Partnership.

“The way to retain employees, to make them care, is to communicate everything to them,” says Tindell. Knowing the companywide impact of everyone’s efforts on business performance and how the overall business is doing bring an understanding of how each individual impacts the company’s growth and marketplace position. Distribution folks know their support to the stores means getting products delivered on time and in good condition. Store folks deliver the customer experience. People at the home office create and source the innovative products which pull customers into the stores. They all connect to fuel the growth of the company. Knowing the details of financial investments in each area and the overall business results connects the dots between each position and each contributor.

Trusted Employees Want to Stay and Grow the Company.

By committing to creating an environment of trust and nurturing in their employees, The Container Store has successfully built a retail experience that compels customers to come back for more. Their stable workforce, with less than 10 percent turnover rate, has contributed to the double-digit growth achieved by The Container Store every year since it began in 1978. Achieving $523 million in revenue in 2009, energetic and passionate employees stand behind the store they love. Can you sustain the excitement of your company for customers in this manner, by deciding to honor the intelligence of your employees?

The Container Store decided that all employees should know their sensitive financial information. Sharing information guides employees and elevates their purpose.

What actions can you take, or policies can you remove to show employees you believe in them?
How can you decide to honor the intelligence of employees?
Can you “skinny down” your rule book?
How would you rate you intent and ability to show your employees you believe in them?
How would your employees say you are doing?
Do employees rave about your trust in them today?
How does your decision to fan the flames of trust compare with this beloved company?
Do your decisions for creating an environment of trust earn you “beloved” status today?
What do you need to do differently to move toward earning the rave of customers and employees?
Can you identify one “stupid rule” and unleash power by removing it.
Beloved companies throw away the rule book. What actions can you take, or policies can you remove, to show employees you believe in them? Do You Fan the Flames of Trust?

CustomInk - Uncensored! Dare to Bare what the Customers Share

info@netpromoter.com — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:48:12 GMT

CustomInk Fuels Revenue Growth By Putting Uncensored Customer Reviews On Their Home Page

In this era of social media, companies who embrace customer feedback and “believe” the words of their customers earn the right to growth. They realize that customers turn to each other more than to advertising and campaigns. Here’s how one “beloved company,” CustomInk fearlessly listens to customers and how it fuels their growth.

Earn New Customers Through Past Performance.

CustomInk prints T-shirts for well over 100,000 groups and families per year. Each order is assigned a designer who personally reviews and inspects each shirt, because, let’s face it, there’s nothing worse than having your typing error printed on 1,000 T-shirts. For example, if you accidentally mistype the word “annual” as “anual” in your T-shirt design, someone at CustomInk who has reviewed your design will catch that typo for you, sparing the obvious pain and suffering you would have otherwise felt when you opened the box of 1,000 T-shirts for your “Anual Fun Run.” But CustomInk doesn’t want potential customers to take their word for the fact that they deliver this level of service—they want their customers to speak for them. So whatever a customer types in as his or her post-purchase online feedback appears word-for-word on the front page of CustomInk’s Web site. And, in this case, to show the authenticity of the comments, customers’ typos stay.

Customers Should Be Completely Informed.

Founder Marc Katz said, “We thought about cleaning customers’ reviews and making them more like testimonials, but we decided that doesn’t mean anything to the customer. Any company can pick a few great reviews. It’s the fact that we leave these uncensored and show all of them. It’s the 1 in a 100 few unhappy comments that show these are real.” So CustomInk puts its money where their customers’ mouths are. Customers tell other customers if they believe CustomInk is the place to trust for T-shirts for their charity event, or the T-shirts that their grandpa and entire family will wear at his 100th birthday party.

Revenue grew 77 percent from 2006 to 2009, fueled by customer feedback.

CustomInk believes and trusts customers to speak for the company. This brave decision to “bare” customer feedback has fueled significant double-digit growth every year since their inception. Revenue of $13.5 million in 2004 is now nearly $62 million in 2009. And this growth is largely organic, driven by customer love, and with no backing of venture capital. For its 284 employees, living up to customer accolades energizes them; people want to be part of a company that believes its customers. Consider giving your customers a forum to connect and convince each other to become your customers. It does take some daring, and trust in your customers’ words. But it is a powerful way to engage your company in customer feedback and to drive accountability in resolving the issues that customers bring up.

Do You Dare to Bare What Your Customers Share?

CustomInk decided to put uncensored customer reviews on its Web site because they believe in the truth of their customers’ words. They trust customers to guide potential customers.

- Do you trust current customers to guide future customers with their feedback?

- Do you censor customer reviews? Do you believe in the truth of your customers’ words?

- How would you rate your intent and ability to believe feedback?

- How would your customers say you are doing? Do customers rave about how you trust them today?

- How does your decision to believe and share customer feedback compare with this beloved company?

- Do your decisions for believing in the truth of your customers’ words earn you “beloved” status today?

- Consider one way to give your customers a forum to connect and convince each other to become your customers.

Gone But Not Forgotten - 5 Steps for Regaining Customer Trust and Revenue

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:12:11 GMT

Every business has customers who have departed.

There are a variety of reasons that prompt departure. And how you react to the departure will either validate that they left for a good reason, or begin the process of bringing back that customer and that customer revenue.

In fact, companies that do a great job of winning back departed customers will frequently have a stronger relationship as a result.

Follow these five steps to identify and regain customer trust and relationships:

1. Track customers who have departed.

Most companies only track customer retention as a percentage of their business. They often don’t get down to the number and the actual customers who have departed. This effort must be about caring about the customers who left not just the percentage or how they impact your balance sheet. So the first is to quantify the volume of customer and the volume of business that departed. This can be done monthly or quarterly, depending on the volume of your business model.

2. Segment and identify those who have departed.

All customers who have departed, especially if you have a high volume business, are not contributing the same value to your business. So now you need to make some hard decisions. Segment the customer base of departed customers and make a determination which you will reach out to for recovery.

3. Reach out to customers with respect, reason and reconciliation.

Now that you know who you want to save, reach out to them with a phone call. My suggestion is to have two groups within your company make the calls. First, executives should call a handful (1-10) of departed customers in every “rescue” cycle to keep them close to the issues driving customers out the door. The second group is a specially prepared group of people who are trained in a recovery conversation with the customer. This is not a sales pitch. The first part of the conversation is apologizing that the customer left. The second part is listening, intently to the customers’ explanation. The third part is diagnosing and verifying back to the customer why they departed, and cataloging this information for the company. And the fourth part is extending support and immediate assistance in resolving the issue. Finally, there should be an offer (not a pitch) extended to the customer to bring them back. These skills need to be developed and this can be a very rewarding project for your best call center folks, or for exceptional managers within your company. I would not outsource this.

4. Categorize reasons for departure.

Take action.After the calls, there is major opportunity for your company to identify the issues that came from all of the calls and trend and track these issues. By attaching them to the revenue of the departed customers, these issues can also be prioritized. Within the second session of customer recovery, the most critical issues will emerge and there will be no question what you should focus on. There may also be opportunities that arise from these calls about the frontline service that can provide immediate and specific feedback to the frontline that served the customer and potentially contributed to the customers’ departure. Creating a closed loop process for this feedback is very potent, in that very specific information usually comes out of these calls that are productive for coaching.

5. Put returned customers into “Intensive Care”

Once a customer has agreed to come back into your business, to be rescued, keep an eye on them. Conduct a review every six months of their experiences, tracking customer service calls, purchasing, support and other indicators which will identify the health of the restarted relationship. Then reach out again. Your close attention will not go unnoticed.

Results you can expect from customer recovery:

The process of customer recovery has been fruitful in every vertical business where I have seen this practiced. In financial services, with high levels of customer departure, we experienced as high as 30% customer recovery. We also achieved an improvement in frontline service as the feedback gleaned from these calls was provided immediately to the managers of account reps serving customers who departed. In an automotive client, we experienced 10-15% return for service work following calls and rescue efforts to customers who had lapsed. The key is to ensure that there is a planned process to contact, resolve and reconcile the issues with the customers who have departed. But then there must also be an intention and commitment to fix the issues which pushed the customers out the door. The focus must be to fix the customers AND to fix the company. In this way, the customer rescue process brings back in revenue and prevents future revenue from departing from your business.

Seven Inhibitors to Customer Experience Success

info@netpromoter.com — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:57:15 GMT

Want to make sure your Customer Experience Work Stays on Track?

Manage these Seven Inhibitors of Customer Experience Work Success

1. Starting with a mantra, not an action plan.

Often companies decide that they want to get some early traction by telling everyone to “focus on customer experience” What happens next is that people realize this is a big corporate priority and begin taking actions, making plans and creating new scoreboards and taking action.
This proliferates the silo based approach to actions that is contrary to the discipline of experience development and management. A lot of action occurs, executives get a “false positive” that action is occurring and traction is happening, but it eventually stalls out because the actions don’t aggregate up to improve complete end to end customer experiences.

2. Not first defining the customer experience and gaining alignment on the path of actions.

This is similar to first point, but I am stressing it separately because defining the experience consistently and gaining alignment has major downstream implications if it is not done correctly and if the time is not done to get alignment.
The organization needs to agree on the stages of the experience and the definitions of success.
The importance of this is because we want to give leaders a new language set for which to ask and drive the business, and we want to establish the key cross-functional metrics for the development of key KPIs for priority touchpoints. This is critical also to database management, as the stages of the experience interrelate to one another.
Without creating this framework first, the risk is to experience the same failure as what happened when (most) corporations around the world rolled out CRM.
They automated current processes without rethinking the business.
The business of customer experience is about redefining the operation of the business to be driven from the customers’ point of view on how they experience the company.
This new attitude and approach to talking about and managing the business is key to achieving the cultural transformation. It’s only when we drive the experience from this vantage point, and hard-wire this approach into language, leadership and operations that it will become sustainable.

3. Not breaking the work into actionable pieces and not understanding what “success” is.

Initially the work on the customer experience journey should be considered successful when “enabling infrastructure” actions occur, such as:
- Aligning the databases to be able to manage customer data to know the value of the customer asset
- Engaging leaders in personally becoming connected to customers’ lives by calling customers, visiting employees
- Teaching the organization the competency of working together across the silos to solve and improve one (or two) customer experiences end to end
- Changing the communication from leaders to drive customer experience accountability
What often happens is that instead of building in (and celebrating) these new competencies so critical to the long termed sustainability – is that people want to attach a score.
- “We will be successful when our satisfaction rates are x” or “we will be successful when our net promoter score is y”

4. Attaching early metrics to outcome metrics rather than operational metrics people can impact.

It’s very enticing to jump to the outcome metrics such as survey scores.
The challenge with this is that the outcome of a survey score is impacted by numerous factors, not all of which can be impacted by areas of the organization who are given the outcome metrics as their performance score.
It’s more powerful to, for example, identify the operational KPIs that people can impact
If the outcome metrics are added to early, before the underlying processes and culture change and coaching and development are put into place – people WILL want to achieve great scores – but they will rely on involving the customer in helping them to achieve a better score (follow up – any reason you can’t give me a ten?, etc.)
They will also focus on actions so minute that it might move the needle a little on the score, but the overall approach to sustaining that skill or even building that skill is compromised. It’s very hard to sustain this type of “go get a good score” approach.

5. Not having executives engaged in the effort.

Often executives will say that they want to focus on the customer experience – but they hand off the work to a department or area to work on.
This work is not like a typical project. Setting up a great project plan and executing on tactics and actions will get the infrastructure built (such as VOC systems) but it won’t drive the change in culture and the development of cross-silo competencies.
Leaders must commit to being personally involved – beyond a perfunctory monthly “check in” meeting. They need to engage in the process of the work. Without executive involvement driving the new prioritization, driving out the actions that are in the way and giving people permission to work together – it is hard to sustain this work.

6. Not having clear communication to the organization that walks people constantly through the roadmap, and actions, and behaviors to model.

It’s not enough to do the work behind the scenes. The organization needs to be constantly kept up to speed on what is happening and what it means to them.
As new decisions are made that focus on customer experiences – people must be kept apprised of these decisions – and given permission to model this type of decision making.
Leaders must emerge as constant communicators of why we are taking the actions we are.
The organization must be kept up to speed on actions and successes.
Without this constant communication and “permission setting” and “decision guidance” the organization will view the cx work as another in a long string of exercises or programs that will go the way of the others – away.

7. Taking actions based on what they think, not based on understanding what customers need.

Many companies, especially those long entrenched in their business, believe they know what customers need.
Even when they do research, they make the research about “validating” their plans rather than beginning open minded and asking the customer about their lives and what they need.
This approach will compromise the outcome of the new experiences that are built – and in some cases will completely backfire.
The recent Walmart case is a great one to bring up. Walmart did “research” and got from it that customers said that they wanted less cluttered stores. So they set upon a plan (led by a past Target executive) to declutter the aisles, etc. Then they asked customers if this what they wanted. It backfired. They have lost millions on this. Look up this example --- it’s a good one!
Customer experience differentiation comes when the experiences are based by truly understanding customers’ needs – rather than beginning with current processes and asking customers what they like or don’t like. Many companies fall into this trap – from experience building to customer satisfaction scores that indicate that “they are doing ok”. Customers are forced to react the box of the experience you are currently giving – they aren’t given the change to really talk about what they need.

Honor the Frontline. Grow Your Company.

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:24:45 GMT

Satmetrix’ 2011 Net Promoter Industry Benchmarks study found that bad customer experience forced 22 percent of consumers to stop doing business with a company during the second half of 2010.

Factors that have an immediate impact on the customer’s personal experience with a company were the primary reasons consumers gave for defecting. Interacting with a rude or disinterested employee was cited most frequently (34 percent). When you scratch away beneath the surface of what causes disinterested employees, it is almost always because of how employees are treated that causes disinterest. It is about how they are hired, and about how they are enabled to honor customers by being honored themselves.

L.L. Bean is a company grows because they honor the frontline. In this great example, customer Alma Rettew bought a holiday gift for a friend, and asked L.L. Bean, whom she bought it from, to get it to her friend on a specific date (the company has a service to do this). Unfortunately, there was a glitch in the system, and the gift arrived before the holiday, spoiling Alma’s surprise for her friend. When Alma called in to L.L. Bean to register her complaint, her fear and “dukes up” concern that she might have to fight to get her situation addressed was quickly disarmed by the quick and rapid response she received. Ms. Rettew was offered two options for solving her problem. She could receive a refund, or have a complimentary duplicate of her gift sent to her recipient at the correct time. In addition, she received a sincere apology and a promise that the company would contact her friend and explain what had transpired. The burden would fall on L.L. Bean, not her, to make things right with her friend. After all, it was their mistake, and they were accountable. All corrective actions were successfully completed. And while this solution was probably an unusual experience for Ms. Rettew, it is not an uncommon occurrence at L.L. Bean.

Empower employees to do the right thing

The L.L. Bean guarantee gives customers peace of mind, it frees the company’s front line to do the right thing, and it keeps them close to their small-town company culture. “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit; treat your customers like human beings and they’ll always come back for more,” Leon Leonwood Bean said in 1912 when he founded the company. It remains true today. Bean also said, “A lot of people have fancy things to say about Customer Service, but it’s just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, persevering, compassionate kind of activity.”

This most recent Satmetrix information provides additional proof that Leon Leonwood Bean was correct in asserting that training employees to excel in customer service and selling quality merchandise would create return business. The study cites that the top reason U.S. consumers defect is rude or disinterested employees. And the second reason is poor product or service quality. Mr. Bean knew that hiring and training good people, to do an excellent job at selling his superior products would be the best way to keep customers coming back.

Honor the employees who serve the customers

L.L. Bean has sustained their respect for customers and the front line throughout the entire history of the company. From a one-man operation to its place as a global organization with sales of $1.5 billion today, the company has grown by honoring its customers—and by honoring the employees who serve customers by giving them the trust and the tools to do what’s right. In 2008, L.L. Bean was ranked the number one “Online Leader” by Women’s Wear Daily. BusinessWeek magazine named L.L. Bean as one of its top 25 service “champs” in 2008, 2009, and in 2010, L.L. Bean was named the number one service “champ.” Also, in 2010, L.L. Bean ranks in the top two of clothing catalog companies in the Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Index.

Can Our Front Line Rescue Customers?

L.L. Bean’s guarantee puts power in the hands of their front line. It gives them freedom to think on their feet and offer options without putting the customer on hold or checking with a manager.

When a customer calls who is unhappy, does your front line have “permission” to do the right thing?
Are there options for them to evaluate and exercise using their own good judgment?
Do you nurture the ability in the front line to think on its feet?

Recipe for Growth

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:52:31 GMT

Eliminate Silos, Be Fanatical, Stay Focused on Culture.

San Antonio–based Rackspace grows by imagining the life of their IT manager clients. And that means making it easy to get help, support, and service without the customer “hot potato.” So Rackspace is organized by teams assigned by customer account, in order to create customer peace of mind. Rackspace’s Web site explains this commitment: “No more call centers. No more dealing with a different person every time you need something. No more transferring you to the ‘expert’ who transfers you to another ‘expert.’ . . . And, most importantly, no more feeling like you’re just one more anonymous customer stuck in a system that works against you instead of for you.”

Unify Accountability for Customer Growth

With this decision, Rackspace is there for clients, on their terms, with a reliable delivery method they can count on. Teams are assembled to include everyone a client needs: account managers, engineers, support technicians, billing, and data center professionals. Everyone on the team has a common set of goals aligned to the client’s goals. And they are all rewarded and recognized together— with shared accountability— for ensuring the customer’s needs are met. This team structure ensures that when the client calls their account manager, ready resources are available to support the client. The traditional silos that create the “hot potato” experience are gone. So the client doesn’t have to figure out who to call for what and when. Rackspace connects the team to give customers peace of mind.

Growth fueled by Being There

Serving a diverse customer base of over 99,000 worldwide, Rackspace’s growth is fueled by “being there” for IT managers. They understand that people who choose IT hosting want someone else to be responsible for their servers, period. By reliably and seamlessly managing the hosting of Web sites so that their clients can stay focused on their businesses, Rackspace has earned the right to grow. In recent years there has been significant growth in both revenues and net income, and has experienced revenue growth of over 55 percent annually. In 11 years, Rackspace grew from a $34 million to a $1.4 billion company.

Do you make customers traverse your organization chart to do business with you?

Would your customers say that they are handed off to many people before they eventually receive help?

Do the boundary lines of your organization chart keep people from going the extra mile?

Is collaboration something you’re good at, or do the silos impact the customer experience?

Legacy Industry Practices – What Could You Become?

info@netpromoter.com — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:54:33 GMT

Customer experiences are delivered year after year in many industries without challenging or changing process, policy or approach in what they do. And when questioned the answer is “this is how we always do this.” And then they wonder why they don’t stand out in the marketplace.

Perhaps the answer is that they never took the time to determine how they would stand out.

The banking industry is one of those perennially steadfast industries. Standing firm on legacy practices and policies, there is real opportunity for those who grasp that customers will respond to an experience delivered from their point of view.

Just recently, new research by Peppers & Rogers shows that “experience” in retail banking is essentially lacking. Their key findings included that less than one-third of the banks surveyed have a clear definition of their customer experience. I call this ‘clarity of purpose.’ And it is one of the key defining characteristics of organizations that thrive in good times and bad. Clarity of purpose unites the organization from executing tasks to delivering an experience customers want to experience and tell others about. It unleashes the organization’s ability across the silos – to make decisions guided by its purpose, its promise.

Umpqua Bank Decided to Get Rid of the Ropes.

We’ve all stood in that bank line. Walking between two ropes that force us into a single-file lane, we shuffle slowly, waiting our turn, with nothing to do but watch the person at the counter, look at our watches, and wait for it all to be over. And if there’s a request that the teller can’t handle, there’s another line, and more shuffling. Well, they got rid of those ropes and the lines at Umpqua Bank. As part of Umpqua’s metamorphosis from “bank” to “store,” led by CEO Ray Davis, they shed the ropes and most standard banking practices to get rid of the feeling that banking was a chore.

Here CEO Ray Davis Explains His Decision to Change Umpqua’s Purpose:

Umpqua Bank has a quirky, lighthearted nature for a financial services company, perhaps because they started with the simple goal to help loggers and farmers with their banking. But despite their heartfelt purpose of being “the loggers’ bank,” customer experiences prior to 1994 were not consistently strong. Service levels varied from one day to the next, from one teller to the next. I call this “biorhythmic” service, in which customer experiences vary by service provider and by what kind of day he or she is having. Observing Umpqua’s lack of a clear customer-service approach, CEO Ray Davis decided to make a change. In a move away from traditional banking, he renamed Umpqua locations “stores.” In redesigned “stores,” “shoppers” could browse products and services, stay as long as they wanted, sit a spell with their legs up on a comfy chair, and sip a cup of coffee. And when they were ready, they could tap an Umpqua associate to help them with their banking needs—all without the red ropes.

At Umpqua, customers are not herded into a line for service, and they don’t have to stand in separate lines to get different services. Dedicated associates assist each customer from start to finish.

Decide with Clarity to Shed Old Industry Practices

“Umpqua Bank is part Internet café, part community center, and part bank. The coffee’s good and it’s not a bad place to sit and read a book.” By shedding old industry practices and warming up and humanizing the experience of banking, Umpqua draws customers to them. Through transforming banking into an enjoyable shopping experience, its original five branches from 1994 are now part of a bank network of over 148 “stores,” across two states with more than $8.6 billion in assets. And they continue to grow! This recent article announces their increasing expansion in their market area.

Do you have your own version of banking lines that you make customers shuffle through to get help from you? Can you find a way to get rid of your version of the “red ropes”?

The Employee Interview: Your Gateway to Earning Customer Referrals

info@netpromoter.com — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 12:10:23 GMT

Amy’s Ice Creams in Austin, Texas, is beloved for two things: the ice cream and the floor show. They are the ice cream equivalent of Seattle’s “flying fish.” Ice cream scoops are thrown from one worker to another and caught in cups balanced on their chins . . . while standing on one foot . . . hopping. You’ll see ice cream slingers sliding across the counters on their knees and bellies. It’s a carnival ride in there.

Without the Right People, This Is Just Great Ice Cream

Amy’s Ice Creams is clear about the vibe they want for their business. But, finding people who are fearless and creative enough to come up with stunts like flinging ice cream balls across a room just can’t happen in the normal interview process. How exactly do you ask, “Are you a little bit nuts?” You can’t. So, at Amy’s applicants receive a white paper bag. It must be brought back within a week turned into a creation that tells Amy’s about who they are. From this white paper bag, Amy’s finds the personalities to fill their shops.

By using a plain white paper bag as its job application, Amy’s gets to know the creative soul lurking within the teenaged candidate standing before them. This idea began with an applicant who was given the bag instead of the boilerplate job application because Amy’s had run out of the forms. The applicant floated the bag back into the store with helium balloons; inside the bag were items about her life. She got the job. Now for all applicants, this is how Amy’s fills their shops with people who make getting an ice cream like going to the circus.

So my question is this…

Employees Fueling Word of Mouth Decreases Advertising Costs.

Amy’s exceeds $5 million in gross annual sales—through word of mouth alone. Like many of the beloved companies, Amy’s Ice Creams doesn’t advertise. They don’t have to. Customer referrals build the business. And in Amy’s case, they redirect that unnecessary marketing money to community development, which fuels more word of mouth.

Getting the right people to work at Amy’s has spurred their growth from a single location in 1984 to over 14 stores today. In 1984, Amy’s served 125,000 servings of ice cream. Now they sell well over 1 million a year. The Amy’s Ice Creams Web site says, “Amy’s looks at ‘going out for ice cream’ as a total sensory experience that can revitalize a less-than stellar day.” Part of the joy of going to their ice cream shops is wondering what kind of floor show you’ll be greeted with.

Amy’s represents the power of the small business owner and how service and exceptional experiences can build their business. Amy’s Ice Creams prospers because it revels in being real. In being their kooky, nutty selves. That people love. This translates even to the Amy’s Web site, where the front page welcomes you with “Life is uncertain, eat dessert first!” Sound advice.

Go Try This:

Get “REAL” in how you hire and bring people into your company

• First, define the core values of people you want to fill your company.
• Next, determine the personality of your company. Are you serious and deliberate? Are you whimsical? Have you thought about it?

Next, EXAMINE your current hiring process:

•    Are you deliberate about selecting people who will deliver your distinct personality to customers?
•    How would our customers say you are doing?
•    Do customers rave about how unique you are today?
•    Do your decisions for selecting people earn you “be¬loved” status today? Are you selecting “memory makers” or filling slots?

DECIDE to be REAL:
• What’s YOUR version of a white paper bag to select people who will become our company to our customers?

Want to learn about other tools to help you earn customers who drive the success and growth of your business? Pick up a copy of: “I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.”