Stay away from 9K!  Seat 9K on Virgin Atlantic night flights, that is. It's the funky bed seat next to the cool in-flight bar -- great for partying, bad for sleeping...

Which perhaps explains a) why I'm blogging this at 4 am @ 37,000 feet somewhere between London and Mumbai and b) why the customer satisfaction questionnaire handed to me is in 100% Hindi, presumably so I don't understand a word of it.

Which gets me thinking (sorry, we've got a stream of consciousness thing happening here) about satisfaction surveys, and their relationship to the Net Promoter Score (NPS). One way of looking at these two is to say that the NPS provides a validated and growth-correlated measure of the overall customer experience you are delivering, whilst satisfaction surveys, unpack the drivers of specific points of time within that experience.

For example, my Hindi customer satisfaction questionnaire has 300+ boxes I can check, and I'm sure that through a combination of statistical hyper-mathematics and dead-impressive regression techniques, it will be possible to cross-reference my checks and spew out the answer to what is driving my experience.

However, you don't need squiggle-babble to unpack core NPS drivers and barriers of that flight -- there are additional approaches: Listening Labs. The spirit of Net Promoter is to encourage companies to engage ongoing with their customers in a systematic way to improve their experience. Listening labs would be considered an adjunct to an ongoing, systematic approach to improving NPS. They are comparable to focus groups in that they are used intermittently, and can really help understand a point issue.

Specifically, Listening Labs are (as their name would suggest) listening sessions with small groups of your most profitable and influential customers -- usually split into groups of detractors and groups of promoters. The idea is simple: they talk, you listen. You listen to their specific experiences with your brand, spoken in their own words, particularly those words they use to share that experience with their friends or colleagues. You listen to where they say their experience meets, beats or misses their expectations across all the brand touch-points, and you listen to their suggestions for improving the experience.

An increasing number of brands are finding Listening Labs to be powerful tool for unpacking their core NPS core drivers and barriers. They don't replace customer satisfaction (C-Sat) surveys, but they do provide a rich source of insight. In fact, I'd challenge you to run a set of Listening Labs alongside your C-Sat surveys, and compare the quality of the output for yourselves.

So here's a short discussion guide for running your own Listening Labs that will illuminate your core NPS drivers and barriers, and thereby map a pathway to growth.

NPS LISTENING LABS: DISCUSSION GUIDE

Time: 90 minutes
Location: on site (you're engaging participants in this session as 'special advisors', just as you would business consultants, so on site sessions provide an appropriate business environment)
Participants: one group (5-7) high-value (influential/profitable) promoters in your customer base, and one group high value detractors
Support Materials: facilitator, post-it notes, sticky tape, pens, paperboard, stress balls, refreshments

Introduction (10 minutes)

1. Thank group for agreeing to take part.
2. Introduce yourself as here to listen to their feedback, insights and suggestions on their experience of your brand.
3. Explain that, as valued customers, they have been recruited as special advisors, but reassure their feedback and ideas will be anonymous and their identity will remain confidential.
4. Outline the session: 3 exercises -- 'wall of words', 'power blobbing', and 'association game'

5. Warm up icebreaker: ask each participant to
        - Introduce themselves,
         - What they do, and
        - What would be their dream job

Exercise 1: Wall of Words (25 minutes)

This exercise unpacks the key drivers of word of mouth promotion and detraction, and provides priority areas for improving your NPS.

Give each delegate 3 Post-it Notes, and tell them that you're interested in what they think is worth recommending about your product or service.

Ask everyone in the group to write down on their first Post-it note the answer to this question:

What specifically, would you tell a friend if you had to convince them to try your product or service?

Ask each member of the group to read out the answer they gave and explain it. Take their post-it note and stick it up on a free space on the wall, clustering similar answers together.

Now ask the group to write down on the second Post-it note the answer to this question:

What specifically, would you tell a friend if you had to convince them NOT to try your product or service?

Ask each member of the group to read out the answer they gave and explain it. Take their post-it note and stick it up on a second free space on the wall, clustering similar answers together.

Finally, ask everyone in the group to write down on their third post-it note the answer to this third question:

What's the one improvement that would make your product or service really worth recommending?

Ask each member of the group to read out the answer they gave and explain it. Take their post-it note and stick it up on a second free space on the wall, clustering similar answers.

Ask group to look at the three clusters - and briefly discuss their main take-out.

Exercise 2: 'Power Blobbing' (20 minutes)

This exercise provides insight into critical experiential factors driving NPS, their relative importance, and how you fare on them.

Explain the task -- to understand the drivers and barriers to recommending your product or service.

Explain that positive and negative word of mouth is all about whether customer experiences either beat or miss expectations (experiences that just meet expectations merely create passive word of mouth 'mutes').

First, ask the group to imagine they have to help a first-time buyer in your product or service category choose from the range of options on offer.

What are the key selection criteria this first-time buyer should use to choose, i.e., what are the top reasons to choose one product/service over another in this category?

Brainstorm this as a group, listing the key reasons to choose on a paperboard, until you have as many reasons for choosing as participants.

Hand out 'experience sheets' (see below), one to each participant, and as you do so mark a different 'reason to choose' on each sheet.

Ask each participant to stick a 'power blob' (a colored sticky dot) in the appropriate box, based on whether their personal experience of your brand beats, meets or misses their category expectations.

Ask each person to hand their sheet one place to the left (pass-the-parcel fashion) and repeat task.

Continue until everybody has 'power-blobbed' each sheet.

Finally, ask participants, one at a time, to stick the sheet they have in front of them up on the wall, creating a line of sheets left to right that go from the most important to least important reasons for selection. Once all the sheets are stuck on the line, allow each participant to move one sheet up or down in importance.

Experience Sheets

(Click on image for larger image of Experience Sheets)

Exercise 3: Association Game (25 minutes)

This exercise captures the 'emotional' rather than rational NPS drivers and barriers by using associative techniques.

Explain the task, to capture positive and negative word associations around good and bad experiences with your product or service. Explain that there are no right or wrong answers -- that associations are 'emotional' truths not logical truths.

Association Game 1: Positive Experience - write the name of your product or service in the center of a flip chart sheet, and ask group to sit back and think of a positive experience they've had with your product or service. Ask them to call out words they associate with this experience. Capture 5-6 words on the flip chart - in a spider diagram emanating out from your brand (see diagram).

NPS Associogram
(Click on image for larger image of Associogram)

Then ask them to continue thinking about this positive experience, and then read out the first association they gave, asking the group to call out two or three words they associate with this word when thinking about this positive experience. Repeat for all the words to create 5-6 association chains on spider chart.

Association Game 2: Negative Experience - write the name of your product or service in the center of a second flip chart sheet, and ask group to sit back and think of a negative experience they've had with your product or service. Ask them to call out words they associate with this experience. Again, capture 5-6 words on the flip chart - in a spider diagram emanating out from your brand.

Now ask them to continue thinking about this negative experience, and then read out the first association they gave, asking the group to call out two or three words they associate with this word when thinking about this negative experience. Repeat for all the words to create 5-6 association chains on spider chart.

Association Game 3: Perfect Experience - write the name of your product or service in the center of a third flip chart sheet, and ask group to sit back and think of an imaginary perfect experience they could have with a product or service such as yours  Ask them to call out words they associate with this imaginary perfect experience. Again, capture 5-6 words on the flip chart - in a spider diagram emanating out from your brand.

Then ask them to continue thinking about this imaginary perfect experience, and then read out the first association they gave, asking the group to call out two or three words they associate with this word when thinking about this perfect experience. Repeat for all the words to create 5-6 association chains on spider chart.

Discuss group takeouts from the three association games.

Wrap-up (10 minutes)

Final round table "The one thing you need to do is..."  Ask each participant to imagine they had just been appointed CEO of your company. What's the one thing they would do to improve the recommend-ability of your product or service?

Thank and close -- offer to send a copy of debrief document to participants, thanking them again for participating as 'strategic advisors'.

So there you have it, Listening Labs in a nutshell. Go ahead, give them a try -- experiment, adapt and optimize -- and let me know how they go. You've got nothing to lose in conducting a couple of pilot Listening Labs, and a whole lot of growth to gain!

Paul Marsden (on the landing strip of Mumbai airport)