Driving Customer Led Growth through SMART Executive Sponsorship - Kip Knight

I really enjoyed hearing Jana Eggers, the CEO for Spreadshirt, share her thoughts and “lessons learned” about NPS. A lot of what she shared can be applied directly to other businesses considering NPS as a key part of how they listen and respond to their customers.

One of the first things I learned during Jana’s presentation was about Spreadshirt, the company she’s managing as CEO. Spreadshirt is an internet enabled company that’s a worldwide leader for creative, personalized apparel. It was started by a grad student in 2002 in Germany and has since grown to over 250 employees. 

Spreadshirt has a direct-to-consumer business (with 700,000 customers) as well as 500,000 “shop partners” who design and sell customized T-shirts online via using Spreadshirt’s platform and production capabilities. They’ve also got some large corporate clients such as CNN (where you can order a current headline on a T-shirt or jersey…how cool is that?). 

Spreadshirt’s key users are consumers who simply want to express themselves in a wide variety of creative ways through words and graphs on various types of apparel. Unlike a lot of their competitors, there’s no minimum order quantity and they’re proud of the “value for money” they offer their customers.  Another key selling feature is most Spreadshirt orders are shipped within 48 hours of being submitted.

Before coming to Spreadshirt as their CEO, Jana spent some time with Intuit where she became a big fan of NPS. Intuit was one of the “early adopters” of Net Promoter and continues to be one of its biggest advocates. Jana successfully used verbatims from NPS surveys when she was in charge of QuickBase at Intuit to help identify and implement quick wins in the business. 

When she arrived at Spreadshirt last year, the good news was the company was already a consumer-centric culture. The challenge was it didn’t have an overall guiding customer metric for the customer voice to be heard. They needed a way to talk and think about their customers and needed to break away from the tendency to say “if customer service hasn’t heard about an issue, it’s not an issue we care about”.   

Jana has used NPS to make sure Spreadshirt has an aligned way of listening and responding to their customers from all over the world. She implemented NPS across all the business units in 2007 and made sure NPS data was an integral part of everyone’s SMART goals (i.e. specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound). 

Jana initially rolled out the NPS program in her core markets in three languages (German, English, French) with an email survey sent out to customers once a month. They have now included all their markets and do automatic email mailing after an order is placed or set-up. 

They’ve also learned the wording of the invitation e-mail (such as subject heading) has a significant impact on the response rate to their NPS surveys. Based on this insight, they are continually experimenting with different e-mail subject headings and wording to improve their response rates.

Spreadshirt has developed some key early insights due to NPS which has led to a better understanding of their customers. For example, they’ve confirmed that Promoter re-order rates are 60% higher than that of Detractors. Additionally, customers who don’t respond to their NPS surveys tend to have a similar NPS score as Detractors.

Having worked with NPS before at Intuit, Jana also appreciates that while the overall concept of NPS is simple to explain, it can be quite challenging to implement effectively across different markets. Another key lesson in implementing NPS she’s applied at Spreadshirt is the critical need to balance short term vs. longer term issues. 

For example, if you focus solely on long term issues, there’s a danger of the organization giving up when they don’t see progress in a relatively short time frame. If you focus solely on short term issues, you ignore the bigger strategic issues that are going to cause major problems in the future. The art and science of NPS is how to find the right mix of addressing both types of issues at the right time with the right team and resources.

Now that NPS data is coming in continuously from the various Spreadshirt markets, they’ve created an NPS dashboard that has all country data available for easy access. There’s a “general assembly” for all employees held every month to review current business performance with only two PowerPoint slides (which should be a “gold standard” for any management meeting!). The first slide shows the number of shirts shipped the previous month and the second slide is an update on NPS data.

That’s it…two slides….talk about focus!  And it highlights the importance that NPS has at Spreadshirt to all employees on a regular basis.

A major point Jana made throughout her presentation is teaching all employees, especially new leaders, about the importance of NPS. Everyone in the organization should be familiar with your NPS scores and key drivers behind the scores.

It’s important everyone in the organization understands you will get different NPS results due to cultural differences. For example, the US and UK scores tend to be higher than those from France and Germany.  Additionally, smaller countries tend to have greater flux in their scores than larger countries.

That means there’s a real risk of managers turning NPS scores to a contest to see “who’s #1 and who’s not”. This belief would be a major detriment in making NPS a core part of how they manage the Spreadsheet business.  To make sure this doesn’t happen, Jana emphasizes that while everyone naturally likes to be #1, the important thing to remember is it’s all about improvement in their NPS scores, not the absolute number.

So what’s next for Spreadshirt and NPS? Jana outlined three key areas, including:

• Understanding success factors that drive strong NPS scores
• Continue to study country specifics (and what’s needed to improve)
• Benchmarking against other companies

That’s it for this blog…now I’m going to think of a snappy NPS quote that I can put on a shirt and order on the Spreadshirt website (www.spreadshirt.com)!