Jeanne Bliss, CustomerBLISS

Take Your Understanding of Customers Way Beyond Spreadsheets

One of the things that is common to all "customer zealot" companies is that they take their understanding of their customers way beyond spreadsheets and survey scores and stats and results. Their meetings about customers and customer experiences are far from paging through a deck looking at results and asking why the number hasn’t moved.

Companies that customers love bring their customers to life.

Setting Net Promoter Goals

One of my clients is firmly grasping the concept of Net Promoter – and is committed to make it be a part of their plan in 2008. To set their goals, they scanned the materials that were readily at hand: information from The Ultimate Question with aggregate and summarized high and low Net Promoter performance scores and published materials they had seen on Net Promoter Scores out in the marketplace.

The State of Customer “Focus” Around the World: 2007 in Review

In 2007, I had the privilege of delivering over 75 speeches around the world – all in the quest to help bring companies together to deliver a better customer experience.

What I learned is that in every part of the world, making this work happen is a challenge. The struggle still remains to connect the silos and get everyone on the same page – moving in a unified direction for customers. In Brazil, the challenges sounded uncannily the same (although much more beautifully sounding in their language) than the challenges I heard from audiences and clients in New Jersey and San Francisco.

With all of these audiences, what we talked about is where they are making traction in the customer crusade, how they are making that happen; and what still gets in the way of moving past lip service to action.

Here’s a review of the state of the crusade in 2007:

Ten Actions for Marketing Hope

A big part of the work to transform your company into one that customers love is marketing hope internally, and to your customers. We ask and we ask and we ask customers to give us feedback.  “Help us improve,” is our mantra… yet customers don’t hear back when we’ve heeded their words and what we’ve done about it. Asking the Net Promoter question is a shift – but for customers – it’s just another survey – until you market back.

One of the ways that I coach clients to ask the Net Promoter question is to do things: first ask the ultimate question, and then ask the customer to please name ONE thing they’d like improved. This gives the organization very potent information to take the following actions and to market back meaningfully to customers. Here are 10 actions for marketing hope by marketing back to your customers and inside your organization:

Holding Promoter Close

The Key to Turning Advocates into Your Strongest Marketing Force

Once you know your “Promoters,” the goal should be to bring them into the fold of your business. Think of this group of zealots as your internal advisors and the most important marketing arm of your company. If they truly do “love” you... their words will mean much more to other perspective customers than any declaration you can make about how good you are.

But how do you achieve this? Please don’t think this is about turning to them to get quotes and case studies about how great you are. Naturally this is something you might do with a few, but this action isn’t what strengthens the relationship.

Mining the Gold: Listening Hard to “Detractors”

As you get your Net Promoter methodology stabilized, the most important action for your company is how you actively use the information to a) hold your “Promoters” close, b) understand what makes people ambivalent about you (the “Passives”), and c) really understand and feel the pain of your “Detractors.”

This blog post will focus on Detractors and how to mine the gold by listening hard to their feedback to improve your organization and relationship with your customers. Let’s make this simple and break this into five key action items:

We Know Our Net Promoter Score. Now What?

“Net Promoter® can break through and drive the change… but ONLY if you break the cycle of what is done with the information you receive.” – Jeanne Bliss

Any time business asks a customer how they’re doing it should be for the purpose of action on that information. But that’s just not happening today. Heck, companies are so exhausted and numbed from customer survey collection that just getting the report out is considered a great feat. And that’s where it lands – in a brick – that big 4 inch report of survey data lands at the feet of the people who are supposed to read the data, analyze it and understand how it relates to them, weep about it a bit and then go fix things for customers. But beyond the rigor of running surveys, there is not much rigor around doing anything with what’s learned.