Net Promoter Conference 2007 Blog

Andy Sernovitz: Parke Pettegrew, part 2

During the customer lifecycle there are certain critical experiences:  leasing, move-in, resident service requests, renewal, and move-out. Here's an example of drivers during move-in:

• Apartment readiness (clean, appliances hooked up)
• Office staff is available
• Eliminate mistakes (missing keys, lease errors)
• Preventing errors in move-in experience.

This led to a big chart with a move-in checklist in each building. (They call it the "poor man's Six Sigma"). The result of this visual, simple tool? 50% increases in NPS.

Andy Sernovitz: Parke Pettegrew, VP, National Training, Archstone-Smith, part 1

Parke Pettegrew shared many of Archstone-Smith's innovations in the apartment rental business, which include some very aggressive customer-facing promises.

Parke then asks: How can we be sure we are living the brand promise that we make to our residents?

They want to know how to understand baseline loyalty and understand what drives it. Then they want to translate these into operational improvement.

They have an interesting system to track NPS in parallel with their org chart -- regional EVPs, VP, etc. are compared against each other.