Net Promoter Conference 2007 Blog

Deb Eastman: Intuit's Experience Using NPS to Drive Design and User Experience

Barry Saik shared the experience of Intuit in using NPS to drive product design and user experience.

As anyone who has read The Ultimate Question knows, Intuit has embraced NPS as a key metric of the business. When getting started, they debated whether to invest in competitive benchmarking.  Barry’s advice to anyone starting on the NPS journey is to invest the time in mapping yourself relative to your competitors on the growth vs. NPS charts from Fred’s book, The Ultimate Question. 

Deb Eastman: Focus on Right Customers with Right Value Proposition to Drive Growth

Rob Markey of Bain shares his insights and experiences on how customer segmentation can be used to improve loyalty and drive growth by targeting your offerings in a manner most relevant to your target buyers.

There are six basic things that companies should do to define and deliver to their target buyer, yet very few actually do this. 

Deb Eastman: NP Panel - Lessons from the Real World

We wrapped up Day one with a panel discussion moderated by Richard Owen with executive participation from Charles Schwab, GE Real Estate, and Mellon Investor Services. In their opening comments, each of the panelists shared a summary of where they are today regarding NPS. 

Troy Stevenson of Charles Schwab shared important insight from “Chuck." In a recent meeting, Chuck indicated that focusing on the customer was a guiding principle for how they built the business and lack of focus in the organization caused it to lose their way: an important lesson for all of us as the business grows and your attention moves from customer-centric to financial-centric metrics.

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.

Andy Sernovitz: Raimund Schmolze, part 3

Raimund has fantastic examples of how they communicate NPS within the organization. The toolset includes:

• Detailed 2,000 word NPS brochure
• NPS conference with local university (Bonn)
• Best practice documents
• Flash animation video

Andy Sernovitz: Raimund Schmolze, VP Customer Insight, T-Mobile -- part 2

T-Mobile finds that NPS increases with proximity to customer interaction -- it rises significantly (as much as 70%) immediately after a visit to a store, and then begins to drops back as time passes.  Without the positive reinforcement, NPS drops back to nearly 0% over a few months. Lesson -- pay attention to customers!

Andy Sernovitz: Raimund Schmolze, VP Customer Insight, T-Mobile -- part 1

For all you NPS fans, Dr. Raimund Schmolze (see left) opened with a great video that explains NPS to employees. Ask him to borrow it!

NPS adoption at T-Mobile was driven by their board, who wanted to address issues of customer defection due to problems with "unfriendliness or lack of care in service" - 70% of defections. So they set a mission to be the "most highly regarded service company." He was concerned about how to adopt this new measure without the experience and tools ... and with traditionally low NPS in the telecom industry. So he set out to do it ...

They now measure NPS in every market, every month. Raimund shared a number of fantastic examples of how marketplace behavior drove month-by-month NPS changes at T-Mobile and with competitors.  The stories are hard to reproduce (I can't type that fast), but the lessons are clear:

• NPS can be used to track the impact of operating decisions in fast enough time to use the data for meaningful improvement
• NPS can be used to evaluate the impact of marketing decisions as they happen

Andy Sernovitz: George Hofheimer, part 2

Other interesting findings:

1. Customers have difficulty articulating why they choose an institution
2. There is enormous switching inertia, even when consumers know they can get a better deal.
3. Consumers are irrational.
4. We thought that people would be attracted to the idea of doing business with a group they own, but the decisions were really based on service and features. They were resistant to the ideas of a relationship, and didn't want one.

Andy Sernovitz: George Hofheimer, part 1

George Hofheimer is the Chief Research Officer, Filene Research Institute (see left). George's organization is what they call the "think tank and do tank" for the credit union industry.

George's research set out to understand and validate NPS in the credit union context, and correlate NPS with growth.  The studied 17 credit unions and surveyed 50,000 of their customers  They got a 13% response rate.

The result? Credit unions had an average NPS of 53% -- compared to typical financial industry scores of -21% to 48%.   People love their credit unions.

They further looked into the loyalty question, with 97% of promoters reporting that they would stay with the credit union.  Promoters are likely to see their CU as their primary provider of financial services, have been customer for more than five years, and have a good overall experience. The research also found that NPS correlates very positively with membership growth.