Net Promoter Conference Miami 2008

The Net Promoter Conference Blogs Have Moved

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Net Promoter Team

Understanding Customer Value to Drive Growth – Emilia Brad

Dr. Laura Brooks, VP of Methodology and Consulting for Satmetrix, presented on the topic of customer value, highlighting the value of Word-of-Mouth (WOM) advertising and the importance of employee engagement to foster customer loyalty. 

Nurturing Customers by Living the Golden Rule

Four Seasons: Impeccable. Deluxe. Personal. In Touch.

Those are words that loyal guests use on a regular basis to describe the Four Seasons. All hotels experience glitches. The water gets turned off, the fire alarm accidentally goes off at 2:00 am, light bulbs burn out, shower curtains fall down. At Four Seasons, they are crazy devoted to glitches. Employees report each and every one and they are rigorously monitored to make sure they are resolved in a timely manner. Ahhhh... sounds lovely. 

Deborah Carlisle, Manager of Marketing Planning for 74 Four Seasons in 31 countries, has the best job. She sells experience. By listening to their loyal customers they are able to distinguish themselves among a very competitive market. Hotels are always in danger of becoming a commodity. Websites like Hotels.com perpetuate that. The Ritz Carlton, Hotel Intercontinental, and Four Seasons are all within $100 in their price range for a standard room. Word-of-mouth among the high end business traveler is especially valuable. And Four Seasons gets that.

Integrating VOC and NPS: Making Sense of One Million Customer Responses - Laurie Weisberg

In this session by John Griggs, Director of Customer Experience for H&R Block's Digital Tax Solutions Group, we learned that in July 2006, Net Promoter Score was mandated throughout business.

John opened up with the question: Why is Voice of the Customer (VOC) important? Consumers have many choices, so it's really important to understand what customers want. H&R Block believe it's not just about the score, it's also about finding out what's behind the score. They wanted to find out if customers were vested in their product and if they were willing to have a conversation with them. After all, he stated, its your chance to impress them and their perspective is better than yours.

Competitive & Cross Cultural Benchmarking by Satmetrix - Paul Pakalnietis

David Hankin, Director of Business Consulting for Satmetrix, discussed how and why organizations should benchmark their Net Promoter Scores against their competition and account for cultural differences. Competitive benchmarking helps executives answer the question, “How do I know if we have a good NPS?” There are three approaches to competitive benchmarking that can answer this question:

1) add competitor questions to your own loyalty survey,
2) use an external industry benchmark and
3) build your own panel of customers across your industry.

Each option has different costs, benefits and complexities.

Internal Customer Service: Improving NPS by 12 Points in 12 Months - Denise Wymore

Can I bring my dog? That’s a question Amber gets asked a lot. It has nothing to do with a company that specializes in the placement and recruiting of healthcare professionals. But Amber gets that it really has EVERYTHING to do with being named one of America’s fastest growing private company by INC Magazine.

Dwight Cooper, Co-Founder and CEO of PPR Healthcare Staffing, wowed the audience with stories of guts and glory. His goal was to be the Nordstrom or Ritz Carlton of nurse staffing, not a commodity. Nurse retention is key to their reputation, and if that means they need to find an apartment that will take a 40 pound dog, they will do it. It also means scoping out great restaurants in a new city before the nurse moves there and buying a gift certificate or having groceries delivered.

Using Integrated Customer Experiences to Move the Needle - Laurie Weisberg

Sage's Simply Accounting business has been using Net Promoter metrics for 3+ years now with good results, according to Scott Zandbergen and Margaret Dron of Sage. The company is serious about this: new employees at orientation learn about the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the importance of focusing on customer loyalty.

They have created 3 Pillars of success:

1. Organizational buy-in -  getting support from exec level down and at every employee level
2. Regular measurement of NP score – they prompt customers at point of use to give their NPS
3. Take action on learning – e.g., pick up the phone and thank them and tell them they have acted on the information.

Focusing Employees on Member Wow – Emilia Brad

How do you grow at double the rate of your industry with a $0 Marketing spend? Diana Dykstra, CEO of the San Francisco Fire Credit Union, shared her story of driving growth through a focus on customer loyalty and employee engagement. 

Boosting Return on Ad Spend and Consumer Engagement - Colin Brogan

Lee Boykoff, Director, Digital Media Analytics and Distribution for A&E Television Networks shared an exciting presentation on their experience identifying promoters, engaging them in the content development process, and incorporating NPS into powerful segmentation that targets specific influencers with one to one marketing efforts to amplify marketing spend and jumpstart Word of Mouth.

Focusing Employees on Member Wow - Denise Wymore

It’s not just a noise a dog might make, it’s a consumer ranking website of everything you’d find in your local yellow pages. In San Francisco, if you search for credit unions, you will find San Francisco Fire Credit Union’s loyal members. They are the highest rated financial institution in one of the noisiest markets in the US. This is not a ranking you can buy, you have to earn it. Every single day.

Diana Dykstra is the CEO of San Francisco Fire Credit Union and a self-proclaimed Net Promoter Score zealot. She HATES satisfaction surveys. Why? Because when she took over as CEO, her credit union had a 98% satisfaction rate. But she knew, just from interacting with employees and members that they were not “delighted.”

Building a Net Promoter Program Brick by Brick - Laurie Weisberg

In the session by Marina Hannaford, Consumer Insights Manager for LEGO, we learned the Net Promoter Score (NPS) fits with the core of LEGO, including the company's philosophy of focusing on consumer experience from top down and their “only the best is good enough” motto. The the goal is to produce only the best to ensure positive Word of Mouth (WOM) and lifelong loyalty.

From Denial to DNA: How to Operationalize Net Promoter across an Organization

For the opening session on day 2, Enrique Salem, COO of Symantec, joined Richard Owen, CEO of Satmetrix, for a candid one-on-one chat on how Symantec is using Net Promoter to measure customer loyalty, drive operational improvements, and empower employees throughout the company. When introducing Enrique, Richard noted that Symantec, a global leader in infrastructure software, is an early adopter of Net Promoter and has focused on the discipline to guide strategy through tremendous growth periods, including the largest software acquisition in history.

Using Net Promoter to Drive Organizational Learning - Emilia Brad

Rob Markey, Partner and Head of Global Customer Strategy Practice with Bain & Company, spoke about using NPS to drive organizational learning at three levels:

1. Executive or strategic
2. Management or process
3. Front-line employee

Customer Centricity: The Role of Leadership

Fred Reichheld, author of the Net Promoter book, The Ultimate Question, gave a historical review of the history of NPS. He has spent 30+ years talking about the importance of loyalty. Loyalty is a difficult term it seems for businesses to latch onto, so you are better off talking about growth. The two are almost synonymous. Loyalty leaders grow at 2.6 times that of competitors. Loyal customers do four key things that drive growth:

1. Repurchase
2. Buy more
3. Refer
4. Give feedback

Investing in Customer Communities to Drive Loyalty - Aisling Hassell

Kip Knight, VP of Marketing at eBay, talked about how eBay built an online community and how they are using NPS. eBay started in 1995 and now has 248 million subscribers from 37 countries around the world. It is now "The World’s Online Marketplace." About 1.3M people make part or all of their living off eBay. eBay thinks of community as anyone who has a relationship with eBay Inc. Community is core to eBay. It is a strategic differentiator, a unique asset to eBay, builds loyalty and retention, and community members are more valuable.

Customer Experience in Retail Banking Accenture/Satmetrix Sponsored Research - Glenn Donovan

In the fall of 2007, Accenture and Satmetrix conducted a detailed study of retail banking in North America to uncover consumer attitudes and loyalty toward their primary banking institution. The survey, which included responses from approximately 3500 customers addressing 16 institutions, covered all aspects of customer experience relating to checking account, including channels, product quality and services.

According to Susan Piotroski, Partner, Marketing & Customer Strategy Practice with Accenture, who delivered the presentation, when Accenture thinks about touch points, it’s important to consider all aspects of the experience, including the product experience. These factors are often not part of customer satisfaction surveys, which tend to focus on call center, web, branch, and the like.

Q&A with Chief Customer Officer Author, Jeanne Bliss - Tom Kehler

Jeanne Bliss, Net Promoter blogger and author of Chief Customer Officer, and John Abraham, General Manager of Net Promoter Programs for Satmetrix, chaired a discussion session driven by questions from the audience largely focused on program implementation issues. For those who missed the session you missed the opportunity for free books!   

An early question kicked off the discussion (and the first book give away) related to top management commitment. The case was presented of a committed top management but a somewhat confused middle management. Jeanne made the case that if top management is really committed they will change incentives for middle management. Middle management will be caught in the middle if the NPS program is a top management and front line philosophy without a complete look how it changes cost and operations.

Gaining Exec Team Buy-In for an Investment in Customer Loyalty - Tom Kehler

Pitney Bowes MapInfo is one year into an NPS program. True to the title, Reid Hislop, VP Corporate Marketing, gave a clear picture of how the team built and sold a business case for the investment value of an NPS program. At the start, Reid had some top management support but he needed to turn that support into a business case that would pass CFO and board muster.

Designing For Action - Paul Pakalnietis

Deb Eastman, Chief Marketing Officer of Satmetrix, covered how managers can design a Net Promoter Score (NPS) program for action Friday afternoon. The well attended session included B to B and B to C Net Promoter practitioners from a wide variety of industries, including Financial Services, Business Advisory Services, and Telecommunications. In her ebullient style, Deb captured the attention of this audience, focusing on the topic of driving action at all levels within an organization.

Driving Investments in NPS Improvements with a "Lean Six Sigma" Approach - Aisling Hassell

Vivian Blade, a Master Black Belt, shared her experiences in using NPS to drive loyalty at GE. Jeff Immelt, GE’s CEO, is driving NPS from the top down. It makes life a lot easier in terms of driving the program. A viable business needs organic growth …and NPS supports this by showing if you are growing your base of loyal customers. GE thinks of NPS and Lean Six Sigma complementary to driving growth.

NPS works across B2C and B2B as well as to provide product and process insights. Key point…NPS is not about managing the score…it IS about how we improve customers’ experiences. GE uses a simple framework for listening, acting and measuring in order to drive growth.

Driving Investments in NPS Improvements with a “Lean Six Sigma” Approach - Colin Brogan

Vivian Hairston Blade, Master Black Belt – Marketing at GE Consumer & Industrial, gave a lively presentation on the GE experience with Net Promoter and leveraging Six Sigma and LEAN to improve the customer experience. In summary, GE leverages customer insights to identify unnecessary and non-value add processes and touchpoint experiences, and applies LEAN to attack the "waste" – which results in improvements to internal processes and customer loyalty.

Fostering Hospital Practices that Drive Patient Loyalty – Emilia Brad

Peggy Kurusz and Mary Ellen Griffin of Ascension Health, the nation’s largest Catholic nonprofit health system, discussed how NPS is used by their organization to focus attention on the patient experience. Specifically, the presentation described how St. Joseph Hospital, one of the top performing member hospitals, uses the Adaptive Design technique to drive process improvements.

Measuring What Matters - Glenn Donovan

Audience expectations seemed quite high as it was standing room only. Taking a practical approach as a result of his practitioner experience, Dr. Vince Nowinski, Principal Methodologist of Satmetrix, began by addressing the who, what, and when of data collection. He explained how the underlying validity and content of the data collected is what will ultimately impact the “actionability” of the information in your organization. (Yes, that is a made up word, btw.)

Improving the Customer Experience: Moving from a Satisfaction Index to NPS - Tom Kehler

In the session by Larry Hyett, Vice President, Retail Sales & Customer Experience, TD Canada Trust, we learned TD Canada Trust bets its brand on being "the better bet" for customers and has a significant history of measuring likely to recommend. The TD story is clearly one of making loyalty and recommendation an operational and management issue for a large diverse organization. There are over 1000 branches in Canada within a broader organization of 50,000 employees. 

Marrying a Global Standard with Local Ownership - Aisling Hassell

Phil Clement, CMO of Aon Corporation, had an interesting story based on his company's NPS program. It shows how you can scale a program around gathering NPS and drive it down into the operational level. Aon has 43,000 employees out of 425 acquisitions! Companies that grow through acquisition have some challenges: they buy versus recruit talent and buy vs home grow products.

State of the Net Promoter Nation - Aisling Hassell

Richard Owen, CEO of Satmetrix, decided to *go large* in talking about state of the Net Promoter nation. He’s gone out to the Net Promoter community of 6000-7000 today and asked what is working? Successful companies understand that NPS is not the goal, but operational change is the goal. NPS is not a research exercise. No miracle will occur just from measurement. You need an operational approach.

Having sorted out NPS, Richard moved onto the easier topic of the world economy. The story of baking birthday cakes over the years shows how we have added a higher level of service to every purchase... economies are moving to service economies.

Richard referenced 3 drivers of value creation:

• Operational excellence
• Product design
• Customer intimacy

Welcome

Couldn't make it to the Miami Net Promoter Conference, taking place January 24-25, 2008? Then check out this Conference blog. Postings were made live from the conference.

For more Net Promoter learnings, check out London Conference 2007 blog and New York 2007 Conference blog.

For blogger bios, click link immediately below.

Couldn't make it to the Miami Net Promoter Conference, taking place January 24-25, 2008? Then check out this Conference blog. Postings were made live from the conference.

For more Net Promoter learnings, check out London Conference 2007 blog and New York 2007 Conference blog.

For blogger bios, click link immediately below.