Help Wanted: Superhero

Net Promoter Managers Reveal Their True Identity

Requirements: Experience driving cross-company, customer-centric culture change with limited resources and no budget. Must be comfortable managing executives (previous experience herding cats a plus.) Must have in-depth experience with sales processes, service processes, product delivery, marketing, and every other role in the company that is the least bit customer-facing. The ideal candidate should also be able to reengineer customer-facing processes in ways that maximize customer experiences and shareholder ROI. Wearing underpants on the outside is optional.*

Is being responsible for a Net Promoter program great or what! Kidding aside, those of you who wear these versatile uniforms know that there is a grain of truth to these superhero-like qualifications. You get to analyze and stick your nose into all parts of the company. Your job is to make account managers more effective, service employees more responsive, and R&D able to deliver more valuable products. In short, you get to weld the mighty sword of the executive proxy.

Why the super-human requirements? Because loyalty is now serious business. Many CEOs have their bonuses and stock options tied to the satisfaction of their customers—particularly when they can demonstrate a link between customer experience and escalating profits. Customer loyalty scores are often reported to the board. Sales people get to sell, support gets to answer the phones. You get to drive the company to higher levels of quality and business performance. You need a raise, pal!

And then there are the technical ramifications. Until recently, IT wasn’t a strategic part of the company. Now it is mainstream—along with its practitioners. Savvy organizations that depend on the IT department to decrease costs and boost productivity are turning to the Net Promoter Discipline to improve their relationships with customers—and you are in the driver’s seat! So in addition to driving leadership practices and organizational strategies to ensure adoption you also need to think about the operational systems to support the initiative. Is this a great job or what?

There’s more. You are an educator and a leader. You train the company on what it takes to be customer-centric. The insight you gather helps the company evolve as you make the progression from collecting data to acting on the data while driving change. As the Voice of the Customer, you rule supreme.

While you may have a background in marketing, operations research, statistics, or even an MBA, your impact on the organization extends far beyond what these skills would normally indicate. You get to do the research, analyze the data, present the results, put together a strategic plan, and reengineer the business processes. Then, on Tuesday . . .

There is more fun to this job. You are no longer regulated to some back-office to deliver a report once per year. Your input has an impact on strategic decisions and helps define key business processes. You facilitate improvements in account management, sales processes, customer support, product development, quality control, project management and field service, to name a few—all of which are guided by the Net Promoter discipline. We’re talking respect, man. What’s the janitor’s Net Promoter Score? You would be the first one to know.

But in the spirit of late-night TV, “There’s even more!” You have to think on your feet (even while sitting around the conference room table). You must wear many hats (and look good in them) and be able to drive cross-functional teams. You are willing to roll up your sleeves to support the team. You are a highly organized multi-tasker who can simultaneously manage a broad portfolio of projects across multiple business units. Oh, yeah, and you have a day job too!

You also have superhero sidekicks. These willing assistants are customer-facing line employees who help you improve the customer experience by using Net Promoter as part of their every-day jobs. You slay the poor-experience villains when customer experience and Net Promoter become part of the corporate DNA.

Your title is Director of Customer Care, Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Vice President of Client Relations, Market Research Manager, Director of Customer Loyalty, and Director of Customer Commitment, to name a few. But we know what your real title is: Superhero!

Just don’t give away your identity or you might get a few more responsibilities piled on your plate.

*All ‘catch-phrase’ job requirements in this post have been pulled from actual NP job postings.

Comments

this article in my opinion misses the point by a mile. Customer care manager (or whatever) isn't about ego, as this blog (in)directly suggests, but about (especially) the front-line employees; a customer care manager who doesn't put them and their commitment (after the customer of course) front, hind, and centre, is just another fat cat that will come and go.

[Scott Smith]

Thanks for the comment. I would agree that it is about the customer and supporting the front-line employees and not ego. That is what makes the job interesting – you have a central role in making this happen, you get involved in all aspects of the business (which is not easy). My point is that these functions are becoming mainstream within organizations which is good for the customers and front-line employees (and the people who hold this role). Most customer-facing roles want to be part of ‘good profits’ and the ‘superhero’ roles make that happen. My goal for this blog is to celebrate the fact that companies want good profits and you get to help make it real.