Richard Owen, CEO, Satmetrix

Richard Owen's blog has moved

Richard Owen’s blog has moved. Follow Richard’s latest posts on the Net Promoter Website at:

http://www.netpromoter.com/netpromoter_community/blogs/richard_and_laura

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Sincerely,

Net Promoter Team

Circuit City won't be the last

Over the weekend, my family and I dropped in to a big box electronics retailer to pick up a copy of the Wall-E DVD. After a fruitless search of the shelves, we finally tracked down an employee who advised us that their system suggested they had two copies in inventory, but he had no idea where they were. Frustrated, we picked up another item we needed and checked out. Nobody asked us if our shopping experience had been a good one. I went home and bought the DVD on Amazon, and therein lies the story of an existential crisis in retailing.  By the way, this wasn't a story of Circuit City, who on Friday announced that they had lost their fight to remain solvent and would liquidate - eliminating 34,000 jobs in the process. In an ironic twist, circuitcity.com is now pointing to a URL with the word "closed" in the title and showing only a letter to customers, not the usual commerce site. It was, after all, the internet that put them out of business.

Let's Party Like It's 1929!

It seems like no self-respecting blogger right now can write without making some reference to the Great Depression of 1929. After all, the media has stood pretty firm over the last 6 months in taking a position that we are facing "deja vu all over again."

I'm not going to use more virtual trees debating that assertion. If you think we are in the Great Depression again, save me a spot in the soup line at central park. I'm not going to talk you out of it, but I don't see the data to support the argument we are there - yet.

If you are buying loyalty, the price apparently went down

Our favorite microcosm of loyalty experiments, the airlines, have apparently devalued their currency. At this rate they will beat the British Pound when it comes to debasing their currency, and that's saying something.

The WSJ reports that "plunging value of fliers' miles saps loyalty".

From this middle seat, this confuses loyalty with discounting. I'm not loyal to an airline because of frequent flier miles. I get an effective discount on my ticket, which attracts repurchase. Perhaps this basic confusion is at the heart of poor customer relationships in that industry.

On a related note, I hear stories of folks who "saved" millions of miles for their retirement. Crazy, relying on a currency that someone else controls and is of questionable value stability. Sounds like a dollar denominated 401k.

Jaffe Juice

Laura and I were interviewed for a podcast with Joseph Jaffe for his Jaffe Juice site. If you are a marketer who has not heard of Joseph, you are missing out. Joseph is very well known through his books for his opinions on advertising - which I share - and has something of a cult following amongst marketers.

Aside from the conversation with Joseph, there is a lot on the site to stimulate your thinking. Check it out.

The detroit customer service bail-out

It's impossible to avoid the debate around the auto industry (or more specifically the big 3 US firms) in the media. It's almost equally impossible to avoid an auto firm touting its latest win in the customer satisfaction rankings of JD Power. And yet, despite this apparent preoccupation with customers, many people see the auto dealership as the case study in how to game customer loyalty scores. How do we square all this away, and what lessons can be learnt for other industries?

Economics and Management Decision Making, Again

Those of you who regularly read this blog (both of you) know that a continued theme is one of management decision making and behavior in the face of economics incentives. A friend recently characterized this as "if long term customer success is such a powerful idea, why don't firms do it?"

Well, it's interesting to study management decision making in a different context to see if anything can be learned. Most of us are tuned in daily to congressional testimony (yeah right) so I'm sure that this piece from Andrew Lo of MIT's Sloan School didn't escape your notice. Skip past the theory and you get this interesting behavioral vignette:

More of the Same

The lab rat type experimentation around customer experience within the major airline carriers and banks continues at a pace. Draw your own conclusions. United spells it out:

Recovery from an Unusual (Net Promoter) Attitude

Training programs for pilots sometimes debate the merits of testing pilots on their ability to recover from “unusual attitudes”. Now I know what you are thinking; “unusual attitudes” these days in the airline industry could be a cabin staff who actually enjoy working for their airline. But I don't mean that.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Verizon gets it.

We all understand that the wireless telecom business (and for that matter all forms of the telecoms business) is brutally competitive. Not every firm is taking the same path to address these challenges, but it’s worth reflecting on some of the lessons from Verizon’s focus on NPS.