Our CEO, Richard Owen, and VP of Methodology and Consulting, Dr. Laura Brooks recently published a book call “Answering the Ultimate Question”. The book is a consolidation of our experiences and learning from interviews with over 80 organizations on the best practices for successful Net Promoter programs. 

Fred’s best seller, The Ultimate Question, makes a compelling argument for re-engineering how you look at your customer satisfaction programs and has created a ground swell of adoption of Net Promoter as an industry standard for how well you treat your customers. Adoption of Net Promoter continues to grow across the globe. In just the last week, I received Google alerts from every region of the world

India: Marketing Metrics you Need for Interactive Marketing

Sydney Australia: Investor Strategy Presentation

Brasil: Industry Leaders to Discuss How Superior Customer Experience Can …

UK: Trends and developments in customer contact technology

Clearly, there was a need in the market to simplify the way you measure and improve customer loyalty and Net Promoter filled the void. However, what we found in our research is that while many companies are implementing Net Promoter, not all are implementing it well. Adding the recommend question to your 78 question customer satisfaction survey does not tranform how you look at customer relationships and help you drive a customer centric culture.

In the book, Richard and Laura showcase the best practices at companies such as Virgin Media, Symantec, Experian, and LEGO to name a few. Through this research, we developed the Net Promoter Operating Model to help organizations build an effective Net Promoter program that drives results.  The book content is organized around this model and provides a practical guide for how to implement this in your organization.

Our hope to is further the adoption of successful Net Promoter programs and help organizations realize the benefits of improved customer relationships that create repurchase and referral behaviors.  For more information on the book, here are a few articles that have recently been published based on interviews with the authors:

Net Promoter’s Promoter on What Works, BrandWeek

NPS book explains the process practically, The Wise Marketer

Net Promoter ‘not in competition with MR’, Research Magazine

And you can always buy the book to learn  more.   In fact, it made it on Maeve Naughton’s Christmas List.  Dear Santa, I Want Books for Christmas!

Last week I had the chance to speak with the VP of Service and Support for one of our large software clients. We are interviewing a number of executives to learn more about how they have enjoyed significant increase in their Net Promoter score, doubling it in the past 2 years!

One of the key learnings of this interview was the use of technology to improve the customer experience. Through diligent review of their customer feedback, they learned that making support more accessible and overcoming the language barriers of offshore call centers was for critical to satisfaction and loyalty. One of several improvements they made was to leverage technology to change the consumer interaction with their support centers.

Through the implementation of instant messaging, agents are able to interact with customers and overcome the language barriers. In addition to improve the customer experience, they are also more efficient by handling 1.6 customers at a time. This weeken had the chance to experience this interaction with a cellular provider and truly appreciated the convenience of “push to chat” from the website. The interaction was convenient, effective and resolved my issue without having to sit through a phone queue, type in my account number and then repeat it when the agent answered the phone.

According to a recent mycustomer.com article which only 21% of companies use instant messaging today. This looks like a great opportunity for companies to improve their customer experience, increase efficiencies and improve Net Promoter scores. In the Net Promoter operating model we talk about innovation and transformation as a critical part of improving your Net Promoter scores. Companies like Intuit and LEGO have seen benefits in co-innovation with their customers and innovation of their customer experience through interactive dialog. As support organizations fight the balance of cost reduction and managing the customer experience, look to technology to improve efficiencies for both you and your customers.

As I prepare to attend the upcoming CMO Council event in Monterey I was thinking about the ways Net Promoter relates to marketing. I have always believed and been a proponent of the fact that the brand is the experience, so this wasn’t a new thought by either me or my marketing colleagues. In fact, every marketing conference I have attended over the past year has included the discussion of Net Promoter in almost every keynote presentation.

On this topic, I ran across a few items that directly discuss the issue:

1.  Richard and Laura recently participated in this podcast with Joseph Jaffe about the new book “Answering the Ultimate Question”.  Joseph is a thought leader in the world of new Marketing and author of Death of the 30 second spot and Join the Conversation.  In this podcast they talk about how Net Promoter provides a key measure of organic word of mouth and how companies can’t advertise their way out of a poor customer experience.  Joseph’s words about Net Promoter “everything that it is and everything that it stands for is what companies should be obsessed and fixated on”.

2.  In my Net Promoter google alerts I ran across this interesting posting that included a You Tube interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.  Here is my favorite nugget from the interview.

“As we did more things to improve the customer service and customer experience our customers would keep buying from us and tell their friends about us….We came to the realization one day that all the investment we are putting into the customer experience should just be viewed as our marketing expense”

Zappos truly gets it and has created a cult brand in a short period of time.  I had the chance to hear Tony recently at the WOMMA conference and he spoke about how they build the culture of service within the business and how they use Net Promoter to maintain the focus on the customer.  It made me want to go buy more shoes =)

All of these folks will be speaking at our upcoming Net Promoter conference in San Francisco.  These are great leaders that understand the power of Net Promoter in creating a positive customer experience that creates word of mouth.

As marketers we all know that word of mouth is not only more effective than advertising, but more cost effective and measurable.  Why do marketers keep pouring billions of dollars in advertising when no one is listening?  Take a tip from Zappos, customer experience is the best form of marketing.

One of the key tenants of the Net Promoter approach is the distribution of information distributed to employees and business processes that support closing the loop with customers based on their feedback. Unlike the traditional market research approach where information is collected and analyzed on a periodic basis to evaluate the health of loyalty and satisfaction, Net Promoter is all about employees engaging in a process that improves the customer experience, enables customer recovery and increases loyalty. In fact, my favorite module of the Net Promoter Certification course is the closed loop process design.

However, too often we focus our closed loop processes on following up with Detractors and recovering from bad service or product experience. This blog posting from a Verizon Wireless customer shows just how powerful closed loop process design that included Promoters can be at furthering loyalty and activating word of mouth.

Our CEO Richard Owen recently saw a presentation by the Verizon Wireless team about their Net Promoter program and wrote this blog posting if you are interested in learning more about how Verizon Wireless has embraced Net Promoter to improve their customer experience in this highly competitive market.

Welcome to the new Satmetrix website! Our goals for the site updates include:

• improved navigation to enable rapid access the information you are interested in finding
• better communication of the value of our technology in supporting robust enterprise program deployment
• clearly communicate our focus on Net Promoter as a discipline for building a customer centric culture

Net Promoter continues to gain market momentum. In the past month I have had the opportunity to attend a variety of conference events including WOMMA, Customer Feedback Week, and CMO Club. At each event, companies across multiple industry segments continue the share their success with Net Promoter as an approach for improving the customer experience, increasing customer loyalty and measuring word of mouth.

While the economy continues to dominate our day to day concerns, smart business leaders are maintaining their focus on protecting their most important asset, their customers. Those that maintain commitment and focus on collecting and acting on customer feedback in a way that changes the customer experience and increases loyalty will emerge as the market leaders as the economic times improve.

We hope you take the opportunity to browse our content, watch our videos, and learn more about how Satmetrix can help you to create loyal customers and link loyalty to business outcomes.

I also encourage you to follow our new blogs and we expand our employee blogging and integrate the blogging of Richard Owen and Laura Brooks, authors of the new book “Answering the Ultimate Question”. We will to continue to strive to provide valuable content that will help you and others apply best practices to customer retention and growth.

Look forward to your comments and continued dialog.

Are your employees acting on customer feedback?

Here is an excellent article from ComputerWorld demonstrating the power of a closed loop process from our client, Cypress Semiconductor.

On Friday night I was relaxing from a long week and with nothing more important to do, I turned on the TV. My typical TV viewing is to watch shows I have recorded on my DVR or On Demand (Mad Men is a personal favorite), but this time I was stuck watching commercials. So I decided to use it as a research project.

One of the first commercials was from MasterCard with an interesting call to action to visit priceless.com. Well, how could I resist this opportunity to observe how MasterCard has integrated their advertising and web activities?

It’s an interesting site. You can submit consumer generated content by entering your own priceless experience. But something strange happened early in my visit; the site instantly presented me with a survey to offer my input on the user experience at priceless.com. Well, I hadn’t been there long enough to comment, but I thought I’d go for a ride. What I found was disappointing; it was a long survey with questions that were not relevant to my experience on the site.

I think MasterCard is on the right path, but there is definite room for improvement. Here are a few observations from a visitor sincerely interested in their approach:

1. Don’t start asking questions until you engage me. Find a way to draw me in with interesting content and after I’ve been there for a while, or return, engage me in a dialog, not a one way survey.
2. The 0 – 10 scale is backwards relative to best practices that put 10 on the right side and 0 on the left. Ok, that’s being picky, but expected as a Net Promoter practitioner.
3. Don’t ask questions you can answer yourself. The questionnaire asked where I came from (direct, search or referral), can’t your web data tell you that? Even better, let me put in my name and zip code and look me up, act like you know me!
4. Create compelling content that makes me want to engage. For example, a travel section on current travel offers for MasterCard customers. Make me want to be a MasterCard customer and move up the loyalty ladder by seeing what I’m missing.
5. The site was interesting for entering and viewing priceless picks. This demonstrates it’s a campaign, not a community. Use this opportunity to build a relationship with your customers and/or prospective customers, not just an extension of your ad campaign.

After my visit to priceless.com, I visited many of the other advertiser’s sites; no one had quite integrated their website with their ad campaigns yet. The key here is YET, these guys are spending enough money, sooner or later they will see the opportunity for using ad dollars to engage customers in communities that build loyalty and increase word of mouth.

Have you seen someone that’s done it right?