Customer focus is more of an issue now than ever before, with the effects of the recession still being keenly felt and recovery still some way of for many organisations. The Net Promoter Score Conference is one of the few within the business improvement industry which is almost solely focused on how to provide not only customer value, but customer ‘delight’.
Indeed, the theme of this years conference was “Delivering the Delight Factor”, and the presenters who spoke about the topic included representatives from Dell, O2, Sony, Maersk Line, eBay, Symantec, Belron and many others. Richard Owen, CEO of conference organisers and customer experience experts Satmetrix, opened the conference by talking about how successful businesses look to ascertain the customer expectations and then exceed them. These businesses understand the difference between what a customer expects and what they want – which Richard referred to as the ‘Zone of Tolerance’ – and the world-class organisations then use that to remake their industry through experience innovations.
This is something Dell have been trying to do by changing their focus from customer satisfaction to customer delight in partnership with Satmetrix. In his presentation, Gary Fox from Dell spoke of how he believes that “delighting customers is at the heart of transformation”. Dell have brought into using NPS as their main customer experience metric because, as Gary put it “every 1% improvement of our NPS is worth tens of millions of dollars”, which is why Dell have put their NPS score on the corporate scorecard right next to their share price.
Focusing on achieving customer delight rather than satisfaction – or indeed simply avoiding customer dissatisfaction – not only has tangible financial benefits, but softer ones such as employee engagement, a fact which was remarked upon by many of the presenters, including Gary and Fred Reichheld, the man who introduced the primary concepts of NPS in 2003. Fred spoke of how there is a big difference between motivation and inspiration, and one of the pleasing side-effects of utilising NPS is that it can be used to create promoters within the organisation, as well as externally.
Fred also spoke of how important – as well as powerful – it is to find ways to delight customers that don’t break the bank, a concept he referred to as the “frugal wow”. These are memorable little touches that cost little but add value to the customer experience and follow what Fred sees as the main inspiration behind NPS: treating people right. He cited companies such as Zappos, a relatively small online shoe retailer who have achieved great success by making customer delight their main strategic goal and were bought last year by Amazon for $1.2 billion.
Embedding these concepts into an organisation was a theme touched on by many of the presenters, including Tim Kaner of Sony and Steve Hewson of Colt. Tim believes that without engagement from the business at all levels then any customer experience programme is just “paying lip service” to being customer focused. For Sony, this has meant viewing the data that is relevant to each product, country and function and using a central NPS team to ensure it becomes embedded based on the local requirements.
Similarly, Steve Hewson spoke of how a lot of companies only have customer feedback programmes because their competitors do. At Colt, who provide telecommunications services throughout Europe, they have ensured that their programme is embedded by linking it to revenue and profit and building it into their Business As Usual process. Their aim is to create a forward-looking programme that ultimately will be able to predict customer dissatisfaction before it happens.
Investing in the areas that customers value and stripping out things that provide low value allows an organisation to put money into the right areas, and in order to do that they need to make sure they have the right KPIs and measures. This was the challenge that O2 faced, as described by Simon Groves, when they realised that they were lagging behind their competitors. They developed a new brand promise that was about putting the customer at the heart of everything they do, which then drilled down to specific plans that would underpin the promise. With NPS a key ingredient, all the KPIs and measures linked to this, and they tracked it every quarter to reinforce it throughout the company.
Subsequently, they have moved into a leading position on their satisfaction measures relative to their biggest competitors and have been acquiring new customers faster than their competitors. They are moving toward building a more emotional connection with their customers. The rallying cry is to “create a million more fans.”
Shaun Smith of Smith&Co and author of three books on customer experience, spoke how creating an emotional bond with customers results in retention and loyalty. He gave the example of First Direct, renowned for great customer service, who gain a new customer every 5 minutes from word of mouth recommendation. They focus their marketing on customer experience and deliver on their brand promise by taking their employee NPS as seriously as their customer NPS, because they believe they are directly linked: high customer NPS results in high employee NPS, and vice versa.
This emotional bond is vital for businesses who seek competitive advantage without having to invest heavily. An NPS programme is an inexpensive way of aligning a company’s strategy with their customers, and ensuring employees are motivated and driven to provide the delight that will ensure not just survival but prosperity in a difficult economy.
For more in-depth look into the presentations, there are a series of blogs that were made during the conference by Satmetrix, These can be found here: http://www.netpromoter.com/netpromoter_community/blogs/conference_europe_2010
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