Dell's customer experience turnaround: An NPS journey in-progress

Updated on Friday, November 19, 2010 at 11:28AM by Rob Markey

Gary Fox, Director of Global Customer Experience at Dell, told the story of their transformation and the role that NPS played in that at the Net Promoter Conference in London on June 17.  At 26 years old, Dell is today a $53B revenue company with roughly 80% of that revenue coming from enterprise and 20% from consumers.

The appeal of NPS to Michael Dell was grounded in its simplicity.  Everyone understands Net Promoter, and under Michael's direct leadership, improving the customer experience has become one of the top goals of the company.  NPS is on the executive team's scorecard, and improvement goals are shared.  On their intranet, Dell has posted their Net Promoter Score right next to the share price.  This symbolic co-location is meant to emphasize the importance of balancing the customer experience against financial goals.  Every leadership team meeting that Michael Dell holds begins with a discussion of the Net Promoter Scores and what is driving them.  This cascades down the leadership ladder into each business, another important way Dell works customer focus into the business rhythms of the company.

Net Promoter Scores are collected for all the different customer segments.  "We listen, and we learn, and we push ourselves to improve," says Fox.  He leads a central Customer Experience team that creates consistency in measurement and feedback, and creates a strong closed-loop feedback system in each business.  They listen through multiple channels, soliciting feedback not only through their NPS surveys, but also through customer events, social media, the voice of the agent and other informal settings.  (About a year ago, I took a Dell web survey, which was decidedly NOT in line with the principles of customer advocacy.  You can read the prior post here.)

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Belron: A loyalty leader you've probably never heard of (but you might be a customer!)

Gary Lubner, CEO of Belron, gave a keynote address at the Net Promoter Conference this morning.  He led off by saying that "I see my primary role as CEO as getting everyone in our organization to focus on customer service, putting the customer at the heart of everything we do."  Belron operates under several brands, including Carglass, Safelight, Lebeau, O'Brien and Apple Auto Glass.  They have a business that spans 32 countries on five continents.

About two years ago, Belron pulled their efforts together into a Customer Delight Acceleration Program (CDAT).  It consists of four elements:  NPS, Smile, Global Recognition, and Service Recovery.

The company adopted NPS globally in 2008 after acquiring a US operation, Safelight, that had been using it for a couple of years.  Lubner said that

NPS offers us five things:

• Consistency - we can measure across all our businesses around the world in teh same way
• Simplicity - everyone can understand it
• Voice of customer - verbatims give us direct access to what the customers are really saying
• Deep insight - we now have two million pieces of data which we can use to improve our business
• Accuracy - it really does reflect the thing we most want to know 

Belron uses GfK to place outbound phone calls to collect their Net Promoter data.  They not only send the survey responses directly back to the local service teams, but they also send back audio recordings of the interviews so the technicians and office leaders can hear the customers in their own voices and words.  Local leaders post their scores and feedback quotes on the walls of their offices.  Individual technicians can tell you the most recent feedback they've gotten, what it means, and what they, individually are working on to improve.  Lubner described the most important benefit of the verbatim feedback from their NPS approach as providing richer feedback to individuals.

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Customer credos, charters and public commitments: When are they a good idea?

I'm in London this week visiting some clients, working with some Bain teams, and attending the Net Promoter Conference.  During some of my meetings, a colleague pointed out that NatWest had just published a "customer charter" with 14 aspirational statements (link).  Hard to tell whether it's fundamentally a marketing positioning -- their tag line is "Helpful Banking" -- or something more.  It is certainly plastered all over their consumer home page today.

It seems many companies are busy publishing similar public commitments to their customers.  Out of curiosity I did a quick search on Google for "customer charter" and came up with a pretty long list of links.  Here are some of the first that came up.  They are from all over the (English language) world.  A few are almost silly, others seem quite thoughtful.

• NJIT Customer Service Credo
• The Comcast Credo
• National Library of Ireland Customer Charter
• Virgin Atlantic - Our Commitment to You
• ANZ - Corporate Responsibility
• UK Environment Agency Customer Charter (requires PDF download)
• Australian Government Centrelink Customer Charter
• Standard Chartered (India) Customer Charter

As I buzzed through these, I found myself wondering under what conditions a customer charter is a good idea.  Among the more compelling rationale I have heard executives use to explain their intent in adopting a customer charter:

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Zappos: Video describing their Net Promoter approach

Here is a link to a relatively long interview/discussion describing how the Net Promoter approach is used to generate closed loop feedback and learning at Zappos.  While it's not the slickest video ever, it is HIGHLY informative, describing the approach in some significant detail.

Zappos does a very nice job of creating real closed-loop feedback and using it to drive learning and improvement for customers.  The company was built on creating wow experiences for customers, and they have succeeded in using this to achieve very high customer loyalty, strong word-of-mouth and profitable organic growth with very little advertising.

Video: Zappos CLT and NPS (approx. 17 minutes)

An interesting follow-up survey invitation from Hilton

If you've been reading this for awhile, you know how critical I have been in the past of Hilton employees begging for feedback scores (Begging for scores at Hilton).  You also know that I have been collecting and posting examples of good and bad feedback surveys and email invitations (Survey links).

As a result, some friends have been sending me examples, and a recent one came from Hilton.  Within a couple of days following a recent stay, this person received an invitation to provide feedback.  After a day or two more had passed, a reminder email was sent.

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