Introducing The Promoter Flywheel

About 18 months ago, I had an experience with Hertz that illustrated some of the challenges companies confront trying to move beyond simply calculating a Net Promoter score to pursuing the Net Promoter system. If you're interested, you can read about it here (An unfortunate experience with a rental car return).

My experience provides a great illustration of how a company's policies and procedures around bad profits can impact employee engagement and loyalty, and the pernicious doom loop that results. In this case, a system had been set up to ensure the revenue associated with bad profits was collected. No care was taken to avoid insulting customers or calling them liars. Far too many companies engage in similar behavior, not only angering customers, but demoralizing employees.

At Bain, we've been doing more and more client work around the link between employee and customer loyalty as part of the Net Promoter system. Several clients now measure employee NPS (sometimes called "eNPS"). Most have learned the value of devoting just as much effort to earning employee advocacy as customer advocacy, and the virtuous cycle that can create.

Promoter Flywheel is a service mark of Bain & Company, Inc.We call this virtuous cycle "The Promoter Flywheel." We chose the word flywheel with some care. In engineering terms,

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How and why the Net Promoter approach motivates front line employees

Most executives who hear about the Net Promoter system conclude that the reason it works is because it creates a clear outcome metric to which we can hold front line employees, supervisors, managers and executives accountable.  In fact, some of the NPS early adopters, most notably GE, focused most of their early efforts on creating a score, setting goals, and linking compensation and incentives to achieving goals for improving that score.

Daniel Pink, the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Amazon listing), references academic research that calls into question the model of behavior at work that relies on a simple "carrot and stick" approach to motivation. First, he shows that the typical reward-and-punish approach often fails to produce the required results, and often produces lower levels of achievement than no incentives at all.  Then he shows that a very different approach works much better.  This approach is highly consistent with the fundamental principles of the Net Promoter system, and may explain some of why it works so well in so many companies.

Pink reports on a simple and compelling model for motivating achievement in complex tasks (such as, say, figuring out how to really wow a customer in a service interaction).  It is built on three elements:

• Autonomy: People want to have control over their work.

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Travelport: Surviving industry disruption through employee loyalty

Travelport is a company providing the information infrastructure for travel agencies. Consisting of the combination of Galileo and WorlSpan under a private equity firm's ownership, the company needed to turn around its customer relationships quickly in order to preserve and grow revenue. The travel industry has been undergoing massively disruptive structural change, with airlines selling direct to customers and overall margins in the business under long term threat.

They quickly concluded they needed to understand employee engagement, and knew that the usual top down approach to developing an action plan would not have fast enough impact in the context of the merged company's culture. So they explored NPS as a way to gather high quality verbatim feedback associated with a hard metric.

Their initial experiment, among 1,600 employees in 8 offices yielded an abysmal score, a hierarchy of issues to be addressed and really caught the attention of the company's senior leadership. The CEO (after he calmed down) loved the fact that he now had the opportunity to take action on issues the employees had identified and prioritized. This led to a full company roll out a few months later.

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An unfortunate experience with a rental car return

I happened to sit next to a senior executive from Hertz on a plane not too long ago. He told me, with some pride, that Hertz had adopted Net Promoter scores as an important success metric. That might be true. But my recent experience returning a Hertz car, filling out their Net Promoter survey, and attempting to resolve a billing error demonstrates just how far the company has to go.

Nothing special

My rental experience in Philadelphia was quite unremarkable in most ways. The car was ready for me when I arrived. It was fairly clean. It ran well. In short, it was fine.

As usual, I stopped at a gas station on the way to the airport to top off the tank. It cost me about $7.00, as usual, to fill up. It was raining as I pulled into the rental return area, and in between swipes of the windshield wipers, I scanned the parking lot for the return agent carrying a portable device to check in my car. While I wasn't rushed to get to my flight, I hadn't left myself excessive time to check in and go through security.

It was mid-day, and I was currently the only customer returning a car, as far as I could see. There was no return agent in sight. Hoping they would emerge, I got out of my car and began unloading my luggage from the trunk. Still no agent in sight, but now I was getting wet in the rain. So I didn't wait all that long before jotting down the gas and mileage on my contract, and traipsing over to the service counter inside.

Rising frustration

I found a long counter with perhaps ten spots for agents. Two were manned. There were three people in line ahead of me, all beginning their rentals. I scanned for a way to get my receipt from one of those automated kiosks, but couldn't locate one in the lobby. So I waited my turn.

"I'm returning a car," I said, as I handed over my contract with the mileage and gas level.

The agent did not make eye contact. "I'll have to get someone to check the car," she said, and quickly picked up a walkie-talkie.

"I wrote down the mileage and the gas," I replied.

I started to feel frustration and angerWithout responding to me, she said something into the radio and waited, looking at the device as if it might register a response on its own. She waited a little longer, hand on one hip, head cocked, staring at the radio. Then she repeated her request. Still no answer.

Abruptly, she put down the walkie-talkie and disappeared into an office behind the desk somewhere. I was left standing there. I hypothesized she had gone to get a supervisor or, perhaps, to call someone on the phone. Minutes passed. I surveyed the lobby. No one had entered the building since

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