Want loyalty leading behavior from your team? Show it

Every member of The Vanguard Group's management team must man the telephones. That's right, every executive in the company is licensed and trained so they can provide overflow capacity during periods of peak call volumes. While it's not an everyday occurrence, they call everyone to the phones pretty regularly during tax season or around market disruptions.

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure I would be "slightly" less capable than a seasoned rep at executing trades, setting up accounts, creating transfer orders and so on. So, without intending to demonstrate any lack of respect for the leaders at Vanguard, I guess I'd prefer a regular rep. Nevertheless, their approach, which they call "Swiss Army" (because, like in Switzerland, everyone must serve when called) is brilliant. Vanguard, which has grown to become the largest fund company, is a true loyalty leader, consistently earning higher NPS than their direct competitors and showing the profitable share gain that goes with NPS leadership.

Why is Swiss Army so cool?

• Adds capacity at the peak, reducing call wait times and improving responsiveness to customers

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Complainers, cry-babies and whiners: How to break through the resistance

In this final post on resistance to changing customer metrics, we consider some of the tips for responding to the objections.  Our first post catalogued the objections, the second one tried to ferret out kernels of truth among the complaints, and this final one provides some proven techniques for addressing the complaints.  This couldn't possibly be a comprehensive list.  But it is the distilled experience of our clients and members of the NPS Loyalty Forum.  I bet you have other advice, too.

A few tips for addressing metric-based resistance to change: 

• First, make sure they have their facts right.  Many of the purported "studies" that attack the value of Net Promoter Scores or other metrics simply don't provide factual evidence supporting their claims.  Others are fundamentally flawed.  The most popular of all of them actually supports Bain's research under an inflammatory and provocative headline. (See related post:  Don't just read the text - pore over the data.  Also, you should check out some of the other resources, including other blog posts, located on the Additional resources page of this blog.)
• Bring people back to the primary objective:  Taking actions that will earn your target customers' loyalty (both behaviorally, and emotionally).
• Few employees understand complicated, proprietary satisfaction or loyalty indices.  Fewer still find them motivating and energizing.  And they rarely perceive them as actionable.  This is as true in the C-suite as it is among hourly customer-facing employees.  It has nothing to do with the intelligence of the employees, and everything to do with complexity and opacity of proprietary models.

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Complainers, cry-babies and whiners? Doesn't mean they're completely wrong

In the prior post, we catalogued some of the most frequently-encountered objections to changing customer metrics.  This time, we'll try to give the objectors the benefit of the doubt and search for what might be valid about their objections and arguments.

What about these objections is valid?

The people raising these objections may be disruptive and even irritating at times.  Sometimes, their objections are based on incomplete understanding of what is being proposed.  Often, they choose confrontational and argumentative ways to raise their issues.  In some cases, they aggressively attack the new metrics without making constructive or helpful counter-recommendations.

Nevertheless, they often raise issues out of a genuine concern for the company's best interests.  (Okay, not always, but often.)  Buried deep in many forms of resistance to change we often find kernels of truth.  These can help improve the solutions and actions you take.

A few of the points that may have some merit: 

• Sophisticated and complex multi-question customer loyalty or satisfaction scores often provide stronger statistical correlations to customer behavior than do simpler, easier to understand metrics such as the Net Promoter Score.  In fact, in our client work, we have shown that you can get a 5-15% improvement in explanatory power moving from a radically simple Net Promoter Score based approach to one of the proprietary models based on multiple questions.

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Complainers, cry-babies and whiners: Smoking out resistance to culture change

Updated on Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 12:26PM by Rob Markey

If you're not truly serious about changing your company's culture, don't even think about adopting the Net Promoter approach for achieving customer advocacy.  Just changing metrics accomplishes nothing but heartache and pain.  Yes, culture change is hard work.  It requires persistence, patience and perseverance.  But only by changing the culture do you create a sustainable focus on earning your customers' enthusiastic recommendations.

Bain Detractor emoticon available for download by registered site membersAttempts to change a company's culture invariably draw heavy resistance.  One of the most common and distracting forms of resistance often involves a debate about success metrics.  Resistance usually starts quite early in the change process, typically with objections to the validity, advisability or practicality of the new approach.

It can be tempting to dismiss those raising objections as complainers, cry-babies or whiners.  Yet, they sometimes raise important points worth attending to.  Well, okay, not very often.  But sometimes.

This is the first in a series of (probably three) posts focused on resistance to changing customer feedback metrics.  In this one, we'll just try to catalog some of the most frequently-raised objections.

Typical complaints and arguments

Do any of the following resonate?  Have you heard them in your organization? (Fill in the bracketed phrases with whatever is relevant to your company.)

• "We have years of experience with [our existing customer metric] and we would lose our baseline if we make a switch"

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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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