Creating a culture of customer advocacy

At Safelite AutoGlass, NPS has been a great tool for measuring customer satisfaction. But, we needed to take it a step beyond asking if someone would recommend our service to friends and family. We include open-ended questions so we can learn what we're doing right and what we can improve. We've made impressive business process improvements based on our customer satisfaction survey. And, our NPS us currently around 85!

Oh, boy ~ nearly three years into the customer experience program I oversee, I could make quite a list! Probably the most important piece of advice I can offer is stolen -- I heard it from Richard Owen of Satmetrix. He told a story at a conference lunch about American football that really got the point across. From England, he found it quite amusing that over here in the U.S. even though the football might bounce around among players' hands, tumble across the field, get covered up by a mound of tackled players, etc. -- we still bring out the measuring stick to verify to the inch whether or not a down was made. He laughed and warned against applying too much precision to something that is by nature imprecise. I found when we first began our NPS journey that employees at all levels of the organization dwelled too much on the data rather than the dialogue. Sr. Executives wanted endless slicing and dicing to provide views every which way, while frontline employees questioned the method, the metric, the mood of the customer that day, you name it! Though of course you need to ensure you are measuring who matters and compiling trustworthy data, don't lose sight of the fact that finding those actionable issues and fixing what's bothering your customers is job one. If I could recoup all my time spent re-sorting, graphing and defending, I would spend every minute of it interfacing directly with my survey respondents instead, without a doubt!

Measurement is only the first step - you need to think about and communicate the importance of the overall business system rather than just the measure itself. People will generally want to focus on the #'s versus the dialogue about the underlying components of the business system that are required to change (e.g. closing the loop with customers and associates after they give you feedback; turning that insight into action by focusing on what about your company's experience drives detraction or promotion; understanding the economics of detraction). Asking the question is the easy part - it's really the change in mindset, culture and operating model that is the most critical part of the NPS journey.

We are a B2B environment and here is what we have found.

Do not obsess about the number. It will not improve as fast as you hope, especially if your customer base consists of relatively few, long term, relationships rather than a large number of shorter term transactions.

Do obsess over service recovery, accountability and follow-up on the information you receive from your customers. This is where the short term money is in terms of reduced attrition and opportunities to engage your customers in cross selling and up selling. Creating accountability for the feedback you receive will pay long term dividends as products and processes start to change to better serve the needs of the customers.

Be sure when you look at your results of your program that you take into account all of the positive results such as increased sales, reduced customer attrition and changes to your company’s products, services, and culture rather than just measuring success or failure by the NPS score.
(originally posted on LinkedIn)

I wish that someone would have told me that the best way for an NPS program to grow is give control of it to as many people as possible. It took me about three years to realize that given: reliable, transparent, real-time data; executive support; and the tools to understand the data, managers and employees will do their best to make things better for their customers. What I didn’t realize was how uncomfortable it would feel ceding control. This has been by far the hardest part of having a successful, grass-roots program.
(originally posted on LinkedIn)

I'd share a few things:
- Start with executive buy-in. This really has to come top-down, not bottom up. Find your executive sponsor and meet with him/her periodically to give updates. Start this long before you kick off the survey...get your sponsor to "think NPS".
- Socialize the idea around. I work for a software company - so this meant I had to make sure the R&D management, product management, and sales teams were all on board. If they won't support the effort, you can't drive change.
- Get the sales teams engaged in building customer interest. Customers get hundreds of emails a day, and if they don't know what's coming it's likely your survey invite will get tossed. Ideally, account managers should brief their customers on what's coming and get involved in helping drive up the response rate.
- After you get your survey results, form a cross-functional "NPS committee" that will work to resolve issues the survey uncovers. Put these into "short-term", "medium-term", and "long-term" buckets. Also, don't ignore any feedback that's specific to one customer (i.e., a customer says "We haven't gotten our most recent shipment, can you help?")
- Once your NPS committee starts taking action, share the results with your customers. This will show them that you listened, and will help drive results in the future.

Hope this helps...feel free to contact me offline if I can help more!

Jim
(originally posted on LinkedIn)

Thanks! Some great ideas and contributions here.

My addition to this great discussion would be: Action & Follow Up...

It's critical that the customer feels heard.

Obtaining the feedback and data is great for the company - That's the information that allows us to improve, or change, or confirm our ways of doing business.

For NPS to be of real value both for the company, and for the consumer, we need to "close the loop" - complete the circle as it were... follow up with the customers to ensure that they're honestly being heard in the process.
(originally posted on LinkedIn)

The best advice I hear from my customers who are most successful in implementing NPS is that they make it actionable by tying it to measurable business metrics. What are your key goals? Customer acquisition? Retention? Growth in spend? NPS may be a measure of intended advocacy, but I'm told that it's also a predictor of retention.

Closing the loop, as others have mentioned, is important to manage individuals. But for aggregate business issues and the predictive value of the metric there's more to it.

To Ralph's point above, this is no longer the only question you need to ask. In order to make it actionable, you need to ask questions that get you to understanding the drivers behind the response to the recommendation question.
(originally posted on LinkedIn)

Keep the program small initially. Do not go out and make a huge announcement, start a governance board, etc. Build some success with quick wins and let the data speak for itself. Once you have a few meaningful successes, the program will take on a life of its own.

Segment the customer base
Generally, depending on the business your are in, you can’t be everything to all of your customers all of the time - think about the breadth and depth of customers you want to survey. Can you realistically address all the feedback across your entire customer base – if so excellent, if not, segment your client base?

Survey at multiple levels within the customer account
Ensure you have a balanced view of the customer relationship – ie from decision maker to hands on user etc. From a strategic account management perspective gain an insight as to whom you need to be surveying and put in place a plan to ensure all decision makers through to key influencers are not only happy but loyal.

Leverage the Promoters
These are the advocates for your business, who are actively promoting your organisation amongst their peers and colleagues. Leverage these advocates for example as: Sales References, for case studies, media interviews and product beta testing initiatives etc.

Analyse why these customers are the promoters versus your other customers who may not be so loyal. For example you may have one Telco customer that is an advocate and another that is a detractor – learn what your organisation is doing with the advocate but is not doing with the detractor.

Ownership - every touch point a customer has with an organisation contributes towards the Net Promoter Score. There can be a misconception that Sales own the customer relationship and therefore the Sales person is soley responsible for the NPS. It is imperative there is senior level sponsorship and that the entire organisation understands they have a role to play with influencing the Net Promoter Scores – Sales have a role to play but so does the rest of the business.

Closed Loop Process
Before any feedback is sought from customers on NPS, ensure that there is a clearly defined process in place. Also ensure that you have (ideally) a process that is easy to follow / track.

What you don’t want to see is the same feedback/score coming from the same Customer, survey after survey – ie no one has actioned the feedback or follow up has not actually resolved the pain points that led to the customer’s original NPS. Ensure everyone understands the role they play with NPS across all functional departments and also ensure there is a closed loop process in place before embarking on a customer loyalty program.

Communication
Internal communication (ie what is the Net Promoter Survey, why is the business doing this, what is the process, what does it mean to you, what does it mean to the customer etc) External communication (ie commitment you are making to the customer, what the benefits are to the customer and expectation of time required by the customer to participate etc).

The NPS should be used to drive change and re-inforce best practice to ultimately have as best as possible a loyal customer base. Communicate with customers key changes that are being made based on their feedback so that they feel they are being heard. Share successes and learnings internally.

From my experience of setting up and managing NPS efforts, the most important learning I have had is never to get absorbed in numbers. The focus on action items is very critical.

Here are some of my thoughts on this
1.Identify departments where you have the capacity to measure and "manage" the program to take action items

2.Set up MOT(Moment of Truth) stages to map the VOC by different stages. Identify the stages well ahead of time based on the different process the organization follows.
For e.g For a call center survey, MOT stages could be be Agent Knowledge, Agent Manner. Sub categories for Agent knowledge can be Product Knowledge, Process knowledge etc. and sub category for Agent Manner can be Kindness, Prompt etc. This will help in diving deep into analysis and finding the real problem area.

3.Manage your survey samples well as NPS score can vary from month to month based on sample fluctuations. Gather enough survey samples to get adequate responses (atleast 20+ by each channel and overall 100+) to gather valid sentiments from customers

4.Conduct extensive training within the organization about NPS and what it means
If you have agents who conduct phone surveys, walk them through the whole NPS process, what they should capture and how everything ties back

5.Finally the most important step is to analyze the data and identify the weak areas and take action items. How can we convert those detractors and passives to promoters! Communicate internally!

Hope this helps!

Thanks,
Tulsi

Only one? Then it has to be true, meaningful, senior management buy-in. Meaning they prioritize strategic decisions/investments based on increasing promoters, using customer experience feedback to evaluate operations, and actually believe the numbers are telling them something useful.

Other people have commented on many of the things you should do to make the program actually useful to senior mgmt - particularly the comment on segmentation, it's just so critical to get meaningful data - but all is for naught if senior mgmt is more concerned with brand equity or other strategic tools they use to make decisions. If you don't immediately get what I'm saying, just go through your senior mgmt team's quarterly review deck and see what it is they are using today to manage the business. What would NPS add to that? How should management prioritize this info wrt all the other info they are getting? How will NPS support meaningful decision making? If you figure that out, you will be way ahead of many programs that - no matter how well conceived, are just another slide in the review.