Archive for the 'netpromoter' Category

The 2011 Netpromoter benchmarks report does say lots of obvious things. But that can be useful when said with numbers. Take this parargraph:

“Businesses are expected to spend $214.3 billion on advertising in 2011, according to SNL Kagan. But only 4 percent of Americans trust advertising the most as an information source when choosing products or services. Instead, the Satmetrix study finds that consumers most trust recommendations from independent sources (83 percent), especially those with whom they have personal relationships. Half of consumers (50 percent) cited personal recommendations from friends, family or colleagues as the most trustworthy source of information. And, approximately four times as many people trusted product test reviews (18 percent) or consumer opinions posted online (15 percent) as compared to advertising.”

So here’s one to  discuss with your board colleagues…… the exam question is “What would the business look like if we spent 83/4 times, let’s say 20 times, as much on improving the colleague and customer experience as we do on marketing our brand or product?”

Anyone who  has played with business simulators will know that more advertising of a poor performing service or product just leads to a worsening economic cycle – higher acquisition costs, higher cost to serve, low retention. Word of mouth reality outstrips advertising glitz.

And the opposite is true. Businesses like Amazon, Google ,eBay and Skype took off and stay up there without much, if any, advertising support. You can read more about Amazon and Google in our “100 things you can learn from …” series at our website.

100 things, 21st century marketing, Amazon, Google, customer experience, ebay, netpromoter, word of mouth | 1 Comment

Netpromoter scores abound and it’s interesting to see the US NPS benchmarks now being published in competition with the American Customer Satisfaction Index ( ACSI ) . Recently colleague Bill Price in the US was speaking at a conference on customer happiness and we all continue to push the case for removing dumb things under the banner of reducing customer effort (search categories: “customer effort”), another way of measuring customers.

So many things to measure: likelihood to recommend, satisfaction levels, happiness and effort.

I just wish people would stop putting their money and energy into measuring and use it to change things instead. The top scorers in all the these measures are the same people. The Amazons, USAAs, Southwesterns. They don’t need to be told their scores in order to change things. They live that way. They’re always listening and changing. Open to feedback, honest and transparent towards their customers and their staff.

The attention is on doing the right thing, not on measuring if we did the right thing.

Take two examples yesterday and today.

The Apple store in Covent Garden. So good it makes you purr. Sales help given, diagnostic tool for iphone and service given, additional questions answered, no time wasted. No one has tried to measure me.

Booking some Virgin Atlantic flights today. So poor I nearly gave up 3 times. 75 minutes in total. It was only the very poor chance of finding anything better ( in process terms) that stopped me. Measured in the middle of the process. And failed my feedback test: when speaking to the agent I asked what she’d do if I gave feedback and was offered the website as a place to put it.

There’s just no excuse for some of the obvious things…. the agent had to book my kids whilst I booked myself at the same time in order to get on the same flight for sure. Why? Neither she nor I can book flights on the same place out and different flights back – that’s got to be pretty common. Her price quote for me is higher than mine. The website rejected both bookings part way through booking and then changed the prices when I went back in. The webchat help can’t do anything to help as the process doesn’t allow. The credit card fees are per booking at £30+. I get pinged to give them webchat feedback scores on the agent – completely irrelevant and untimely. You can hardly hear the poor woman in the new Swansea call centre for background noise. She got off the phone pretty pronto when I started asking about sitting all 4 of us together.

And I’m writing this blog whilst I wait for my confirmation emails so I can book car hire and parking. 50 minutes and waiting. I’ll have to go back into the site and look up my arrival times.

OK so Ive booked with them but would I recommend them on any measure? Do they know these things are broken? Betcha they do.  Do they care – they got significant sum of money anyway.

I suggested the advisor bring up some benchmarks in her monthly feedback session – easyjet, the passport office, directgov. Will it change – I doubt it very much. It was like this the last time I flew with them and the time before and so on…..

So if you cant offer good service, if you aren’t already a benchmark, then don’t measure me – it makes my experience worse still. Talk to your front line staff – they know what the score is. And they know what to do about it.

Postscript: It’s now the day after. Needless to say the only pre book seats available are in 2s.

No confirmation emails came anyway, only a text for one of the bookings so I have had to ring and get the ref for the other. No answer on the customer services line so I gave up and rang using the sales option. Despite a vehement attempt to get rid of me, I hung on in and got them to give me the missing ref. Emails had been sent and failed apparently. They never send text confirmations apparently so that’s confusing.  So I called again, hung on til I got thro to customer services but couldn’t be helped. We, the agent and I, decided the only way to get 4 seats together in advance was to reach Richard Branson and get him to change the system. I really really wish I hadn’t given my money to Virgin til booking 4 people out, 2×2 back was solved. No wonder the first agent got off the phone fast yesterday when I mentioned seats.

Apple, Customer effort, Customer satisfaction, Virgin, airlines, broken websites, customer experience, feedback, netpromoter | No Comments

I’ve recently made the transition from the Microsoft world to the Apple world. A rich vein for blogging but luckily for you, dear reader, I fell out of the habit of blogging as I twittered succinctly instead. Well now to make up for it….

Not just Microsoft was to be left behind. I moved from the rest of the world, as I got rid of Nokia and Dell at the same time. No offence to the Nokia world, I loved my old Nokia engine that only did simple things simply – but a waiter in Kashmir is dining out on the proceeds of our cash, phones and ipods stolen from the hotel rooms on our “LimeBridge goes trekking” global get together in June.

Digressing for a moment….did I tell you about seeing a snow leopard! Here it is! I’ll come back to that later

Any offence to Dell? I don’t know, I never tried to get help for daily crashes or a battery on their machine that struggled to make the 1 hour  journey into London. Or a shoulder ache from the weight. Ok, when my last machine gave up the ghost in the middle of a seriously hot project in the Cabinet Office I had to rush out and buy the highest spec machine I could. So its my fault I bought a dog. It’s my fault I should have read the blogs in more detail, I only got as far as Dell delivery delays but found a high spec, very reasonably priced one in PC World in a hurry.

But I didnt try to contact Dell or read a Dell site. Interesting.

I did try to contact the PC World site abut the battery and the crashing but they didn’t return their nicely formatted emails. I could have gone to the store but I’d got better things to do.

I did try making sure I had the latest updates from MS and I tried their forums but crashes just seem to be an expectation with Vista. 2 or 3 times a day was becoming unbearable. Put that with slow performance on a high spec machine and the loss of an hour a day isnt tenable. Just opening the machine could take me two train stops in the morning. You could make the tea, whilst saving a 2003 compatible file. I blame MS – whether or not it’s their fault I don’t know.

The other reason MS get the blame is what they did to their standard office products in upgrading from 2003 to 2007, the other “upgrade” I experienced, alongside Vista. No new functionality, is just you cant find any of it !!! After 3 months, I’ve got used to it. But why did they do that?

When I looked at my daughter’s Mac, I realised. They were training me to think Mac!!

So back to Kashmir and the stolen phone and ipod. I’ll save the insurance story for another blog, but of course I asked my PA on the emergency call to get them to redirect voice mail (can’t do that..) and get a new phone, sim and dongle. Now call me old fashioned but every bit of customer experience work we did with telcos in the 90s said the key churn point was a lost phone.  So I kinda expected this to be a slick process.

Whoops not at Vodafone. Call centre says you need a letters in writing to take to the shop. Shop says you didn’t need that letter for the phone. Whilst I’m there, can they replace my stolen dongle. Not without a written letter. But its £2 of plastic memory stick. No. I’m thinking of moving all our business account away. No. Very well then.

Off I go to the Apple store to replace my ipod. And that’s where it got expensive. Greeted as I entered by enthusiastic Apple fans, shown the tempting wares, I walked out with a ipod touch, the thing I came for. And a MacBook Air with no moving hard drive, endless  battery life and the sexiest touch this side of …….well anyway. And no Microsoft stuff to crash. To date a month in, it hasn’t crashed.

The only reason I didnt walk out with an iPhone was that they can’t sell a business account, only to individuals. So off I trot to the O2 store.

Then I meet the very ordinary environment and endless queue and the business prevention officers again. Everything in writing in triplicate bla bla. I give up.

And walk back to the Apple store and buy an iphone privately there. A very chatty lady from Oklahoma configured it and set it up and showed me all about it. In fairness to O2, I bought another iphone for daughter no.3 who was out of contract this weekend in Maidstone and they’re trying very hard to copy the Apple model. Much better, but no emotion.

So you get I’m an Apple fan now? Thoroughly

You get I’m a Vodafone, O2, PC World, Dell ‘neutral’. You get I’m a Microsoft ‘detractor’ -  or rather a Windows detractor. in fact I like Microsoft – they have great people, great ethos – just a lousy product that doesn’t work and they forgot the user interface was a key asset.

You can probably guess my 1-10 Netpromoter scores. Yes, a 9 for Apple and 3 or 4 for the others, I bet I can guess the companies’ Netpromoter scores, without knowing them.

But wait, it’s not that simple. I bet you can’t guess how many problems Ive had with the Mac and the iphone. Just as many as I had with the Dell and more than with my old phone. In fact the Mac wont sync with the mail server so I can’t use it fully. I can only get my old email history across if I give them both my machines for 48 hours. It turns out the solution is a mod to the operating system in September called, wait for it….. snow leopard! The bluetooth worked but now it doesn’t and the internet link option to the Mac has, impossibly, disappeared from the iphone. The gurus in store don’t know everything so refer to the c2c site (which is good) and although the call centre answers the phone, it’s very average.

Yet I’m still a raving fan – why? As a consumer, I haven’t worked it out.  But as a professional what I know is it’s crucial to understand the calibration of the drivers of netpromoter scores. Brand, price, product, service relative to segment. These are all elements of the ‘customer experience’ that are being scored. And what drives each element in detail is relevant if one wants to change the promotional activity by customers on customers. And this is a really interesting example.

An example, other companies cannot simply copy parts of, without understanding the whole. The Apple experience design.

So combining my consumer and professional hats, here are a few thoughts on why I’m an actual promoter despite what has happened

1. Brand
I was pretty neutral about the brand. Loved how my classic ipod made my music accessible, loved the New York store where I bought it ( blogged Aug 07). Loved the London store on the odd occasion I’d been in professionally examining. But really, was I a geek or a media person or a designer…..not as cool as that I’m afraid.

2. Price
Had looked before and decided it was very expensive compared to laptops, despite what fans said. Would have to buy more MS software on top because at work we only have licences for PCS.

3. Product
Yes they looked sexy, but once I’d played with the iTouch, the iPhone Mac Air I was wowed. This is what did it in conjunction with parts of the other factors. The swish of your fingers to do things….. Dont ask me why. Let me try harder to look:
a.  It’s very thin and very light – practicality. And the power lead is very light with light cable too so the total effect is a bag you don’t have to hump around.
b. Because there’s no moving hard drive, there’s v little heat to cool, so no fans, less power consumption and so endless battery – 7 hours showing at the moment.
c. Switching it on and off. It takes less than 2 secs to sleep and 1 second to be available when you open the lid. I just timed it mid sentence! This changes stuff. You can look up stuff on internet whenever you want. You can work on a tube. You can do the little things when you think of them, rather than putting them on a bit of paper.
d. The design is fab. The finish and surfaces are so great, the tiny magnetic power connector, the closing lid to the ports. The way the mouse pad feels
e. The touch functionaility. If I tap once, twice, three times, different things happen. I f I tap or swipe with two fingers. If I swipe up or down or across with four fingers, everything on screen whoooshes around so I can see them. If I press f8, I can see my 4 spaces – I have four screens to put different projects in so my desktop is huge. And the most basic thing, the keys are lovely.
f. The applications stay open when you ‘close’ them so they’re back in a jiff if you need them
g. The compatibility so far has been very high for files brought across or sent- the key thing I checked with other ‘promoters’ – Mac users. In fact, all bar one, all users were promoters.
h. The functionality of the core programmes is great and actually only took a few hours of playing with every function to learn. Having been in ‘confused’ mode with MS2007 must have helped. I would certainly have found it harder had I still been using the 2003 formats I know so well. Its certainly not perfect with about 3 controls needed to switch a bullet point off and on. I struggle to control the presentations full screen. Even when I use my iPhone as a remote control – so cool! But I bet there’s a control somewhere I haven’t learned yet.
i. Most of all, it just doesn’t stall, crash, or need a reboot. I have managed  to fox the USB port a couple of times by extracting without ejecting!
So yes the product itself is a big bit of my promoter score.

4. The service – design first and then experience
The key element of design has been putting the face to face retail experience at the heart of things. And recognising that face to face retail experience is drab to non existent in most places, or posh and snotty in others. Either way it puts you off. Retail seems to be at the heart of getting the brand passion across. It starts in the store design and completes by having  more than enough people all the time. All the stores I’ve visited are fully staffed with enthusiasts. People who really love Apple products and love working for Apple. You get approached for help in most stores, and even when its busy you can get help. The genius bar is available to book on line and get lessons or support as you wish. Just going back to the store, or different stores, a few times, you start to feel part of it.  When geniuses consult each other for help you feel part of the conversation. You learn how to get the most out of the Mac and iPhone and as a result you engage emotionally with it. The c2c site seems to be at the heart of what geniuses and the web support is about – again its being part of something. Less said about the call centres in comparison, it feels like a.n.other company.

The service experience is challenging. I’ve always seen that resolution is the the top driver of satisfaction, followed by helpful, knowledgeable staff. In this case I still lack a lot of resolution for certain things but haven’t (yet) become dissatisfied. I can’t yet give away my Dell until I see if Snow leopard stops my exchange sync. Check back in Septemeber and see….

Meanwhile, I’ll start to plot more scientifically the drivers tree for netpromotion.

Get in touch, if you want to share your thoughts on how Apple’s netpromotion works and how you’re calibrating spend against netpromotion, emotional engagement and the design of the experience.

Apple, Dell, O2, customer experience, netpromoter, vodafone | 2 Comments

measurement, netpromoter | No Comments