I recently undertook the Net Promoter Score (NPS) certification course, the online version offered by Satmetrix. Overall, quite a good experience and the knowledge will come in handy as we work with our clients’ relationship strategies.

There is much that is ‘traditional’ CRM in the NPS program methodology (with no negative connotations implied), so my years at Peppers and Rogers Group on projects where we struggled to make companies more ‘customer-centric’ were relevant. In fact the organisational change processes outlined are very similar to the framework we built (way back in the early 2000’s) and still use for this type of project – it was originally borrowed from McKinsey and others (in my case) I think.

To successfully change the way an organisation looks after and thinks about its customers requires work. This work sets out to achieve;

1. Front line staff teams that understand the rationale behind a customer-focus and the impact it has on their daily work. This includes establishing a single view of customers, i.e. a customer segmentation and treatment plans that are useful in guiding staff to treat different customers differently (and appropriately). Reichheld says basically the same thing when he says that if your segmentation framework does not explain the difference between your Detractors and your Promoters it is not useful for you.
2. Staff that have the skills required to provide the new improved customer experience.
3. A remuneration system that unambiguously rewards the new, desired behaviour by staff, not the old
4. A management team that publicly demonstrates commitment to the changes – asks about customers first and regularly.

CRM strategy projects tended to revolve around the definition and then implementation of these deceptively simple things. Deceptive because they sound simple, but several of my projects took better than 12 months, some are still effectively going 6 years later (and not because I am a slow worker). Keeping project teams focussed for these long periods, with a lack of short term leading indicators is just plain hard.

Relationship marketing generically uses customer loyalty, value, equity and profit as measures of success, correctly so, but many of these dials take a long time to move. Making them difficult metrics, especially in the impatient environment of quarterly reporting and short-tenure CEOs.

The NPS folks make a distinction between top-down and bottom-up implementation. Top-down measures customer satisfaction with the overall relationship, bottom-up measures customer satisfaction with the particular transaction, or interaction.

Top-down does not strike me as being very different from traditional measures of customer satisfaction with a brand.

In bottom-up is the magic. Bottom-up involves mapping the customer transactional experience, identifying the moments-of-truth in that experience, then asking the NPS recommend question and ‘why?’ of enough customers at that moment of truth to get an indication of what is happening in the process. Short and sharp. As scores vary with transaction variables you can do a root cause analysis (guided by the customer verbatim responses) to determine what best to change to improve the customer experience – and therefore likelihood to recommend.

Today.

And measure how you are doing tomorrow.

The difference this regular and immediate measurement of customer reaction makes to work-force transformation projects is significant. It makes them action oriented, execution projects for customer facing staff, not consult-speak heavy management fads that will pass as long as we keep our heads down and ignore them…. especially if closing the loop requires key staff to talk with unhappy and happy customers personally and often.

Exciting.

My only, presumptuous, suggestion; the Customer Engagement Management industry has a body of tools available that could be productively integrated into bottom-up NPS. These include moment mapping, peak-end experience design and touch point mapping…. Satmetrix talk about a ‘customer corridor’ in describing the over-time interactions customers have with you, this corridor is already a consulting industry in its own right; borrow from it.