How does Apple produce advocates like this? Is it Steve Jobs & leadership, clear mission & great culture, amazing product & service? All of the above I'm sure. What is not well known in the Apple story is the role of customer feedback.
 

The enormous amount of customer feedback data generated by Net Promoter ¹ (Closed-Loop Feedback, Customer Insight & Action, Voice of the Customer etc) programs generates a very interesting challenge: "how do you separate out the signal from the noise?"

So-called Voice of the Customer programs have become a hot topic. According to our friends at Communispace, search results from Amazon.com reveal more than ten times the amount of material about voice of the customer than was available fifteen years ago. In 1993, there were thirty three books published on the voice of the customer; since the new millennium there have been on average thirty-three books a month published on the same topic.

Like a lot of apparently good ideas, the 'devil is in the detail' with Net Promoter Programs...

The good news, however, is that there is a developing body of public NPS knowledge and to some degree an "open source" approach fostered by the originators of the Net Promoter concept - Frederich Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix Inc. The Satmetrix NPS certification course attended recently by this student is one example of this.

An explosive mix of social media, online communities, text analytics & visualisation technologies together with Net Promoter Score (NPS) programs is presenting marketers with the opportunity to deliver on the type of Customer Relationship Management vision promised 10-15 years ago. In my humble opinion of course... but as practitioners, we are now seeing some of the more innovative companies closing in on this position.
 

At the risk of repeating myself, consider the following statements:

1. Never before have brands had so much data about their customers or capabilities to analyse this data
2. Never before have we had customers so willing to interact with brands and each other online (social media, user generated content)
3. Yet, we are the least connected that we will ever be...

The great challenge for contemporary marketing is summed up very nicely in Rethinking Marketing (Harvard Business Review, Jan 2010):

'Never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them and tailoring their offerings accordingly.

And never before have customers expected to interact so deeply with companies, and each other, to shape the products and services they use.'

Here we are in the run-up to Christmas and the New Year, so I thought I would jot down the things that I found amusing, noteworthy or just plain strange about the business we are in for the past year. A personal list and personal opinions...
 

It looks like we may be involved in a 'bottom-up' NPS project shortly and this has set me to refreshing my working knowledge of Net Promoter Scores, customer satisfaction measurement and Customer Experience Management (CEM).

'Bottom-up NPS'?