New Headquarters for CustomerGauge/Directness
We are pleased to announce that due to expansion CustomerGauge/Directness has today moved to a new larger headquarters. We are now based in the architecturally famous Silodam complex in Amsterdam, a short walk from the Central Station. Our new address is:
Silodam 253
Amsterdam 1013 AS
Netherlands
We hope to welcome you to our new offices soon.
Automatic Post-Sales Marketing for e-Commerce – Webinar
How automatic surveying can be used to increase customer loyalty and help grow online sales.
Boosting revenue from existing customers costs a fraction of the money spent on SEO and customer acquisition, yet many companies have not yet implemented automatic “Post Sales Marketing” (PSM*) to understand customer sentiment. With this webinar, you can learn how top e-commerce companies like eBay, Zappos, Philips and Sony are using loyalty measurement based on the industry standard Net Promoter® Score methodology to survey every customer transaction. This helps them continually improve service, and retain more customers.
In this 30-minute presentation, Adam Dorrell, CEO of CustomerGauge and former Director of Sony’s online store SonyStyle Europe, will explain how companies can implement PSM. Companies can:
- Automatically survey every customer
- Use the industry-standard Net Promoter Score methodology to learn from customers
- Score what works best, and change your business in almost realtime
- Segment out VIP customers
- Save money on acquisition and grow revenue from existing customers
- Reduce returns and dissatisfaction
- Real life examples showing how to grw revenue from retention customers by 25%+ a year.
- Demonstrate a “Marketing Robot” that can identify automatically contact your customer “Promoters” to boost sales
Adam will give resources to help ecommerce companies of any size benefit from this methodology. He will show practical solutions from the no-cost spreadsheet solution, as well as the professional application CustomerGauge which is designed to be integrated into the major e-commerce systems, including DigitalRiver, SAP etc.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009.
Starting time: 17.00 Europe Summer Time (Amsterdam, GMT+02:00), 16.00 London, 11.00 AM New York
Duration about 30 minutes. Free of charge.
*Post Sales Marketing: Understanding and satisfying needs and wants of existing customers after a purchase
Net Promoter News: Standardising the Net Promoter Score Reporting Format (SNPS.09)
It took nearly 500 years for accountants to establish global standards for reporting financial information. Luca Pacioli invented double entry book-keeping in 1494, but it was not until the mid 1960s that standards of reporting came into the mainstream. The Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) is a non-financial metric that was created by Fred Reichheld in 2003, and is rapidly becoming the industry standard of reporting customer loyalty. Today we are publishing a proposal to help companies standardise on reporting NPS, aiming to shorten adoption of standards (by some hundreds of years). We call it “Standardised Net Promoter Score reporting format” or “SNPS.09” for short.
Each week, we report on companies who publish their Net Promoter Scores in press releases and earnings reports. NPS is an open standard but like any metric needs to have the details documented, and it is usually not clear how the companies arrived at the score. It seems that there is no established standard to help companies report their methodology. We’d like to continue to encourage the publishing of the metric, and so have created a reporting framework, available for anyone to use. Download the presentation in PDF format here.
Transparency is key.
In May 2009 we published an article “Who Surveys the Surveyors?” which first described the situation, and proposed some solutions. Learning from comments, and taking other industry input we have compiled this presentation to help companies with reporting.
The guidelines of the IASB framework for reporting financial statements are to show Understandability, Relevance, Reliability and Comparability, which we believe can be used for non-financial metrics like the Net Promoter Score. This first SNPS.09 format is aimed at showing how internally calculated numbers can be properly formatted. Later versions may include surveys including competitive companies, and externally calculated numbers.
We believe there is scope for auditing results, which may be a role for accounting firms, or consultancies like Bain. This will help provide transparency and rigour to help investors and customers better understand the value of Net Promoter.
We list the elements to be included, and show an example usage:
- “Acme Company are pleased to announce our most recent Net Promoter Score surveys and are delighted to report an increase of 2 points to 37 (SNPS-09) over same period last year”
- “We asked ‘Based on your recent purchase would you recommend Acme company to a friend or relative?’”
- “Scale used was standard Net Promoter 0 – 10.”
- “We surveyed actual customers on our online shop”
- “An email was sent to all customers after their store transaction 7 days after purchase inviting them to take the web-based survey”
- “The score is the average of the UK, DE and FR countries”
- “The survey is continuous. The score stated was gathered from transactions between 1 April – 30 June 2009. Score is compared to same period in 2008”
- “More than 1000 customer transactions were surveyed in UK, DE and FR”
- “More than 200 customers responded (20%+)”
- “The Net Promoter Score is calculated at 37 (last year 35)”
Download PDF presentation here (2.8Mb).
Future’s so bright…
With this proposal, we don’t mean to discourage anyone publishing Net Promoter Scores. The information should be readily available from the survey owner – we are simply helping with a framework (or a checklist) for information to be included. We invite you to use it and give feedback on how you implement SNPS.09.
Our five years of Net Promoter experience have given us the confidence to propose an industry reporting standard, but it is only a start. A standard has to evolve with user input. We welcome comments and proposals, and will keep developing the standard in an open way.
Please contribute your views to help us improve.
Net Promoter News: HomeDepot build to 63, Secrets of Sony, Retail Top-Tips: Be Secure or score -62
Home Depot’s CEO Frank Blake gives NPS® shout-out on on the Q2 earnster: “Net promoter score has improved approximately 1,000 basis points year over year and is now at 62.7%. It’s particularly significant for us that our scores went up in the second quarter versus the first quarter since frequently there can be a deterioration of performance as foot traffic increases”. Source: SeekingAlpha
Secrets of Sony from NPS “Walked-Man”… From an Exec on Net Promoter® in CE industry – Dan Wiersma, just-retired Senior Vice President for Consumer Service at Sony Electronics talked NPS -”My Proudest Moment”.
Wiersma detailed how they used Net Promoter methodology and loyalty scores improved in every sector of the organization from 2006. “Not only for service, but for all of the consumer business in the organization, and people around the world in other regions and corporate areas started paying attention to the methodology and started adopting it.”
He added how NPS had helped Sony: “I think we proved it, at least in one product area within the company made significant progress by using our data as well as some of their own to really focus on some of the customers and solve some real customer issues at the sales, marketing, out of the box, service experience level. It definitely panned out. I think companies may go wrong as not thinking of service as a significant part of the data repository for customer information and use it to help them improve their business.”
(Ed: Small note of personal pride here – Adam Dorrell implemented Net Promoter Score in Sony Style division in March 2004 – predating Wiersma by two years). Article source: Customers 1st
Update: Sony have today announced a new logo “make dot believe” – I kid you not. What were those marketing guys smoking? Sell any remaining shares now… More here
Retailers: understand loyalty metrics or go broke! In a Viz! Top-Tips type article, SC Magazine shows connection between security and loyalty and urges Retailers to look at loyalty metrics to understand failings in security and customer perception. But some interesting stats from a previously reported YouGov Net Promoter Score paneller which discovered customer loss could cost brands in banking, insurance, gaming, retail and mobile a total of over £3.3 billion.
Average NPS for UK top retail brands was +25. However, when brands don’t show their security credentials, the score dips to -52. Furthermore, if a brand tries to levy a £10 charge for additional online security, the score plummets to -62.
Kudos for Verisign for scoring PR points by making an NPS and security link. Source: SC Magazine
That’s when good Neighbours become good friends… The Aussie Banks are in NPS News again – it seems a month can’t go by with out some new competing Net Promoter Survey for Australian banks (European and US banks: take note, it’ll be your turn soon). This time, “Bank Retail Customers Happier than Business [customers]” spouts The Sheet reporting on latest Nielsen nums. Net Promoter numbers dem how that consumers love current low rates, but business clients can’t get overdrafts. Hard to get the real NPS numbers as they mention Customer Sat but they look similar to NPS from earlier this year. Poor Adelaide Bank is now bumping along the bottom of the table… Source: The Sheet
Net Promoter News Snippets…
Sweet Score Alabama: In the Orange Beach, AL area on 8-10 Oct? Check out the NAFA Fleet Management’s 4th Annual Southern Regional Conference, where Net Promoter – Matthew Betz, Veep Sales for AmeriFleet Transportation will tell-all on setting up Net Promoter Score to determine how many customers would recommend service to a peer. Source: Announcement
NPS one of Top Ten Business Best Practices. Shaun Smith, smith+co puts Net Promoter at number nine in laundry list of ten sensible ideas to grow customer value. Money quote “…what is important is to reward the KPIs that you want to move.”. Source: CustomerThink
FMCG guy: Is Loyalty Dead? Mike Linton, formerly of sudser P+G says customers are less loyal… rounds up nice op-ed with push on NPS. Source Forbes.com
Editorial: NPS Twilight Zone:
Ahhh Ambassador, you spoil us with your score… Education travel company People to People Ambassador Programs anounced NPS of 60.8 in self-puffer here. Mid-west leasing minnow Capital Systems report 63 in their self-puffer here. But is that a Net Promoter Score?
We have covered this before – I’m calling this the NPS Twilight Zone. PR bunnies are still reporting numbers with no context – NPS scores which are meaningless and allow an easy target for the NPS flat-earthers who want to criticise Net Promoter. We’ll cover this more in a future post, and give some guidance to reporting Net Promoter. In the meantime, please don’t promote an NPS score unless you state at least how many people answered, when you took it and what you asked them. Hiding it in the unsexy small print is fine, but please, include the details!
