Net Promoter News: No alarm for SF Fire at 79, Ambassador spoils us at 70, Bank Montreal trouve 39. Steamboat chairlifts 82

Net Promoter News 9 June 2010

San Francisco Fire Credit Union hits 79

Grow your Net Promoter Score, reports the CreditUnions.com,  and see an increase in new business. According to the informative article “The Successful Near $0 External Marketing Budget” San Francisco Fire have have tracked Net Promoter Score since 2004, and now bases all staff incentives on the score. With “…focus on the member [the SF Fire] creates word of mouth,” says CEO Diana Dykstra. A useful table shows the link between rising Net Promoter Score and gross new member growth. In 2009, NPS climbed to 79, with new members rising to 14%. And with not a dime unwisely spent on marketing.

 

 

 

 

Wall Street News – NPS in the K10s

Ambassadors Group (NASDAQ: EPAX) Q1 2010 Earnings Call

Peg Thomas, President of student-tripster Ambassadors Group confirmed on the Q1 2010 call “our Net Promoter scores today are at 70%, in comparison to a score of 62% at the end of 2009. Source: Seeking Alpha

Intuit (INTU) Q3 2010 Earnings Call May 20, 2010

Bookkeeping softer Intuit won’t go into NPS details, but on the Q3-2010 earnings call Brad Smith, CEO shows confidence that analysts know about NPS:  “…continued improvement in our product and our continued execution in terms of our online marketing capabilities are showing up in terms of improved net promoter scores. And as you know, net promoter scores are a pretty good indication of which way retention is going to go.” CFO Williams added “Revenue per customer exceeded last year’s level, driven by fewer promotional discounts on QuickBooks and a better product experience as indicated by improved net promoter scores.” SeekingAlpha

SAVVIS (SVVS) – Q1 2010 Earnings Call

CEO James Ousley of server polishers Savvis pulls out NPS (but no numbers): “we continue to see the results of our efforts in client care outreach. This is reflected in our improving Net Promoter Score rankings.” Freiberg adds “[With Net Promoter] you’re reducing your churn, you’re increasing the stickiness of what you have and the ability to put more than one product into a customer, really for us, drives better margins because a lot of the value-added services may not necessarily take additional square-feet space in a data center.” SeekingAlpha

Franklin Covey, Co. (FC) F2Q10 Earnings Call

Robert Whitman of trainola Franklin Covey was proud of “very high net promoter score from our customers in the customer loyalty practice” (although that is the one place you would expect to find a high NPS – Ed). SeekingAlpha

BMO Financial Group / Bank of Montreal Q2 2010

Reported in the Canadian BMO FinGroup earnings press release: “Our continued focus on the customer experience is reflected in our high loyalty scores. Our retail net promoter score was 39 for the second quarter of 2010, compared with 40 in the first quarter. Our retail net promoter score remains very strong compared to the scores of our major competitors.” MarketWire

 

Net Promoter in the News

QVC with NPS Asker

Gina Deeble from UK home shoppery QVC discussed NPS at Gartner CRM Summit UK stating “75 percent of QVC’s customers would recommend” with around 100,000 reviews a year.  Using NPS and reviews  helped QVC find issues they would not have known about – product examples include an ice cream maker that initially sold well,  but, in fact, the product was so bad “it was hurting QVC’s brand reputation,” so quickly discontinued selling the product, and canceled future orders. Some good tips on how QVC communicated to customers, and worth registering to read. 1to1Media

In brief

Thank you Quantix, a UK based server polisher for telling us you “have been given” Net Promoter of 34″ which is “miles ahead of industry standards”. Congratulations, but some more detail would have been helpful. Self Puff, RemedialMathPR

SatMetrix phones it in with Hoffman: From Tom Hoffman’s blog – Deborah Eastman, Chief Marketing Officer at Satmetrix, discusses how NPS has evolved and how companies are applying it to improve the customer experience (podcast) – 1to1media

IMD, leading executive teachery and MBAmonger adopts NPS: Jim Pulcrano, IMD executive director says “We still need to make more effort in our post-programme work with participants and companies, [...] and [with] all of our improvements efforts, I believe our efforts with NPS (Net Promoter Scores) will help us immensely.” GenevaLunch

Fast Company: NPS is a silver bullet: “There’s really only one way–to get as close to the paying customer as humanly possible. If there’s a silver bullet, it’s the Net Promoter Score–a research metric, but a breathtakingly intuitive one.” FastCompany

NPS helps career prospects: Seen on the job boards – Better World Books, the “online bookstore with a soul,” is seeking a Chief Operating Officer to help us change the world through a new form of capitalism focused on people, planet and profit. [...] Actual experience of driving and implementing a NPS (Net Promoter Score) culture a real plus.” Send in your CVs here.

Steamboat Ski area surveyed 3,000 skiers to gauge net promoter score of 82 percent. The spokesmen said Steamboat had a Net Promoter score of 80 percent in 2008-09 and 79 percent in 2007-08. Source: SteamboatPilot

And finally, Portland Development Corporation undertook a Net Promoter asker among the city’s tech community, which prompted the headline of the year: “PDC survey suggests software developers like Portland, but there’s room for improvement”. But not all the askees were happy, not least with the methodology: “they asked multiple choice questions which potentially had answers other than the options presented on the list, which caused me to answer questions in a false manner” complained one. The PDC boss summed up the result rather glumly: “We may have to take a bit more of a hands-off approach”. OregonLive

Net Promoter News: Centrica +3, 10Ks from eBay, Nokia, HomeDepot – plus FaceBook stuff, Sony NPS-Man, Kamp skore

Net Promoter News 3 June 2010

Centrica supply Net Promoter Dashboard

Centrica (the Company Formerly Known as British Gas) come with plenty of customer experience baggage. To their great credit, they are reporting their Net Promoter progress by publishing on their site a chart and downloadable numbers. They also list goals: “British Gas’ NPS at the end of 2009 was -2, placing us equal first in the league table of major UK energy providers with three other suppliers. Our target for 2010 will be to increase this score to +3.” An example of transparency that we look forward to seeing more of. Source

Zuckerberg: Privacy down, NPS up!

Facebook’s privacy controls have been heavily criticized recently, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg is confident users care less about sharing data, more about possible subscription fees. And he knows this because he tracks what he calls “a special metric”, which most others call Net Promoter Score. “We’ve seen no meaningful change on the stats on any of that stuff,” which is how he refers to people quitting the ‘Book.

“Whenever we make a change, the net promoter score always goes down. But it will usually recover to a higher place than it was at before,” he continued. “So when we started rolling out these changes after f8, our net promoter score went down. And we thought it was because of the privacy issues. But what we found was that it actually went down because we made changes to our news feed…” Interesting reveal there – we would dearly like to see some more stats on how they are surveying people. And whether they gave permission. Maybe its not just hubris though, as yesterdays “Quit Facebook Day” apparently was a flop, and did not result in a significant amount of “that stuff”. VentureBeat and Forbes

Sony’s NPS-Man

At a recent conference, Sony Canada opened up about their Net Promoter journey. Excellent tips from Wayne Ground, CIO of the Canadian division, explaining how it was not initially driven by executives, but after getting daily reports, the president was quickly on board. Customers are invited to complete online surveys on call center interactions, website visits and retail store visits. They have sent more than 100,000 surveys with a response rate of 23%.

All detractors gets a follow-up contact from customer support. Promoters also receive a follow-up — a coupon for future Sony Canada purchases. The promoters who receive coupons tend to use them, and sales transactions with those customers are 40% higher than the average purchase.

Additionally, the company started to capture email addresses at the in-store locations. Once in-store managers and sales reps realized they were being evaluated, they caught on to the program pretty quickly, Ground said. The follow-up contacts have really made a difference: “When we phone back the day after they send in a survey, customers are blown away,” Ground said. “They can’t believe someone actually read it.” Source: – SearchCRM.com

Sage grows Net Promoter

Sue Swenson – CEO of Sage North America opened Sage Insights ’10, and revealed how it is “Maximizing existing assets“. Sage has climbed 10 points in its Net Promoter score, which quantifies customers’ “willingness to recommend to others.” It’s also boosted renewal rates from 90 percent up to 97 percent. Customer value comes from not just product functionality, EVP marketer Palsule said, it comes from how easy Sage is to do business with. Source DestinationCRM

 

Phones 4U Pay on NPS. Probably.

Mobile News reports on the fiendishly complex compensation scheme from High Street SIMmery Phones 4U. The scheme has so many “ifs” and “buts” it takes four paragraphs to summarise. NPS excerpt: “Phones 4U sales consultants will now have their full commission entitlement paid out if the store hits a Net Promoter Score of 37.5. Previously, stores had to achieve a score of 35 for consultants to receive full commission.” Mobile News

 

Temkin on Take-Up.

Bruce Temkin of Temkin Group blogs about how executives are using NPS: 400 people took their recent survey. Key numbers: 43% are using Net Promoter Score (NPS), and 65% of those people think that it has had a positive impact on their company. Temkin

 

Wall Street News – Our regular review of the 10-Ks

eBay Inc. (EBAY) – Q1 2010 Earnings Call

Chief Online Gavel Swinger John J. Donahoe called out how eBay is “…becoming a more customer focused company. We are driving improvements to our user experience and we are measuring our success with three customer oriented metrics; net promoter score, velocity and market share. I have tied a portion of our leadership compensation to customer satisfaction.” SeekingAlpha

But the public knew this already, as eBay’s top goals for 2010 were revealed in a tweet by their corporate blogger, Richard Brewer Hay. Having seen a poster in a stair well in San Jose he posted an image of it on yfrog. The goals include 1) Increase eBay’s Net Promoter score by 10 percentage points. Source Tamebay

 

Nokia Corporation (NOK) – Q1 2010 Earnings Call

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo talked NPS on the call, referring to C3 with Ovi Mail: “Since January there have been 10 million downloads [...] Consumer engagement is very high. In addition, feedback on the user experience has been very good with a double-digit positive net promoter score since we launched.” SeekingAlpha

In contrast Parks Associates research of the basic phone market called out some bad news for Nokia. Their Consumer Decision Process research of CE product buyers showed Nokia, once the unequaled leader of the U.S. mobile phone market, last year fell to the bottom of the list of brands of basic mobile phones that people would recommend, as measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Basic Cell Phones by Brand, Q3 2009:

• Samsung 32%
• Motorola 26%
• Basic Cell Phones 21%
• LG 18%
• Nokia 7%

Parks Associates

 

 

 

The Home Depot, Inc. (HD) Q1-2010 Earnings Call

Frank Blake, boss of DIY shedder Home Depot explained on Q1-2010 call called out customer service as key to success: “Last year, […] we re-trained every associate in the company on our customer service expectations. […] We’ve seen consistent improvement in our net promoter score […] in the first quarter, 600 basis points over last year, even as our transactions increased 4.2%.”

Analyst William Truelove from UBS is one of the few bankers we have seen ask about customer service (so for that he gets our “Analyst of the Week” prize) and quizzed EVP Ellison further “…Did you have any kind of service metrics from the customers?”. Marvin Ellison shoots back “Frank talked about the net promoter score […] We get roughly 100,000 customer surveys per week that we look at […] trying to make sure that we have incremental improvement week over week, month over month.” SeekingAlpha

From another source we learn that Home Depot net promoter score (a score measuring customer loyalty) is almost 70%, an improvement of 800bps in the past year, (Shareholder Meeting 20 May 2010)

 

Hertz Global Holdings, Inc. (HTZ) – Q1 2010 Earnings Call

Mark Frissora, Hertz CEO called an increase of nearly 8 points in NPS “Our net promoter score rose 790 basis points in the US or 18%, reflecting the appeal of a newer fleet and the addition of popular new car classes.” We estimated Hertz NPS at around mid 50s last year (http://customergauge.com/2009/02/net-promoter-news-hertz-drives-26-in-europe/) so that may put them in the 60s – firmly in the Cadillac class. SeekingAlpha

 

Other news:

BMW forecourter up 66%

UK BMW seller Vines reports a 66% year-on-year increase in its Net Promoter Score results, as computed by Mondial. Vines BMW (or Mondial) say they have gained insight into its customer satisfaction levels, and using this to predict future business growth. Note of caution: the math is provided by a PR company, and based on that, it’s unclear if that’s and impressive 66 NPS points up (impressive only because it must have been a low base) or a 66% increase, i.e. 10 to 16, (equally non-impressive). Still, they pepper the text with superlatives, “massive” and “huge” so that must be good then. Source

 

Kampground Skore

The fantastically named RV Daily Report tells us that Kampgrounds of America has added yet another guest feedback service for its franchise owners to help them improve service and drive camper nights through increased referrals, based on Net Promoter Score. KOA’s new on-line camper feedback survey offer KOA owners near-instant feedback from their guests following their stays – so far 9,200 surveys have been completed by the campers. RV Daily Report