Case study: W. & L. Jordan GmbH floors customer service with Net Promoter

How a business that already had customer-focused product development embedded in its DNA used Net Promoter Score® to enhance its service, improve customer happiness, and increase revenue.

W. & L. Jordan GmbH is a German third generation family-owned flooring and home textile wholesaler that sells to small-medium sized businesses. Its consistent focus on the customer has seen it expand to more than 50 stores across Germany, Austria, and France.

Prior to 2011, the business ran occasional 10-20 question customer satisfaction surveys, which helped it to keep a finger on the pulse of customer needs. But in 2011, the business implemented the first of its now-annual Net Promoter surveys, in collaboration with CustomerGauge partner j/s/w Consulting and using the CustomerGauge platform.

The Net Promoter surveys returned 35-40% response rates (significantly higher than its previous surveys), and revealed to the business new information on how it can improve its customer satisfaction.

With the CustomerGauge system’s comprehensive suite of automatic reporting tools, the organisation has implemented a series of steps that have created a self-propelling cycle of customer service improvement. Store managers are given the information to strengthen individual customer relationships and its Net Promoter team is able to track how overall, regional, and store-level customer service is evolving.

Said Head of Marketing Norman Virks: “For us, a real benefit of using Net Promoter is how it has armed our store managers with the knowledge to find out whether a customer’s issue is a regular occurrence or an isolated incident.”

Its Net Promoter Score has improved from +29 to +38, with a corresponding improvement in business performance.

The organisation is now running its third survey flight, and eagerly looking forward to see how its results compare to previous years and uncover the information that will drive its customer experience to a new level.

Click here or on the thumbnail to find out how Jordan implemented its Net Promoter survey.

Net Promoter News: Hubspot’s interview with Net Promoter’s creator, A Twitter NPS survey, Amex swipes employee churn

Hubspot interviews Fred Reichheld, Hubspot employee runs NPS survey on Twitter handle

This week, marketing software biz Hubspot’s CMO Mike Volpe interviewed Fred Reichheld, the creator of Net Promoter, on his thoughts on the system’s relevance for B2B v B2c, and whether it should be a metric that marketing cares about. His answer was unequivocal:

“Most marketers recognize how relevant NPS can make their function. It links their world to the world of the CFO and finance — because it is possible to calculate the economic value of a promoter, passive, or detractor in each customer segment,” he said.

In related news, Hubspot says it is a “big follower” of Net Promoter – and the organisation is not kidding. Recently a Hubspot ecommerce expert, Sam Mallikarjunan, ran a DIY Net Promoter survey to find out how many of his 70,000+ Twitter followers would recommend following him.

Over Twitter he told CustomerGauge that his Twitter handle recorded an NPS of +18. It’s an entertaining handle to follow – Sam identifies himself as being here to  “smoke cigars, drink scotch & kick ass” – and has a very engaged follower base, so the score is perhaps a little lower than one may expect. But according to survey feedback, people want to see more questions and answers (interaction) rather than links.

If you are interested in following a highly engaged expert on ecommerce, and inbound marketing, we have no problem “recommending” @Mallikarjunan as an account to follow.

And if you would like to learn more about how marketers can use Net Promoter, click here to read the full interview with Fred Reichheld.

Amex swipes employee churn with Net Promoter

Net Promoter buffs may know that American Express implemented a Net Promoter system way back in 2006, and real tragics may even be aware that the company sees a 10% to 15% increase in spending and four to five times increased retention from its Promoters.

But what is less well known is the positive benefits the organisation is seeing on employee retention and engagement. Notes Jim Bush, executive veep (world service), the organisation compensates according to two outcomes: Customer satisfaction, and operating margin. This approach has helped drive down employee turnover and helped the organisation contain costs associated with service operations.

Not coincidentally, according to the Financial Times, “As of May 2013, the consensus forecast among 26 polled investment analysts covering American Express Company advises that the company will continue to outperform the market. This has been the consensus forecast since 2009.” Business Standard

In brief

• According to a review of the latest Nokia Lumia, “owners who had opted for the previous striking red and yellow models rated the device more highly [with Net Promoter] than those who had chosen plainer colours.” The Register
• Financial tech biz Direct Capital has announced that its NPS has reached +65, versus “a financial industry average of +23.” The announcement is interesting because the high NPS correlates with a 2012, and is in the top five independent vendor finance company in overall organic growth, according to Monitor. Press release
• IT Services biz OneNeck® has announced its Application Management Division has recorded an NPS of 79, based on a recent DIY Net Promoter survey. Press release

 

Fallstudie: Korrosion bekämpfen – Kundenservice optimieren

Note: This case study for Dörken MKS Systems is the second in a series of German-language cases. For the English version, click here: Dörken MKS Systems: How a technically focused business started a systematic approach to Net Promoter with CustomerGauge

Dies ist die zweite, in einer Serie von deutschsprachigen CustomerGauge Fallstudien.

Klicken Sie hier um die erste Fallstudie zu lesen:
Melitta: Kaffee und Kundenservice – eine erstklassige Mischung?

Dörken MKS Systeme produziert und konfiguriert unter dem Markennamen DELTA-MKS® Korrosionsschutzsysteme für die Automobil-, Windkraft-, Bau- und Schifffahrtsindustrie. Das Net Promoter® Projekt wurde in 2011 in Kooperation mit CustomerGauge gestartet.

Das in Herdecke ansässige und Niederlassungen in den USA, Südamerika, China, Korea und Japan unterhaltende Unternehmen machte sich neben seinen Korrosionsschutzprodukten zudem einen Namen mit einem hochwertigen technischen Service und bietet darüber hinaus Produkte an, die komplexen Normen und Spezifikationen gerecht werden.

Diese Fallstudie zeigt wie das Net Promoter® Projekt mit CustomerGauge und dessen deutschem Partner j/s/w Consulting in zweistufigen Vertriebskanälen eingesetzt wurde.

Das NPS Projekt wurde eingeführt um einen neutralen Einblick in das Kundensentiment zu erhalten. Die Ergebnisse haben diese Erwartungen übertroffen, da viel nützliches Feedback gewonnen und ausgezeichnete Ergebnisse erzielt wurden. Dörken MKS, das innerhalb seiner Branche ohnehin bereits als führend im Bereich Kundenservice gilt wurde Ende 2011 als Best Professional Supplier in der Kategorie „Roh- und Halbfertigprodukte“ ausgezeichnet.

Die Dörken Projektleiterin kommentiert: „Das Echo innerhalb des Unternehmens war großartig und die Leute waren sehr neugierig darauf zu erfahren, was ihre Kunden zu sagen haben.“

Es freut uns ein technikfokussiert Unternehmen wie Dörken MKS mit hervorragendem Kundenservice zu unseren Kunden zählen zu dürfen.

Klicken Sie hier zum runterladen

Net Promoter News: Vistaprint’s repeat purchase fine print, Telstra’s cash splash for service, Volume turns up VoC in agency land

Reading the fine print in Vistaprint’s repeat purchase slowdown

According to at least one analyst, photoprinter Vistaprint is exhibiting concerning signs for the investor. Our Seeking Alpha pundit notes that the business has:

• Acknowledged its 2016 revenue and earnings targets will be difficult to reach.
• Displayed a lack of clarity regarding its short term prospects. 
• Decided it will no longer give quarterly guidance. 
• Grown very large in an industry with low barriers to entry and therefore at risk from nimble competition.

Furthermore, according to the business’s statements at its earnings call, its year-on-year repeat order growth has slowed sequentially – a red flag for customer service pundits that is often a sign of decreasing customer loyalty. Oh dear.

But according to boss Robert Keane, there is a good reason for the slowdown in repeat orders. Previously, the business has aggressively advertised and discounted its products. This was an effective tactic to drive near term repeat purchases. However, it was much less effective at nurturing truly loyal customers – which is one of the most effective ways to grown revenue.

With this in mind,  the business has improved its pricing transparency, reduced the level of discounting, and brought overall prices down in an effort to nurture more sustainable and valuable repeat purchases. One sign that this strategy is paying off is that while volume of repeat orders is down, average order value from repeat purchases are growing. Furthermore, the business has once again reiterated its “strong” Net Promoter results (without giving too much away, it must be noted).

Nimble new competitors may materialise, and no doubt there are other challenges ahead. But after reading the fine print of its earnings call, the business appears to be making an effort to nurture customer loyalty. Seeking Alpha

Telstra offers cash splash for customer service

Aussie telco Telstra has enthusiastically embraced Net Promoter, and in another move to put a renewed focus on the overall customer experience, the organisation also announced that it is offering cash bonuses to more than 2,000 resellers and 350 Telstra-branded shops to improve customer service.

While rewarding superior customer service is good in theory, in practice it depends on how feedback is collected. As noted by our Australian partner Genroe:

“While incentivizing franchisees to improve customer service can be a good idea, the program will need to be carefully constructed to prevent gaming of the system. Where payments are linked to customer feedback scores there is a risk that front line staff (and their managers at the resellers) can actively try to alter the scores that customers receive.” Genroe Sydney Morning Herald

Volume turns up Voice of Customer in agency land

CustomerGauge client Volume – a full service B2B digital and innovation agency – is one of the few agencies worldwide that uses Net Promoter to bring the voice of its customers into the organisation. Read about how the business is using the metric in a non-traditional industry at the press release or our blog post: CustomerGauge client Volume dials up Voice of Customer in agency land

In brief

• Enterprise cloud security specialists MailGuard have published a graph that compares its Net Promoter performance against recognised global names. It’s a pretty graph, but we’d gently suggest it could be more interesting if the business benchmarked itself against direct competitors in the same market. Mailguard
• Trader Joe’s ranked highest among supermarkets in the 2013 Net Promoter Industry Benchmarks. Supermarket News

Net Promoter Vacancy: CustomerGauge is hiring! Sales Manager, North America for European SaaS Vendor

A fantastic opportunity to be US Employee #1 for a fast growing Amsterdam, NL based Software-as-a-Service company.  The CustomerGauge cloud application already has many big-name international clients, including a half dozen US clients.

CustomerGauge client Volume dials up Voice of Customer in agency land

“I don’t know if anybody’s ever told you that half the time, this business comes down to ‘I don’t like that guy.’” Roger Sterling, Mad Men.

As any fan of Mad Men will know, in the agency world client-agency relationships can be unpredictable.

So one might imagine that Net Promoter® would be a popular industry metric to benchmark performance, increase retention and drive word-of-mouth buzz. After all, these are things it is being used for in a number of other industries globally.

Yet despite this potential very few agencies are using Net Promoter. And even less are doing so publicly. 

But one CustomerGauge client – a digital and innovation agency headquartered in the UK called Volume – is pioneering use of the metric in an agency setting to gather feedback from its relatively small number of B2B clients, and seeing a number of benefits as a result. 

Background

An agency that aims to be world class in everything it does, Volume maintained relatively long-lasting client relationships even prior to implementing its Net Promoter program. Due to this, the agency knew it was doing a lot of the right things.

But the agency lacked an objective way to measure the strength of these relationships, and independent evidence of what it was doing right and what it could improve on.

Surveying with CustomerGauge

Using CustomerGauge to survey customers has a number of advantages for Volume that a DIY survey lacks.

The CustomerGauge dashboard delivers real-time feedback direct to the fingertips of key decision-makers in the organisation via a Twitter-like feed, which means that the organisation is being drip-fed the information it needs to know about what it is doing right and what it can improve on.

Perhaps because of the strength of its relationships, the quality of feedback and level of engagement given by Volume’s clients is among the highest we’ve seen in terms of specific information and actionable insights. Some of Volume‘s Net Promoter survey responses are so detailed they even commend individual staff members by name for a particularly outstanding effort.

Finally, as a third party independent platform, using CustomerGauge to gather feedback ensures that the responses are collected consistently and feedback and scores measured neutrally.

Benefits of Net Promoter

The agency is seeing a number of benefits from its Net Promoter program, including:

• Authoritative, transparent, and objective feedback it can take into client reviews.
• The ability to measure the performance of all departments in the business, as opposed to client-facing roles that are more often the focus of internal surveys.
• A recognised marketing tool that the agency can take into pitches, and external evidence to support agency awards entries.
• The ability to independently verify which people to put on which accounts, and a voice in the agency’s internal recognition program, which helps to enhance people’s careers based on outside, unbiased evidence.

Challenges

The agency is seeing a number of benefits from Net Promoter, but of course embedding a Net Promoter program within the organisation does not come without challenges.

Net Promoter enthusiasts will know that once an organisation embraces the Net Promoter philosophy and makes it a part of the culture, there is little place to hide.

Now that the organisation has made Net Promoter a metric to measure its client loyalty, the organisation must continue to deliver the world-class work it is creating at the moment just to maintain its score – and improve to get a higher score. This is a challenge, but as Volume Chief Executive Chris Sykes notes, is “something our clients will no doubt be happy to hear.”

Results

Volume’s current NPS stands at about +60 – a high score for any sector but particularly impressive in the competitive creative industry.

But more important than the score, Volume’s experience shows that despite a reluctance (or lack of awareness) on the part of most industry players, agency relationships don’t need to live and die according to Roger Sterling’s cynical view.

With the right software tools and willingness to embrace the philosophy from the top of the organisation down, Net Promoter can deliver actionable feedback into the agency organisation, provide supporting information for pitches and awards entries, and give the agency an added marketing tool that is widely recognised (and used!) by client-side businesses globally.

Read the full press release: Volume turns up Voice of Customer in agency land   

Net Promoter News: Smaller retailers mobilise CX, Gamification: Coming to a contact centre near you, Sprint links higher NPS with lower churn

Fashion brands have a degree of mobile sass, says UserZoom

UX specialists at UserZoom have released research into the mobile website experience of four leading fashion retail brands – Kenneth Cole, Guess, Bebe, and the moonshine-sounding White House Black Market.

The results showed that each site has “room for improvement” in terms of the search experience. Overall White House Black Market recorded the highest Net Promoter Score, of +26.

A quick scan of the interwebz shows that White House Black Market is indeed something of an innovator in the mobile space, introducing such things as mobile fashion alerts, where “shoppers receive text messages when they pass through specific geo-fenced areas.”

Notwithstanding the fact improvements can be made, the findings also seem to correlate with a recent Wired article which suggests that smaller retailers are delivering a better customer experience than their larger counterparts, by integrating mobile to create a seamless experience across in-store and online.

Of course, we need to be careful before comparing the shopper experience of retail giants to relatively small fashion brands. For one, a Best Buy shopper looking for an iPhone will have the possibility of buying the same product from numerous online or physical store locations, whereas a shopper wanting to purchase their favourite niche clothing brand may have far less choice in terms of where they make the purchase.

Nonetheless, as retail giants such as Best Buy, Target, and Walmart have recently been reported to deliver good mobile experiences for their customers, yet continue to suffer the ill-effects of showrooming, it may be an opportunity to look to smaller rivals for inspiration on how to deliver that elusive seamless experience that will transform showroomers into shoppers and drive up customer loyalty. Digital Journal

Gamification: Coming to a contact centre near you?

Incentives and rewards change behaviour and improve effectiveness. But according to a post by Ben Werner of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, in the contact centre setting, traditional rewards and incentives do little to create an enjoyable workplace experience.

In order to drive up customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores, Werner instead suggests that contact centres should add elements of gamification to their workplace experience, such as ‘leader dashboards’ showing how many points, badges or other goals agents have reached and comparing it against their neighbours in real-time.

It sounds fun, and executed well could be a good driver of workplace culture. However, in our opinion, nothing beats a robust eNPS (employee Net Promoter) feedback system to ensure that staff become empowered stakeholders motivated to deliver exceptional service, rather than the passive mechanical voice at the end of the line that is the stereotype of the call centre.  Forbes

Assalaamu ‘aleykum: CustomerGauge client launches eNPS survey in Arabic

Speaking of eNPS surveys, CustomerGauge client the Mohammed Y. Naghi & Brothers Group has become the first CustomerGauge user to launch an eNPS survey in Arabic.  The consumer goods to foodstuffs distribution business is rolling out its survey to more than 3,000 employees across the Middle East with the platform’s eNPS (employee Net Promoter) survey tool. For full details, please see our recent blog post or the full press release.

Sprint links higher NPS with lower churn 

According to its latest earnings call, the Sprint brand of Sprint Nextel has shown sequential and year over year improvement in its NPS according to “an important third party brand study.” The company said this correlates with reduced churn rates and is a positive sign as it focuses on recapturing as many of the 1.3 million Nextel subscribers it knows will deactivate in the next quarter. Seeking Alpha

In brief

• The 2013 US Net Promoter® Benchmark Study has been released, covering Financial Services, Technology, Online Services, Telecom, Insurance, Travel and Hospitality, and Retail. USAA (+78), Apple, Netflix (+50), Amazon (+69), Kaiser (+35), and Southwest Airlines (+66) are among the businesses leading the way in their respective industries.  Press release
• OneNeck^® IT Services announces its Application Management Division has earned a Net Promoter Score of 79 based on a recent survey conducted internally. Press release
  

Neuankündigung – Deutsche Fallbeispiele jetzt Online

Note to our non German-speaking readers: This is a short announcement to let our German audience know that we have translated case studies available. Regular updates to continue soon!

CustomerGauge ist ein Kundenbefragungs-System, dass die Kundenloyalität misst. Es lässt sich einfach und problemlos implementieren und liefert wichtige Kunden Insights, die Ihrer Firma helfen, kundenorientierte Entscheidungen zu treffen. Wir helfen sowohl deutschen wie auch internationalen, marktführenden Unternehmen wie Philips, Dulux, Vodafone, Melitta, Dörken MKS Systems, und Bavaria Film um Kundenloyalität automatisiert zu messen und in Echtzeit im Web-Frontend bereit zu stellen. Damit ermöglichen wir Ihnen, Ihre Bemühungen zu priorisieren und Maßnahmen entsprechend einzuleiten.

CustomerGauge freut sich, die Veröffentlichung deutschsprachiger Fallstudien bekannt zu geben.

Melitta

Unsere erste Fallstudie ist Melitta, ein Unternehmen aus Minden, das seit 100 Jahren Haushaltsmarkenprodukte produziert. Diese Fallstudie gibt eine detaillierte Beschreibung wie dieser Hersteller, zusammen mit CustomerGauge und deren Partner j/s/w Consulting, das Net Promoter Programm für den Kundenservice eingeführt hat. Das Hauptaugenmerk liegt auf der automatisierten API Verknüpfung mit dem telefonischen Kundendienst und dem CustomerGauge System. Durch die API Verknüpfung (CustomerGauge Application Programming Interface) werden die Daten unmittelbar nach dem Kundenkontakt an CustomerGauge übermittelt und von CustomerGauge sofort versendet, was in einer Response Rate von erstaunlichen 60% mündet.

Erstergebnisse haben mit einem 50+ NPS alle Erwartungen übertroffen.

Kundendienstkoordinator Christoph Sundermeier kommentiert: „Es ist relativ leicht, die Kundenpflege so weit voranzubringen, dass die Kunden mit dem gebotenen Service zufrieden sind. Ganz anders sieht es aber aus, wenn man ein Niveau erreicht, bei dem die Kunden zu aktiven Promotern werden. Gerade deshalb freuen wir uns ganz besonders über die ersten Ergebnisse.“

Als Kaffee-Liebhaber sind wir begeistert einen Kunden zu haben, der nicht nur ausgezeichneten Kundendienst, sondern auch hervorragende Kaffeevollautomaten anbietet. Nebenbei bemerkt ist unsere Client Operations Managerin eine wahre Kaffeekennerin und empfehlt die Melitta Kaffeevollautomaten wärmstens. Das ist Lob von höchster Stelle!

Fortsetzung folgt!

Klicken Sie hier zum runterladen

Assalaamu ‘aleykum: CustomerGauge employee Net Promoter survey goes live in Arabic

In addition to global lingua francas such as Hindi, Portugese, Spanish, and Chinese, CustomerGauge is pleased to announce that Mohammed Y. Naghi & Brothers Group has become the first CustomerGauge client to launch a Net Promoter® survey in Arabic.

The news is significant to CustomerGauge users because the system now has the ability to send Net Promoter surveys in over thirty languages. As well as increased language capabilities on the survey side, the platform itself is available in English, German, Dutch, Spanish, French, and Chinese.

Employee NPS survey to gather feedback across the Middle East

What is also interesting for Net Promoter aficionados is that the consumer goods to foodstuffs distribution business is surveying employee satisfaction with the platform’s eNPS (employee Net Promoter) survey tool.

After choosing the CustomerGauge eNPS tool due to its anonymous feedback and reporting functionalities (built-in to protect the privacy of individual employees), the business is now rolling out the survey to more than 3,000 staff across the Middle East.

The eNPS surveys will be sent out twice a year by email (including mobile-optimised email surveys), SMS and a survey on the company website, and is the first step in a larger Net Promoter program that will see the business use the CustomerGauge platform to survey end customers in Arabic and English across the Middle East.

The Arabic capability brings the CustomerGauge platform one step closer to the goal of being able to send surveys in any language and market and deliver feedback in real-time.

Read the full press release: CustomerGauge launches first Net Promoter survey in Arabic

.ونحن سعداء أن نعلن مجموعة محمد ناغي وإخوانه أصبحت أول عميل لشركة محمد يوسف ناغي و أخوانه لإطلاق شبكة الترويج مؤشر رضا

 العميل المسح المسح باللغة العربية

من السلع الاستهلاكية إلى المواد الغذائية وأعمال التوزيع يستخدم لنا (موظف صافي المروج) لأداة المسح لمسح أكثر من ٣٠٠٠‎ موظفا في أسواقها في الشرق الأوسط. فاختارت أداة لنا بسبب ردود الفعل إلى المجهولة ووظائف والتقارير التي هي مدمجة لحماية خصوصية المستخدمين الأفراد العاملين. سيتم إرسال المسوحات مرتين في السنة عن طريق البريد الإلكتروني (بما في ذلك المسوحات البريد الإلكتروني المتحرك الأمثل)، والرسائل القصيرة، ومسح على موقع الشركة، وتعد الخطوة الأولى في شبكة برنامج المروج الأكبر التي ستشهد استخدام التجاري لمنصة مسح العميل النهائي باللغتين العربية والإنجليزية في جميع أنحاء الشرق الأوسط

Is Gmail hot? Is Hotmail not? How email clients affect B2C Net Promoter survey response rates

This post is a follow up to one of our most popular posts: Boost your Net Promoter Survey response to 60%+. 

Customer survey rockstars know a lot about how to maximise Net Promoter® survey response rates.  They understand the importance of mobile-optimised surveys. They send relevant, well- timed, and appropriately-worded emails.  And they set expectations with clients (and customers). 

But another factor that has the potential to significantly affect survey responses, especially for B2C businesses that tend to send surveys to personal email accounts, is Email clients. 

Curious to see if there was a difference in how users of Gmail, Hotmail, Ymail, and other email clients respond Net Promoter surveys, we analysed 400,000 records from Europe, North America, and Brazil across five CustomerGauge clients from Q1 of 2013.

And this is what we found…..

Microsoft is the most popular email client among B2C customers…..

Microsoft (Hotmail, Live, Outlook, etc) accounted for more than a quarter of all emails that were sent by our clients in Q1 of 2013. Google (Gmail, googlemail) came in a distant second at 14% and Yahoo! at just over 9%. Over 50% of emails sent went to five domains, namely Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and GMX.

…but Microsoft gets only 54% of the response rate that Google receives…

There is a distinct correlation between email client and Net Promoter survey response rates. While it may be the most popular email client for customers, Microsoft delivers only 54% of the response rate of Google and retains a significantly lower response rate than all other email clients except AOL. 

You  will note that “All Others” has a similar response rate to Gmail – it appears that if people give you their work address it is because they are open to communicating.

…Microsoft’s lower response rate is not because of a high bounce rate.

 A factor that may affect responses is bounce rates. But our findings show that although Microsoft accounts do indeed return a higher bounce rate than other domains, it is less than one percent higher than Google and less than half a percent higher than Yahoo and “Others.“

So what does it all mean?

Our research shows:

• If your business has a high level of Google and/or “Other” email contacts in your database, you will receive a higher response rate to your surveys.
  
• If your contact list includes a lot of Microsoft and/or AOL addresses, you will receive a lower response.

It is not completely clear is exactly why this is the case. Anecdotal evidence says that Microsoft accounts tend to be checked less frequently, or used as secondary accounts, but we have to be hesitant to draw firm conclusions without the appropriate evidence.

Likewise, our research does not measure variations across different markets – so if you operate in a market that has a significantly different mix of email clients, our findings may not be relevant to your situation.

Nonetheless, if your database has a high percentage of Microsoft and/or AOL accounts, we suggest being particularly diligent in communicating to customers any benefits they may receive by being contactable at that address, and possibly asking for email confirmation to ensure that the customer checks that account.

Would you like to know more?

In the interests of enabling businesses to drive higher response rates for their own surveys, we are happy to share more information about these statistics.

If you leave your details below, we will send you an anonymised email response presentation, including:

• Sample size
• Spread across clients
• Data contribution by email clients
• Response rate per email clients
• Bonus stats on email opens by device and mobile trends

Filed under Feedback Management, Front Page, NPS, Recommendation · Tagged with aol, gmail, GMX, Google, googlemail, hotmail, microsoft, outlook, Yahoo!

Net Promoter News: Parasol unfurls eNPS results, Lowe’s has high NPS, Home Depot also not low

Posted by Rhys Wesley on April 19, 2013 · Leave a Comment 

Parasol unfurls eNPS results in public (gasp)

The UK’s daintily named Parasol Group – an umbrella company (see what they did there?) that claims to be one of the UK’s biggest employers – has publicly shared the results of its eNPS (employee Net Promoter) survey on its blog.

Parasol Group: It’s an umbrella company, silly.

This is interesting to us because despite examples of employee engagement driving higher operating margins, few businesses use Net Promoter to regularly measure employee loyalty, and less still share those results publicly.

In its post, the contractor-employment organisation starts by providing statistics on how happy employees are with different aspects of working for Parasol – a good way to demonstrate to employees (and potential employees) the high standard of support it offers.

Next, it notes that a small percentage of employees would consider working for another umbrella group on their next assignment. It asks these people to let Parasol know the reasons why and anything they could do to improve. Again, a good demonstration of its willingness to listen and learn.

Finally, it says there is a slight decline in NPS compared to last year, but notes that its score of +30 would have ranked it fifth in the most recent Net Promoter industry benchmark report for the UK. This is where we feel the announcement falls short. While we understand that as an umbrella company, Parasol’s employees could be considered customers in some senses of the word, comparing scores with an unrelated customer-focused Net Promoter report that measures companies across industries strikes us as a case of comparing apples to oranges.

While it’s fantastic to see Parasol sharing its eNPS results, we believe the company could have been better served by acknowledging there has been a slight drop in its score (check), providing the reasons why loyalty has dipped slightly from the previous survey (not explained) and outlining the steps it is taking to turn the situation around (also not explained).

This would have had the following benefits:

• Communicated to employees that their feedback is being heard and acted on and highlighted the fact they employees are active stakeholders in the business.
• Helped increase retention.
• Given the organisation a publicly visibly roadmap to improve the employee experience that would provide the internal impetus to make the necessary changes. 

We consider ourselves a high ‘Passive’ on this particular announcement, with the potential to be nudged into Promoter territory the next time around. Parasol blog

The lowdown on Lowe’s high NPS

In the battle of the US home improvement giants, Lowe’s Net Promoter Score leads Home Depot across both male and female shoppers.

However, Home Depot leads rival Lowe’s in key areas including sales growth and stock price. Home Depot also has more male shoppers, which is significant because male shoppers tend to spend over than a third more than their female counterparts. So if Net Promoter can be considered as a forward indicator of growth, what is going on?

According to Pam Goodfellow of Prosper Insights and Analytics, one reason may be that among males, store location is a major factor of Home Depot’s attraction, and Home Depot has around 15% more stores than Lowe’s. And although Lowe’s has a strong lead in NPS among female shoppers, its lead among the more lucrative male shoppers is less pronounced.

The conclusion? While Home Depot is leading many key indicators now, if Lowe’s can continue a long term approach to nurturing customer loyalty and expanding its retail presence, it may not be much longer before its organic growth starts to outpace its great rival. Stay tuned for future developments! Forbes

In brief

• At its earnings call, property managers FirstService revealed that it uses Net Promoter to measure its service quality and employee loyalty. Seeking Alpha
• Freight shuttle service FW Trucking has begun its first Net Promoter customer feedback survey. Press release

Filed under Front Page, Net Promoter News, NPS · Tagged with FirstService, FW Trucking, Home Depot, lowe's, Parasol Group

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