Net Promoter as a Marketing Tool: Make comments work for you

One of the most rewarding aspects of collecting customer feedback is when you get a positive comment, especially  a glowing unselfish recommendation from a customer that can be passed around the team as sort of virtual “pat on the back”.

“Very easy to use the web site and delivery was extremely quick”

CustomerGauge clients can experience a continuous stream of customer comments, many of which can be published each day to external web sites as testimonials. We show here the latest site to go live with customer comments, Philips Online Store (featured above, also in Dutch, French and other languages). Companies like Philips are surveying hundreds or thousands of transactions each day with CustomerGauge, and depending on their Net Promoter Score are able to use about 15% – 25% of the comments  as positive praise for the service.

“I found the whole purchase and delivery of my iron gratifyingly easy and the product is proving excellent. ”

We offer several ways of showing these comments. The Philips example above is served from an XML feed of comments (available as an API from CustomerGauge) and published with some special code on their site to filter the country and language elements to the relevant pages. Another client uses our RSS feed to publish comments to an intranet site, and also shows the numbers in a dashboard with other key metrics.

CustomerGauge also offers a Testimonial Publisher that allows you to easily publish comments on your site in an i-frame. This is straightforward to implement on any site, with just a line of code. You are able to select which comments you which to use with just one click, and if needed edit the text (for example to hide any personal details).

Whatever way you choose to display positive comments they are likely to make prospective customers feel more confident about buying. A number of comments updated recently is as important as the content. And as with all comments, we recommend you thank customers when they have left you a kind message.

“The whole experience buying was easy & stress free. My headphones arrived swiftly & are comfortable to use. I am a great fan of Philips as I am still using the iron I was given as a wedding present in 1971. It has been in use daily & despite needing a couple of new flexes over the years has never once let me down. Well done Philips!”

More ideas:

• We also can help you Twitter your comments (internally or externally).
• Using comments internally from a post last year (Reasons to be cheerful, part CG).

Details as ever on request.

Real Time Customer Feedback Done Right

Net Promoter Score, Verbatim Comments on a Digital Sign.

Inspired by the “crawler” (or news ticker) on SkyNews and CNN, or maybe by the “Calls Holding” message boards in call centres, we proudly present the new CustomerGauge Real Time Feedback Screen. It’s designed as a digital sign (a new buzz word that as far as we can tell means “giant plasma display” and a spare PC running Firefox or Safari). Ideal for placing in your marketing department, lobby, canteen or even boardroom.

We pack a lot of information on this screen. As a CustomerGauge client, you can survey your customers continually. As comments and scores come in they are displayed in the upper part, on a sliding carousel of the most recent comments. All the relevant transaction information is shown next to the comment.

In the “lower third” we show the Net Promoter Score® for the current week, past week, month and year to date, plus sending stats and other useful information.

It is the latest iteration of our display board, and is designed to:

• understand the “zeitgeist” by reading customer voice in real-time
• help react immediately to customer comments
• motivate staff

For CustomerGauge b2c clients, it’s a simple low cost add-on. Let us know if we can show you more.

NB: Can’t see the Flash image above? View it on YouTube.

Silent Running: Automatically looking after your best e-commerce customers

There is a moving final scene in the 1971 film Silent Running. Bruce Dern sets his robot adrift in a spacecraft to tend the last remaining plant specimens from Earth. Although it’s 40 years old, this image of a machine trusted to look after living organisms inspired recent films like WALL*E, and was perhaps a foretaste of our current age with machines looking after our health, even agricultural robots starting to grow our food.

Not so much of a stretch then to imagine a system that could look after your customers?

It’s a theme we have been developing – we recently wrote about a Simple Customer Rescue and Reward Plan and followed it with a webinar “The Loyalty Robot”: Learn how to increase customer loyalty and grow online sales automatically.

We wanted to share our current thinking on how you can build “robotic” systems to enhance the e-commerce customer experience. The key elements:

• • automated customer surveys to understand voice-of-customer and Net Promoter® Score in real-time
  • automated customer segmentation by lifetime value
  • automated customer segmentation by loyalty (using Net Promoter Score)
  • process to help customers needing immediate response
  • clustering customer issues together for longer-term strategic fix
  • close-loop monitoring of results (Net Promoter Score and other metrics)
  • Responding to customers with updates on your actions

You could roll-your-own solution, but we believe CustomerGauge has all the parts you need to start this now – and we have proof points from our major e-commerce clients including Canon, Philips and Vodafone.

It’s all in a presentation you can download here: Building your own e-commerce Loyalty Robot (PDF, 8Mb) – or you can watch/listen to the archived webinar here.

When you are ready to add some “Silent Running” on your e-commerce site, we would be delighted to help you.

CustomerGauge introduces new b2b survey tool for Net Promoter Score with publishable Document of Record

CustomerGauge announce new Net Promoter® Score tool for small and medium enterprises. The online system makes b2b surveys quick and inexpensive, includes many high-end features, and features Net Promoter Document of Record for publishing online.

Amsterdam, 1 Feb 2010 – Press Release:

CustomerGauge, provider of a hosted software solution for automatically surveying customers and calculating Net Promoter® Score,  announces a new tool designed for small and medium enterprises. The new tool, “CustomerGauge b2b Edition”, allows companies to survey their customers or channel partners using the enterprise-standard Net Promoter Score, quickly, easily and at a breakthrough cost.

In response to the recent trend of companies announcing a Net Promoter Score without  qualifications, the new CustomerGauge tool features a Net Promoter Score “Document of Record” listing the relevant information. This document acts as a certificate, and can be published internally within the organisation, or displayed online publicly to support press releases and act as a benchmark.

“We have been collecting company scores on press releases for our Net Promoter News site for over a year,” says Adam Dorrell, Managing Director, CustomerGauge “and we have seen a wide variety of reporting methodology, using different scales or with no sample size detail. To help the growing Net Promoter community, we have developed a Document of Record, which lists the relevant information in a certificate format. Using this certificate will allow companies to establish a new credibility with their Net Promoter Score reporting”.

View our AcmeB2B demo site certificate online here

CustomerGauge b2b Edition also features HTML branded emailing with reminders, surveying in multiple languages, a real-time dashboard, advanced reporting showing scores for customer companies and individuals, segmented scoring and classification of “voice of the customer” comments. It also includes many features found on high-end systems – for example, results for separate divisions can be rolled up on to a single dashboard for internal comparison.

CustomerGauge b2b Edition is available immediately. Clients can be surveying within a few days, with results usually with 24 hours. System pricing starts at €3900 (approx US $5490), including three month subscription.

http://www.customergauge.com

For product details and online demo, please contact info@customergauge.com.

About CustomerGauge

CustomerGauge measures loyalty and collects feedback to help companies to understand customer sentiment, centered around the Net Promoter Score standard. It is optimized for e-commerce and can be rapidly deployed anywhere in an organization, without investment in capital equipment or IT assistance. Customers include Philips, Canon and CMC Markets. The company is based in Amsterdam, NL.

About the Net Promoter Score:

Net Promoter® is both a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to fuel profitable growth in businesses. Developed by Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld, the concept was first popularized through Reichheld’s book The Ultimate Question, and has since been embraced by leading companies worldwide as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty. Details: www.netpromoter.com *Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.

Make Customer Feedback One of Your 5-A-Day

Every e-commerce professional tracks traffic and counts orders once a day, but rarely (if ever) checks customer feedback daily, weekly, or even monthly. Let’s look at some reasons for this, and why regular customer feedback will benefit your business.

Reasons we have heard for not taking regular customer feedback included: “not standard business practice”, “it’s extra workload”, “how will it benefit?” and “just too difficult”.

Here is what every e-commerce manager needs to know about daily feedback:

1. It’s becoming the norm. World-class companies DO survey EVERY transaction for customer feedback. To mention a few: Sony, Philips, Canon, Avis, Hertz, eBay and many more. Feedback is an essential part of their daily business routine with comments distributed around the organisation. Also there IS an Industry Standard Methodology for measuring loyalty: the Net Promoter Score® - a simple, one-number approach, as understandable as page-views or profit.
   
2. It’s not extra workload. If a customer complains in a survey, you would likely have to deal with that customer issue anyway (so it’s not additional workload, just time-shifted forward). More usually an unhappy customer will silently defect and never return. Unless you ask customers, you may never know how much business you are losing.
3. It’s free consulting. Customer suggestions can help shape your business. We have seen examples where customer feedback helped merchandising give instant additional sales, and comments on manuals and packaging delivered cost-savings. In addition, positive comments can be used as testimonials on your site, which  helps reassure future customers.
4. It’s simple to implement. You can start a feedback project with a simple online survey tool and do it manually (actually, we started that way by doing monthly reports), but due to time lag we highly recommend that you automate it. Products like CustomerGauge have plug-ins for major e-commerce systems that automatically survey customers.

If you are still hesitant, here are some other points to consider:

Responding fast is impressive: When was the last time you had a response to a comment you made? You can transform customer experiences by responding quickly to feedback. Some large companies we deal with read and react to customer comments within 24 hours. That can turn the most hardened complainer into a delighted evangelist for a business.

Customer Focus: As a result of measuring, these same companies have become more customer oriented. Staff are bonused on Net Promoter Score, and welcome the feedback that customers give in order to improve service.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Feedback

Our customer feedback solution is CustomerGauge: a simple plug-in to your e-commerce site, paid monthly on subscription. All the hard work of integration and setting it up is handled by us. We arrange the emails, surveys (in different languages), automatic sending and reporting in real time. We deliver daily and weekly feedback to your staff by email. You can use positive comments and publish them on site as testimonials, which increase conversions significantly. CustomerGauge also helps keep your promises to customers: track open and closed customer issues with built-in workflow. And identify your most valuable returning customers with our real-time reporting.

In summary, Customer Feedback can become one of your essential Daily Metrics, tracked like your other Key Performance Indicators. You can receive it on a daily basis in your mailbox, and use metrics to check improvement. It is the business transformation you are looking for this year.

Join us today on our Campaign for Daily Customer Feedback and benefit from a January 2010 CustomerGauge offer: Free 30-day trial on your e-commerce website*

*Sign up by 31 Jan 2010. Terms and conditions apply, ask for details.

Loyalty Spectrum Analyzer: A New Visualisation for b2b Surveys with Net Promoter Score

So what did Newton know about loyalty? 340 years ago Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated that white light was made up of a rainbow of colours by using a prism. What’s more, he astounded onlookers by showed the spectrum could be recombined back in to white light again, via a second prism. It was no mere party trick – it was the start of our modern understanding of light.

Refracting customer loyalty.

The December 2009 Business-Business (b2b) release of CustomerGauge takes the principle of Newton’s prism to split customer loyalty scores (based on Net Promoter Score®) into their component parts. We call this our Loyalty Spectrum Analyzer.

Using these new reports, it is possible to analyse the scores of each segment, and see the comments and results by each individual customer. Hovering over the image shows the customer comment, and a click allows you to drill down into details. Downloads are provided for each segement (or the entire dataset).

You can also analyse the Net Promoter Score of customer companies in the data with the Organisation report. The score of each company is shown, and again, a mouse-hover over the image shows comments and number of responses. A click shows organisation details and full downloads are provided.

Why is this useful? You can pinpoint problem areas at a glance – for example see the companies that need “rescuing”, or immediately see the reasons behind a low score for customers in “purchasing” roles.

It’s easier to see how it works in this short video (2′30). Also on YouTube for iPhone users

• Filter by “flight” (a batch of surveys)
• Reporting on Net Promoter Score by Organisation and Individuals
• Response percentage reporting by individuals and companies
• Tools to boost response and combat email filters: reminders, multi-point survey sending, survey link for completion by IM or telephone
• Email management: pre-email checks, and unsubscribe
• Root-cause analysis reports

Next steps

Minority Reports No Longer – CustomerGauge Gains Report Gallery

Today we are pleased to deliver our “Report Gallery” – a visual representation of the reports and charts available in CustomerGauge to help organisations better understand customer feedback and measure Net Promoter Score®.

After listening carefully to our customers, we found even experienced users sometimes had to search for a certain report or chart, especially the ones seldom used. In response, we created a visual gallery of top report destinations to aid recall. The images link directly to reports. The “My Favourites” section can be tailored to show the most used reports in your organisation, and we added a “Frequently Asked Questions” section to list common questions like “Can I see all Promoters from this month?”, “Which segment had highest response?” and “What comments did the people who rated us a zero make?” (although hopefully that last report will be small list for you).

Thanks to our customers for the feedback – we are working to continually improve the CustomerGauge platform.

Copy-Paste Tip for CustomerGauge and Firefox

We normally recommend that CustomerGauge and DemonstratorGauge users choose Firefox as their browser to run our software. It’s a better experience, faster, more compatible – and we use it internally.

However, there was one issue that has always slightly irritated me in Firefox. You can’t easily copy and paste a table into Microsoft Excel. It’s not a problem in either InternetExplorer or Safari, and I found that I had to switch to these browsers if I wanted to do a straight copy. Of course, most of our tables have an “Export to CSV” function, but it’s not always so handy.

So yesterday when one of our clients mentioned this, we looked for a solution and found a great plug-in for Firefox that allows you to copy-paste a table with no problems. It’s called Dafizilla Table2Clipboard. It does what it says on the tin. Just right-click on table, “Copy Whole Table” and paste into Excel. Thanks to Davide Ficano – more details here

CustomerGauge adds new ways to visualize Net Promoter Score

CustomerGauge June 2009 release adds new features to this simple, cost-effective loyalty measurement system based on Net Promoter Score®*. CustomerGauge is known for its extensive business-to-consumer (b2c) surveying capabilities, particularly for automatically surveying customers after e-commerce transactions.

In this release, it adds specialised reporting for business-business (b2b) applications.

New reporting helps clients view Net Promoter Score by multiple segments and grouped by organisations. Real-time dashboards show scores and comments from individuals inside an organisation by job or function level – to give a top down view of major corporate customers.  Compare results with all customers, or by all job categories. Quickly identify promoters and detractors within major accounts.

Other reporting helps show distribution of Net Promoter Scores 0 – 10  by frequency, and the evolution of detractors, promoters by week or month. Drill-downs allow quick analysis of comments in each segment. Another report makes it simple to rank Net Promoter Score in a particular segment (for example by country, or sales revenue cluster). A/B options allow experimentation to find  optimum survey design.

Understanding customer sentiment is a key component of CustomerGauge. Reporting has been enhanced to provide multiple level of analysis. Simple graphs showing trends help get to root causes fast and effectively.

CustomerGauge is made for global deployment, with new enterprise-class features for multiple countries/divisions roll-out. But flexibility is also built-in to allow local management, reporting and customisation. A new global dashboard option allows roll-up of Net Promoter Scores from separate divisional instances of CustomerGauge (or even other survey tools).

With this release, CustomerGauge continues to evolve and provide a fast, effective way for enterprises to measure Net Promoter Score, priced from EUR 1500 per month.

About CustomerGauge

CustomerGauge is a hosted software solution from Amsterdam-based Directness BV designed to automatically survey customers and measure loyalty. The results are compatible with the Net Promoter® Score* (NPS), acknowledged as the industry standard for loyalty measurement. It can be rapidly deployed anywhere in an organization, without investment in capital equipment or IT assistance.

*Net Promoter is a registered trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld

Reasons to be Cheerful (Part CG)

They say that fashions come around again roughly every thirty years. I can hardly believe it, but it has been that many years since the great Poet of Upminster Ian Dury released “Reasons to be Cheerful” in 1979. In its 4′43″ length, Dury checks an eccentric laundry list of what makes him happy:

Some of Buddy Holly, the working folly

Good Golly Miss Molly and boats

Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet

Jump back in the alley, and nanny goats

Dury’s sunny outlook is appropriate for the times we’re living in now, and I was struck by its positive tone when I started work last week on a new CustomerGauge client project to measure their Net Promoter Score.

Let me explain. Most of our projects involve analysis of customer feedback with the aim of understanding what an organisation should do to improve. We help businesses listen to the “Voice of the Customer” by categorising and “tagging” comments. Analysing the results show which areas should be improved, in order of priority.

Post-Sales Customer Service comes up a lot. Especially “You promised to return my call…”

Something Nice to Study

Acting on what customer Detractors are telling organisations to improve is at the heart of the Net Promoter Score system.  CustomerGauge helps our clients by presenting  useful charts and tables, plus other analytic tools to understand impact. Managers can find negative feedback quite distressing – and may ignore it Ostrich-like, or rush to fix trivial (but noisy) issues.

But often the simple approach is best. A simple bar chart of top issues. A print out of customer comments.

And rather than just  focusing on the negatives, CustomerGauge can help understand the positives too. What customers like about the experience is just as valuable too. By understanding the areas of the business that customers like can be surprising. I’ve found that Marketing people can suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, and forget that their messages take a while to be generally adopted by customers – they have moved on, while customers are just catching up. Around half of the customer comments in our clients are strongly positive.

Even in one of our worst performing clients, some customers still loved their products.

And flagging positive experiences has a doubly useful effect if the good news is delivered to front line teams. Often we find that customers will pick out and congratulate staff members by name. Delivering this sentiment can be a real morale booster.

A Bit of “Come and Share It”…

Display it on a plasma screen for all to see. Print out and pin up a selection on the notice board. Add them to your website. That’s the “CG” part. CustomerGauge can do all that for you.

Whether or not you use CustomerGauge, my tip is to channel Ian Dury. Find your organisation’s positive feedback and share your customers “Reasons to be Cheerful”.

Ian Dury, 1942 – 2000

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