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Sir Richard, approved.[/caption]
Why Richard Branson and Virgin have the windy city in their sights
Richard Branson is at it again. Venturing out into new territory by opening the first Virgin Hotels property in downtown Chicago, and Virgin has hit the ground running when it comes to customer experience.
To begin they have eliminated a huge set of add-on fees such as WiFi (although in Europe this is standard) and room service that Virgin hotels see as a right and not a revenue stream. Minibars are stocked with normal street prices, while guests can order room service using just their phone and the hotel’s mobile app. Meaning you can order en route to the hotel and have dinner waiting for you upon your arrival.
While long before you ever get to the hotel, Virgin’s loyalty program “The Know”, focuses on personal preferences and tastes rather than trying to sell room upgrades with questions that revolved around favorite food and music, and minibar preferences.
Although the hotel has only just opened, if the customer experience and resulting NPS of other Virgin Group companies (Virgin Atlantic has an industry leading 66) is anything to go by, then we foresee that Virgin Hotels won’t be far behind.
Read the full articles below: http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiebell/2015/01/05/a-first-look-at-the-new-virgin-hotel-chicago/ http://mashable.com/2014/12/19/virgin-hotels-rewards/
The shape of things to come: Interdepartmental eNPS
These days everyone is a customer, even employees within a company. So this year the credit union user group, Member Loyalty Group, took this idea to its natural progression in their Internal Service Survey program.
Standardizing it’s approach, all participating credit unions utilized the same methodology and questions to determine their employee Net Promoter® Scores and collect feedback. What was different though was that each credit union asked their employees to not just score the company, but also departments external to their own within the company.
What is at the heart of such an initiative is to create a standardized employee NPS benchmark for those participating credit unions and to allow each credit union to gauge how well each department is serving employees external to their won department.
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This chart below shows the broad range of scores for Information Technology. Source: http://www.cuinsight.com/press-release/2014-internal-service-benchmark-for-the-credit-union-industry-shows-top-performing-teams-share-outward-focus[/caption]
In this Fall’s 2014 report the NPS for all participating credit unions averaged 65.3, with the highest being 86.81 and the lowest 44.27. The result of such an endeavor has meant not just a company wide score but also an understanding of what brings about a higher or lower Net Promoter® score for departments.
Top performing departments focused on making their processes as simplistic as possible for those external to their department, while low scoring departments had more inwardly focused methods meaning other employees found them difficult to access and understand.
Want to know more, for the full story click here.
NPS can drive industry competition, but be careful how you do it
The UK’s meetings sector research specialist, BDRC continental, has released their VenueVerdict Accreditations for 2014.
Those that received the Gold Standard accreditation were required to have an NPS greater than 70 from more than 40 customer responses across twelve months. Although we always love NPS being used as an incentive, we would love to see a little more than 40 responses in calculating an NPS.
The pitfalls of trying to benchmark across countries
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Source: baltic-course.com[/caption]
While in an interesting report about the quality of public hotspots in 172 countries worldwide, the top 20 in the world show an interesting discrepancy between download speeds and their NPS.
While the fastest country has a download speed of almost three times more than the slowest of the 20 countries. When looking at the average score out of 10 for each country the difference is only 1 point between the fastest and slowest countries.
This is a clear indicator that the need and value of public WiFi in every country differs, and is a prime example of how creating industry benchmarks is something that should be done with caution.
In brief
- Within the Ukraine's banking sector, UkrSibbank has recorded the highest NPS in the 4th quarter of 2014 with a score of 39.
- Discovia, a leading global provider of eDiscovery services to corporations, law firms and government entities has published a score of 60.
- The San Francisco based application intelligence company, AppDynamics, comes in at an impressive 84.
- Lastly, Career Partners International, which provide outplacement, career transition, executive coaching and other talent management services have posted a score of 73.
