Net Promoter News: You Can Be Sure of Shell Customer Service, Android NPS blues but iOS in pink, Transactional Net Promoter Score is “Need To Know Buzzword”

Shell puts customer service in the fast lane

Shell in the Netherlands has launched an intriguing campaign to find out what its customers think about its service via dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android.

As spotted by CustomerGauge staffer Chris, the pilot campaign runs across 14 stations, and the app allows customers let Shell know what they like about the Shell filling stations and what could be improved.

In addition, the stations have a device at the entrance where customers can select an appropriately happy, sad, or indifferent face depending on their experience.

It’s a simple initiative, and if we have one small suggestion it may be to include a mechanism to give feedback in-store as well as online. Shell Netherlands (in Dutch)

 

Android wallows in NPS purgatory, but will Apple continue to dominate?

Like a televised cage fight, consumers are watching battles by Android v iOS,  Microsoft v anyone, Samsung against Apple,  Nokia and Blackberry begging to be let back in. As smartphones march toward ubiquity, predicting where each of the major players will be in a year’s time is complicated by the fact that it is not just handset against handset, but also operating system against operating system, and even carrier against carrier.

New research in the US has found that:

• iOS is the most preferred operating system among IT professionals, with a Net Promoter Score of 69, well ahead of Android at  27.
• AT&T and Verizon are equally preferred carriers among IT professionals, with Sprint a distant third.

The low score for Android may be surprising for some, but it does seem to have some correlation with an earlier prediction that we reported on by analyst Ben Bajarin, who believes that partly based on Windows’ high NPS, iOS and potentially Windows will be the longer term operating system winners.

However, this is complicated by a number of factors, including Samsung’s momentum. Predicting the state of the mobile market in the medium term is best left to those more knowledgeable, but we are watching this space with interest. Red Orbit

Transactional Net Promoter Score dubbed “need to know buzzword”

MarketingWeek UK has named Transactional Net Promoter Score to its list of “need to know buzzwords in 2012.”

While we’re bemused with the idea of Transactional Net Promoter Scores being thought of as just another buzzword, the article makes some good points on the strengths of the metric and how it differs from regular Net Promoter surveys.

One of the more important considerations is that transactional surveys can potentially provide a much bigger data set than conventional surveys, as they ask for a response at the moment of contact, rather than once every quarter or other predefined period. For businesses that don’t often see customers face to face, such as insurance, Transactional Net Promoter Scores can also offer an opportunity to resolve a customer’s problem immediately.

Please check out this link if you’re interested in reading more about transactional surveys and how they have helped CustomerGauge clients, including insurance business nib, branded manufacturer Melitta, and more. Marketing Week

In brief

• Wonga, the financial services business that announced an NPS of +73 in May, this week announced it has trebled its earnings, with income rising 225%. The Guardian
• Recent research in the UK has revealed that “only 14% of service organisations have a system in place that accurately and automatically scores employees on performance in customer service.” For more insights into the state of customer service (or lack thereof) in UK businesses, see HR Magazine.

Net Promoter Vacancies

User Experience Manager – North America: LEGO, Hartford CT, US

Net Promoter Systems Analyst: Aerotek - Parsippany, New Jersey

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.

A Simple Customer Rescue and Reward Plan

We’d like to share a short 6-step plan for customer retention, based on some years working in e-commerce. We’re going to find some key customers that you can rescue, and others that you can reward. Then help you reach them and increase sales.

Step 1. Segment your customer base. Rank your customers by amount of spend, then make the cut at a suitable point – somewhere like 10 – 20% of your total customers.  You’ll probably be aware of the 80-20 rule (sometimes named the Pareto rule) which helps explain how a small number of customers are responsible for much of the sales (20% customers drive 80% sales). In the case of e-commerce, it’s often more extreme. We found on some sites that around 10% of the customer base brought in 50% of the revenue (and even more profit if you take into account acquisition costs). When you do the analysis, you may find it’s just a few hundred customers who make a sizable contribution.

Step 2. Identify your loyal customers. Survey your customers using the Net Promoter® Score question. You can find out how to do it in our 2-minute guide to the Net Promoter Score.   Ask “Would you recommend us to a friend of colleague?”, with a 0 – 10 scale. Use the results to understand who in your customer base are “promoters” or “detractors”. You may get up to 30% of your customers responding, so this is a very good way of dividing up the base. Don’t forget to ask for customer comments.

Step 3.  Draw up the matrix. See the chart above. On one axis, plot customer spend (or value). On the other, loyalty. In the top boxes you should have a manageable number of customers who represent a sizable portion of business, divided into those who would recommend you (promoters) and those who would not recommend you (detractors).

Step 4. “Customer Rescue”: Find the customers who are most at risk from defecting: High value customers that scored low ratings. If you do nothing, you risk losing repeat sales, or lose them to a competitor. At worst, they may warn their friends from buying from you. By reading their comments you can understand what the issues are. Don’t waste time – divide up the numbers and get your team on the phone to them within 24 hours of harvesting their comments. Failing that, personal emails will do. Acknowledge any problems, apologise if needed, and ask what it will take to put it right. Often, customers will make allowances for errors – and if you can surprise them by over-delivering on a fix, you may even turn them into evangelists.

Step 5. “Customer Reward”: Identify the high spenders who rate you highly. These are customers who are likely to make a repeat purchase, and with luck, bring you new customers. So give them the tools to do so. In the excellent book  Creating Customer Evangelists (Huba/McConnell) you can get some good ideas on how to turn customers into referral machines – offer new product information, ask for product feedback, give small gifts. Surprisingly, there are more effective actions than  financial incentives.

Step 6. Automate and track the progress. This retention model is not a one-off task – the successful companies bake these process steps into their sales DNA, and monitor which actions are most successful, while reducing the number of detractors. Keeping a customer is far cheaper than finding a new one.

Do the hard work, easily

Yes, you can do all the above steps using manual analysis. You can do it for next to nothing with low cost survey tools, if you have spreadsheet skills and plenty of time.

However, there is an easier way: CustomerGauge automates all the steps for you: segmenting, surveying, reporting, closing the loop. By integrating with e-commerce systems, CustomerGauge can survey every transaction with the Net Promoter Score question, and can often reach 30% response. Thanks to special reporting, the system automatically ranks customers (and repeat orders) by value, showing results in real-time, and providing call- and email-lists for actions. CustomerGauge even tracks open customer issues with internal workflow, and reports on returning customers.

Now all you have to do is come up with some creative ways of keeping your best customers recommending you to others!

Learn for free

Our upcoming webinar  “Learn how to increase customer loyalty and grow online sales automatically” on 10 Feb 2010 has additional resources on how to keep customers. Details/sign-up here.

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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.

Real-Time Customer Comments via Twitter

With Google Real-Time Search launching today, we thought it appropriate to show off the CustomerGauge Real-Time Customer Comment Feed, which works via Twitter. Ideal for customer-focused companies that like to rapidly react to feedback and issues.

It started when a client asked: “Could we put a desktop widget on the bosses desk, so that every time a new comment comes in it pops up?”. Actually we’d been thinking about this for a while, trying to find the right component.

Now we have a solution that’s super easy and flexible: we integrated CustomerGauge with Twitter. As soon as a customer makes a comment, an API connection to Twitter is made and a “Tweet” sent – and you get a real-time feed on your favourite device (PC, mobile phone etc). It is customisable, so you can filter on comments – examples: “Score 9 + 10 comments for call center staff” or “Detractors commenting in Manchester with ‘reception’ keyword”. The feed can be public (if you are proud of what your customers are saying) or private so it’s secure for selected subscribers. A link takes you to the full comment and customer details.

We would be happy to give you more details, by tweet (@adamdorrell) or old-fashioned phoning. Contact us for details.