Net Promoter: Is there a “Dutch Effect”?
Scores Below Sea Level In the Netherlands?
Thoughts on how cultural differences impact Net Promoter® Score
Yesterday we had three webchat enquiries within an hour from different countries relating to exactly the same topic. This one is typical: “I’m searching for information if there are cultural effects that impacts the NPS. I’m specially interested in if Dutch customers are “harder” to receive a high NPS score from then the rest of Europe”. It’s not normal to hear such a specific pattern of questioning like this, and at first we thought it might be some kind of sophisticated botnet attack attacking customer loyalty firms. But when we spoke to one of the questioner it was clear it was genuine, apparently triggered by one of the company’s Big Client survey results just coming back. And you guessed it, a low score from the Low Countries.
I was asked, in a conspiratorial way “Is there something like a “Dutch Effect” on scores?”
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:
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- 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.
Free Webinar: The “Loyalty Robot”: Learn how to increase customer loyalty and grow online sales automatically
(How a handful of customers can make or break you…)
One of the surprising secrets of e-commerce is that a small number of customers account for a large amount of sales. In fact, on a recent sample of large sites, just 7% of the customers accounted for 50% of sales revenue. For most e-commerce sites, this means if a few hundred customers decide to return or leave, it can make a big difference to hitting sales targets. In this webinar, aimed at e-commerce professionals, we promise you will pick up some useful tips to improve customer retention.
- How to identify and segment your top spending customers
- Learn how to save money on acquisition and grow revenue from existing customers
- Build a “Loyalty Robot” to automatically develop repeat business
Adam Dorrell (Managing Director of CustomerGauge) and Melanie Otersen (ex- SonyStyle online store, Europe) will outline how to succeed using a customer loyalty strategy, and show real-life examples with impressive revenue growth.
Wednesday, 10 February, 2010.
Starting time: 17.00 Europe (Amsterdam, Paris), 16.00 London, 11.00 AM New York
Duration about 30 minutes. Free of charge, but limited places.
Mail for more info.
Register now!
Make Customer Feedback One of Your 5-A-Day
Delighting your customers starts with quick response to their comments, delivered in daily reports like this one from CustomerGauge
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
