Actually, we have only moved next door. We have moved this blog onto our new server and website. You can get to it on
www.engaugement.net” or www.customergauge.com/engaugement. More Net Promoter News coming soon… Hope you like the new look!

Here are links to some useful documents for CustomerGauge to help businesses measure Net Promoter Score® and other field marketing metrics.

CustomerGauge

• CustomerGauge generic D2C (e-commerce) presentation – Automatically Measure Net Promoter Score®, Customer Voice etc… (May 2009) – pdf 10Mb
• CustomerGauge generic b2b presentation – in-depth measurement of Net Promoter Score®, (May 2009) – pdf 9Mb
• CustomerGauge Project Deliverables Document (Typical reports etc) (May 2009) – pdf 5Mb
• Resource document 1: White Paper: Headcount implications for customer voice classification: (Jan 2009) – pdf 60Kb
  
• Resource document 2: White Paper: Impact of Improving Net Promoter® Scores on Average Order
  Value and overall sales (Jan 2009) pdf 80Kb
• Resource document 3: White Paper: Surveying with CustomerGauge – Legal Considerations, privacy laws etc. (May 2009) – pdf 150Kb

DemonstratorGauge

• DemonstratorGauge – Field Marketing Measurement Remotely – presentation. (May 2009) – pdf 6Mb

Weekly round-up of Net Promoter News from round the globe.

Smart Resources Inc, a Chicago Temp Agency promotes “Industry’s Highest Client Satisfaction Ratings” in a self-puffer here. Citing recent study by CareerBuilder and Inavero Institute, Smart Resources received a Net Promoter Score of 74. As a control, the staffing industry average NPS was 25%. More…

Miserable marketers minimise media, move to metrics… After the slump brand owners are ready to go straight back to spend, Spend, SPEND reports MarketingDaily but may also have to employ some people who can do math, as they expect to use more customer-related metrics. According to their survey, marketers are more interested in brand health metrics compared with February 2007, with increased attention on customer conversion/repeat rates and net promoter scores (73% now  vs. 67%). Source here. Hold tight while marketers actually start to listen to customers…

HD Supply win award, save $3m… San Diego based Fac-Mans HD Supply won the Gold Award from American Society for Quality with innovative approach to use voice of the customer data to drive operational excellence. Benefits included improved customer loyalty and +6% NPS, which resulted in $3 million in savings. Read details here

eBay move to transactional NPS… Coverage of interview with Director of Seller Standards and Feedback, Brian Burke at the online gavel-swingers on replacing existing old-as-the-hills feedback system: that “Transactional NPS is applying customer loyalty metric after each transaction, much like we do with Feedback today… NPS provides sellers with much richer information about the transaction and the sellers who’ve participated in the pilot have pleased with the added information.” More from Gianostore.

NPS-softer CustomerGauge shows new views on Net Promoter in summer-09 release. Lots of b2b views plus customer sentiment classification improvements on top of easy-to-use interface. Details here.

Home Depot report NPS in F1Q09 Earner Call. Home Depot notes to Wall Street via CEO Frank Blake: “Customer service continues to improve… Our net promoter score… has improved 790 basis points year-over-year and is now at 61.5%. That is a meaningful improvement.” We agree. From SeekingAlpha

Fin-Server Investors Capital Corporation whips up Net Promoter Score to “deliver Premier Service to Financial Advisors”: Investors Capital’s NPS for the first quarter of 2009 was 66%, up from 60%, 60.2%, 60%, and 49% for the four quarters of 2008. Source: American Chronicle

More market research community flat-earthism from the Southern African Marketing Research Association, who continue to deny marketing Darwinism: “The ideas that spread the furthest are often not those with the most merit: …the widespread use of the Net Promoter Score when it does not stand up to scientific scrutiny are examples.” says their King Canute Enrico Tronchin. Chuckle more about it here

Finally, from Net Promoter Conference London, 4 June via twitter:

• “Philips has seen that promoters spend more (69% sales growth) compared to passives (6%) and detractors (-24%).”
• “Experian mentioned that many of their own clients also use NPS, so it is becoming a common language to discuss feedback.”

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

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