Getting started with the Net Promoter System is easy because you can start small, but in time it needs to be expanded. To create a better customer experience, departments, divisions, and teams need to be on board with NPS and enthusiastic about using it. For no matter how much your executive level pushes a new initiative, it will always fail if those who have to implement it don’t see the value in it and are not aligned.
We take you through five different companies and what they have done to help foster company-wide alignment around NPS.
Just like Black Duck
Black Duck Software is an international subscription-based enterprise software company that solves the logistical challenges of managing open-source technologies and methods.
However, they quickly came to realize that with all their success and passionate internal debates they were potentially creating an atmosphere that everything they were doing was correct. NPS gave them the opportunity to discover what was going on in the minds of their customers, rather than leaving this up to assumption.
Knowing what was happening in the minds of their customers was just one part of the equation. To make NPS really work for them, they came to realize that making the NPS score visible throughout their organization was key. It needs to be strongly present to make it part of the organization, otherwise it’s just something lost in another report and then who cares? If you want it to be part of the culture you need to make it visible.
By putting the NPS score and feedback on digital signage throughout their organization, they were able to get the most value out of it. In the office, it’s a conversation starter among employees (and customers or prospects visiting the office), a continual flow of new ideas and a way to challenge the assumption that everything they do is correct.
Learn more about how Black Duck has made NPS a part of the company culture.
Or the Wolters Kluwer way
Wolters Kluwer, the global information services company, did a very simple thing for its Belgian division at the end of their first year with NPS. Along with a celebratory email, they made little Net Promoter cupcakes for all 700 of their employees, celebrating their first year of NPS.
While this may not seem like a very big initiative, it sends a message to all employees that NPS and customer experience are not something confined to one team or department.
Everyone has a right and responsibility to embrace the importance of customer relationships. And with this simple gesture, Wolters Kluwer creates an atmosphere that as a company they will reach the goals of Net Promoter, and that the goals of NPS are for everyone.
Like Aegon does it
Aegon, a multinational life insurance, pensions and asset management company has around 24,000 employees serving millions of customers globally. Traditionally they had sold their products through intermediaries, but when that changed, and they started selling directly with customers it meant bringing the Voice of Customer into the organization.
Aegon decided to embed NPS across all 47 of its departments to educate and engage employees. They realized that giving everyone access to NPS (not just those who predominantly use it), would mean employees experience the value of NPS rather than being told about its value. From marketing right through to Aegon’s Customer Service department, everyone has access to their NPS tool.
Furthermore, by surveying different touch-points across their business, feedback arrives daily, meaning employees think continually about the results of NPS and how they can improve what they do.
Ansarada style
Ansarada is an Australian company that builds software to help companies stay in control of sensitive information and data when going through a merger or acquisition.
At Ansarada, NPS isn’t a case-by-case resolution tool but a product development program. NPS helps guide the development of new features, which means Ansarada begins their design process by going through all NPS feedback related to the design topic. This feedback becomes the basis for making sure that everything they do within the design process is exactly what customers need and nothing they don’t.
As projects move from design to developers and then to marketing, NPS feedback is right there alongside it, each step of the way. As developers build a feature, they are required to show how it addresses feedback. If it doesn’t then they are forced to realign their efforts so that it does. And when marketing advertises a new feature, the goal is to demonstrate how new features put customer feedback into action.
To steer this objective, Ansarada has made NPS comments a KPI. So by measuring how many comments they address with any action they take, they can understand the impact of those actions. Unlike other companies, which encourage employees to participate in feedback, Ansarada has made it a part of what employees do.
Like they do at Alaska Communications
In Alaska, the Internet industry has just two players, and for Alaska Communications that means providing superior customer experience. However, for Alaska Communications great customer experience means local customer service, and this is the key to engaging their employees around NPS.
In a company that has many interactions that affect the customer experience, creating a brand that feels local means NPS feedback cannot be processed and responded to by a centralized customer service team.
As a result, transactional NPS is followed up by each department, at the most local level possible. For example, in the field operations department local supervisors or maybe even technicians will respond to feedback. At Alaska, this creates strong employee engagement around NPS, because those employees that had the initial interaction with a customer also learn and resolve problems with the customer.
By putting the responsibility for feedback on individual leaders and frontline employees, it has shifted the focus of everyone in the company towards the customer. And to help maintain this enthusiasm, Alaska has built their NPS feedback right into their intranet homepage. Now Alaska even has employees from non customer-facing departments viewing feedback and wanting to know how they can help.
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