Being helpful trumps being nice for JetBlue
When one point of NPS means a whole lot of money, tweaking your hiring process can have a huge impact on the rest of the company,” said Ryan Dullaghan, manager of people assessment and analytics for JetBlue.
JetBlue has always looked to find the nicest people possible to be up in the sky with customers, but recent research shows that customers want help rather than pleasantries and JetBlue’s NPS is proof.
For JetBlue though, finding the perfect flight attendant isn’t easy. Starting with the mammoth 125,000 applications the company receives each year, a set of eight key characteristics are used to find the ideal fit for the flight attendant profile. To identify candidates with these characteristics, JetBlue uses psychological assessments, structured interviews, video interviews and work samples.
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JetBlue prides itself on customer experience, and for attendants being helpful is far more beneficial than being nice.[/caption]
“You can imagine how important the role is to the company and to our brand,” said Andrew Biga the director of talent acquisitions and assessment at JetBlue. “They are literally the face of the brand, and are able to change a regular experience with us to — hopefully — an amazing experience.”
However, recent research performed in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania made JetBlue realize that maybe it’s ideal flight attendant profile was a little off. For being helpful is more valued than being nice, with being helpful even balancing out the effect of an individual who is not so nice.
For JetBlue this was a revelation as they had always looked to find the nicest people possible to be alongside their customers in the sky. However, since focusing on ‘fit for the job’ characteristics the company has seen measurable benefits. This includes higher employee engagement and retention, a 12% decrease in absences that is especially crucial for the air travel industry as last-minute absences can mean flight delays or cancellations.
And the results are starting to show amongst their customer’s satisfaction, with more positive customer feedback and more than a half-point rise boost in its Net Promoter Score.
Read more about JetBlue’s adventures.
Hootsuite leverages customer feedback to improve product quality
Hootsuite is using Net Promoter Scores to learn what features work and what don’t to create better experiences for their customers.
When creating new features and sending them out to their customer base, Hootsuite has a phased rollout approach. Free users are the first to be handed new features. Hootsuite then collects the data analytics and NPS feedback from this target group, in order to better understand the engagement of these customers with a new feature.
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Hootsuite helps companies manage their social media all in one space.[/caption]
“If a feature is getting great adoption, we’ll then roll out the full version”, said VP of marketing, Dee Anna McPherson. “If it’s not, we can roll it back. Freemium takes the guesswork out of anticipating how users will adopt a new feature or product.”
At Hootsuite then, NPS in an integral part of understanding the customer. One-third of all bonuses are dependent on Net Promoter Scores, which is the prominent metric used to gauge Hootsuite’s customer engagement efforts.
“With so many customers online, there’s no excuse for us not to have a very good sense of who are the users of our products and what they think about it,” she explained.
McPherson states that it’s important to have their ear to the ground and know whom their buyers and prospects are, in order to map customer journeys, measure their happiness and use that to shape customer experiences.
“And NPS is a great mechanism to get the whole company to focus on that.”
To learn more about how Hootsuite is using customer input for product design, click here.
In brief
Liquid Web, a professional web hosting and managed cloud services company has a score of 74.
A Canadian provider of product intelligence for retailers and brands 360pi, has come in with a score of 60 from its strategic accounts.
The Cornerstone Credit Union League has a score of 75.
While Bilboa Capital are also on a high with a score of 77.
The event intelligence platform in the experiential marketing industry Eshots, also comes in with an impressive 73.
And the Australian financial services FlexiGroup has a score of 15 this month.
While even in the world of dentistry NPS is starting to find a foothold, as dentists begin to realize the importance of referrals to their industry.
