Surveys: Should you report based on “sent date” or “received date”

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Recently a customer asked: “In terms of “best practice” do you have a view on whether NPS should be calculated based on the date a survey was sent or the date of the response?”

My response was perhaps not as specific as they had hoped: it depends.

In many ways it doesn’t matter which you choose so long as you stay with the same date. The client was concerned about being “most accurate” when calculating the score but this is a fuzzy concept here. “Most consistent” is probably more useful idea in this case. A consistent NPS data collection process is key in obtaining data that you can trust and action. See this blog post for more on this topic:Three Prerequisites to setting Net Promoter targets.

When running a transactional survey approach, another date that could be used is the order date or transaction date. If you use this date you can potentially tie changes in the customer scores to events in the order or touch-point process. This can be very useful in the root cause analysis process.

Some organisations like to use response date because that means that as of a particular date the reported scores will not change. If you use order date or date sent, the reported NPS for, say, February can change during March if someone fills in a survey in March that was sent in February.

However, because we’re most often talking about email surveys this effect is quite small. Email surveys are normally done within a day or two of being sent so by March 5, nothing will be changing in the February report. That may however be enough of an issue to make you want to change.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement a best practice Net Promoter Score program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Best Practices, Customer Feedback Process, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: , ,

Three Prerequisites to setting Net Promoter targets

March 13, 2012 By 3 Comments

What gets measured, gets done, or so the saying attributed to the great management guru Peter Drucker goes. At some point in your best practice Net Promoter implementation you are going to want to, in fact need to, start setting NPS targets for your staff and organisation. This is not a trivial exercise.

Before you can set targets there are three prerequisites you need to meet. When you have those in place you can look at setting improvement goals for the organisation.

1. Build trust in the measurement system

In simple terms people need to believe that the system delivering the measurement is accurate otherwise they will refuse to be held accountable.

For this reason you need to ensure you have a stable, repeatable Net Promoter measurement system and everyone knows how it operates.

I’ve written before about how the survey approach and type can impact on the score that you generate. Your measurement system must stable, repeatable and consistent for every survey and for every recipient. Comparing a last month’s email survey results to this month’s telephone results is not reliable.

Your process does not have to use any specific medium or survey questionnaire; just make sure that you don’t compare results from different mediums, survey questionnaires, etc.

When building your system try to ensure that it cannot be easily “gamed” by staff. For instance having staff select, directly or indirectly, who will be surveyed is open to abuse. Somehow the email addresses of unhappy customers are mis-entered more often than happy customers.

When you design your data collection process look out for situations like this where the process can be manipulated by unscrupulous employees. Ensure that you design out, as much as is possible, these situations so that everyone has confidence in the system.

Remember that the process must not only be fair but it must also be seen to be fair.

As with any new system it may takes several months, or even longer, to build trust in the measurements. Don’t try to set targets before you have this basic element of trust in place. If staff do not trust the score, they will not be motivated by the score.

2. Understand what is a real variation and what is noise

Ensure that everyone in the organisation understands what variation constituents “real” change in the underlying score.

From a scientific perspective, measurement is a “quantitatively expressed reduction of uncertainty based on one or more observations” [1]. Almost everyone has heard of the statistical terms “sample size” and “margin of error”. Generally, the larger the number of responses collected (sample size) the more confident you are that you know actual value of what you are measuring.

Importantly for NPS the sample size for a given confidence level is larger than other survey types. This is because to calculate NPS you subtract Promoters from Detractors and each of these measurements has uncertainty. So you need to take even more care with the statistics than normal.

3. Create line of sight from actions to outcomes

People need to believe that they can have an impact on the thing being measured or they will not be motivated. In the Net Promoter context this means that you staff must know what they can do and control to the affect the Net Promoter score.

In essence you must have done some root cause analysis or identified some explicit cause and effect linkages between NPS and each person’s area of responsibility.

This is not a trivial exercise but is a core step in the Net Promoter process. If as an organisation you do not know that is driving NPS, then you will not be able to methodically drive positive change in the score. Your NPS targets will be nothing more than lotteries, and lotteries are not a good way to run a company.

On a side note: there are two general types of NPS survey approach: Business and transactional. Creating line of sight can be much more difficult when dealing with Business level results. With the large number of organisational units, staff, products and processes in most organisations, understanding how each is impacting on NPS is a difficult task.

On the other hand transactional surveys lend themselves more strongly to gaining insight into what drives scores. This type of survey can be tied back to a specific transaction type or process and so the root cause analysis can be much easier.

More information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS)

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program

 

[1] How to Measure Anything, Douglas Hubbard – by the way I heartily recommended this book as a general view on measuring business factors that seem to be unmeasurable.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Best Practices, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: ,

CustomerGauge Australian User Group Meets in March

February 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

CustomerGauge ReportBook the date and get ready for the first CustomerGauge User Group here in Australia. The idea for an Australian User Group was suggested by one of the local customers and supported by the other users so Genroe is making it happen.

The day will focus on CustomerGauge (an end to end, integrated, Net Promoter Score data collection, reporting, analysis and action system) but we will also share insights on how to drive the most value from the Net Promoter Score process in general. There are no competitive overlaps, yet, in the Australian CustomerGauge user community so there should be little impediment to the sharing of good ideas between companies.

Program

This packed one day program will include:

  1. Company Introductions and Lessons: Each company attending will provide a quick introduction to themselves, how they are using CustomerGauge and best practices that they have uncovered that may be of value to the other attendees.
  2. Questions From the Floor:  Designed as a time to ask questions and seek answers from those in the room about CustomerGauge or NPS in general. The goal here is to share insights amongst the group and learn from the other practioners in the room. Get your questions in early.
  3. Recent New Features: A review of recently added CustomerGauge features that not everyone may know about.
  4. Directness Presentation and CustomerGauge Roadmap:  Adam Dorrell (CEO of Directness, the company that makes CustomerGauge) has agreed to get up in the early hours of the morning and provide a live presentation on the latest information about CustomerGauge.

Date and Time

Thursday 15 March: 10am to 4pm.

Who is Invited

Everyone from Australian CustomerGauge customers. The day will probably be most useful for those that use CustomerGauge directly, manage people who use it or are involved in the NPS process.

More information

For more information about the CustomerGauge User Group or CustomerGauge product please contact us at info@genroe.com.au

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

 

 

Filed Under: Net Promoter Score Tagged With:

How To Drive Customer Experience Innovation Using Transactional NPS

December 6, 2011 By 1 Comment

innovationI wrote recently about how engineers in process plants are never happy with the status quo. They are always looking for improvements and tweaks to the manufacturing process that can drive incremental improvement in profit and efficiency.

This post is about how you can use Transactional Net Promoter Score to do the same thing for customer loyalty, through its key driver; customer experience.

Two types of innovation

Lets start by identifying two key types of innovation: discontinuous and incremental.

Discontinuous innovation creates whole new genres or products: think T-Model Ford replacing the horse, the Sony Walkman creating a whole new product category, the IBM PC. Discontinuous innovation generates major leaps forward but is relatively rare and risky.

Incremental innovation slowly but surely improves a product or category. Incremental innovation is how the car went from the T-Model Ford to the F1 racing car we see today. All the key features of the T-Model are present in the F1 racing car, they are just much, much improved. A million small incremental innovations over 80 years has generated a product that is essentially the same but completely different.

The simple truth is that while discontinuous innovation is sexy, it is also risky and rare. Incremental innovation is less exciting but very low risk, and generates enormous value day in and day out.

Driving incremental customer experience innovation

So how do engineers drive incremental innovation? Not by focusing on the whole process but by breaking it down into sub-areas areas and focusing on the worst performing areas first. To identify the worst performing areas, and how to fix them, engineers then use systems that collect thousands of measurements from all over their manufacturing process.

This very same process can be used to drive incremental innovation in your customer experience. Simply swap the industrial manufacturing process for the customer experience (where we manufacture customer loyalty) and the Transactional Net Promoter Score process for the engineer’s temperature and pressure sensors.

From a practical perspective you can achieve this by breaking your customer experience down into distinct touch-points and sub-processes and then apply Transactional Net Promoter Score to collect data at each of the touchpoints.

Start with the worst

Now you have a series of customer experience manufacturing steps, each with it’s own customer experience sensor to collect data about what works and does not work. Using NPS you can now rank the customer experience manufacturing steps from best to worst; highlight the pain points and focus on those areas that most need attention first.

Put simply; the touch-point with the lowest NPS will be the one that is performing the worst, and the one that you need to start work on first.

If you have implemented Transactional Net Promoter Score correctly you will also have a range of other diagnostic information to let you know what is wrong with the touch-point and how to fix it. It is then up to you to apply the current quality system toolkit that your organization uses (Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, etc) to take this information and drive change.

Customer Experience a Process not a Project

Once you have improved the worst touch-point you can move on to the second worst touch-point and repeat the process. Now you can see that customer experience is not a project but a process. It is a never ending cycle of incremental innovation that can and will move you a long way from your Model-T customer experience to a Formula 1 customer experience.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Best Practices, Customer Experience Management, Customer Feedback Process, Net Promoter Score Tagged With: ,

Do Your Customer Experience Initiatives Have These Flaws?

November 29, 2011 By 1 Comment

It seems to me that many customer experience initiatives are deeply flawed. They start out well intentioned but lack the right process improvement mindset to drive long term change.

The customer experience strategy that seems to be best practice at the moment is:

  1. Do some research on what people want: ask a focus group, run a survey, etc,
  2. Design “the best” customer experience based on the research.
  3. Test it in a limited way –asking people what they think, doing some usability testing (i.e. watching what people actually do either actually or via analytics) of your systems.
  4. Roll-it out.
  5. Relax

The critical part is that the design process (steps 1 and 2)  is run only once. Then, having agreed that it is perfect just let it run. This is wrong.

I spent 10 years working in the industrial process control industry. Let me describe how a completely different type of business runs a very similar process in a completely different way.

Consider a manufacturing plant, say an Oil Refinery. In many respects it goes through the very same process:

  1.  Do some research: engineers gather information about the industrial manufacturing process based on relatively well known chemical and physical processes.
  2.  Design the plant: based on the specification and the research, design an appropriate plant.
  3.  Test it in a limited way: often for a new types processes a smaller pilot plant is created to test the idea.
  4.  Roll-it out; Build the full scale plant and start manufacturing. This is often a long and complex task, especially in the case of an Oil Refinery.So far it’s all the same.
  5. Relax Start the work of improving the design of the plant. As soon as the plant is up and running, engineers are looking for ways to improve performance. They have banks of feedback data from sensors all over the plant. Using that data and starting on day one they are trying to work out how to improve production to more than 100% of rated capacity.

This last step is missing in many organizations working on the customer experience. They may design and build lots of different areas of customer experience but this continuous improvement piece is missing. There are two issues that prevent the last step form occurring:

  • The lack of a continuous improvement mindset
  • The lack of real-time feedback data.

Continuous improvement mindset

Engineers are trained to look for problems and fix them. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” just doesn’t apply. Continuous, improvement within the process parameters that currently exist, is the order of the day.

You can think of it as a giant test and learn process. You wouldn’t think of running your next direct marketing campaign through a one off design and go approach so why are you trying you do it for your customer experience.

No, instead you constantly test different copy, layout, offers etc.. It should be exactly the same for the customer experience. Never be happy, always be looking for an extra 1% improvement.

In truth this can be hard to do in a customer experience process because of the lack of real time feedback data.

The lack of real-time feedback data

Engineers have access to an extraordinary array of feedback about the manufacturing process. Every pump, valve, heater, switch, etc is monitored in real time and it’s history tracked by the second. That is literally thousands or tens of thousands of separate measurements and history with which to work.

In customer experience what have you got: an annual survey of a small proportion of your customers and a few paltry complaints.

[You also have contact centre reports, sales figures, and web logs but these are indirect measurements.]

At least that was what you use to have. Enter Transactional Net Promoter Score. The customer experience equivalent of all those sensors.

Transactional NPS allows the customer experience professional to get a real time view of the quality of the product that is being manufactured, sorry customer experience delivery, sorry loyalty of the customer. In this case the product being manufactured is loyal customers.

Transactional Net Promoter Score As Your Customer Experience Strategy

But TNPS is more than just a measurement it is also a continuous improvement process. Yes the “would recommend” question is the most well known element of NPS but there is also a full change management, continuous improvement element present in best practice Net promoter implementations.

This means that Transactional Net Promoter Score can be the Customer Experience Strategy for your business. By implementing TNPS you get your customer experience strategy included. No extra charge.

In a future post I’ll expand on exactly how to use Transactional Net Promoter Score to drive business improvement.

More Information

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

By Adam Ramshaw

Filed Under: Customer Analytics, Customer Experience Management, Net Promoter Score Tagged With:
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