The fact that I happened to load up the Logitech and Dunkin Donuts surveys on the same day is pure random chance.  They are in wildly different categories, so it would make sense that their approaches to gathering customer feedback would be wildly different.

That won't stop me, however, from making a few observations about each one.

The Logitech survey is really a classic implementation of a Net Promoter approach to gathering customer feedback.  I couldn't really say that if I didn't know how extensively and carefully Logitech's teams use the feedback to inform product development and customer service improvements.  They have talked about their approach in several public forums (plus, they were a member of the NPS Loyalty Forum and hosted one of our meetings).

Logitech is interesting, in part, because they are a product company with challenging product innovation cycles.  They use NPS as a key tool to inform their innovation and product development processes, cutting cycle times from product introduction to product enhancement.  They also have worked hard to figure out how to get a really good sample of feedback on every product, and continue to improve this over time.  They ask for feedback at just the right time -- a couple of weeks after you have installed the product, which gives you the opportunity to get past the initial excitement of the purchase and into the early usage experience.  In my case, I was giving feedback on a webcam.  My feedback was far more valuable and well-informed because I had been using it for long enough to have observed some of its unexpected good features, as well as some of the unexpected annoyances.  So my feedback was far richer and more detailed than it could have been immediately after installation.

A few things to notice, some of which you couldn't glean just from the document here:

• They trigger the survey off of product registration and time the request to coincide with the first couple of weeks of usage, rather than just purchase or installation
• Very short, simple survey - it all fits on a single web page
• Simple, context sensitive drop downs to help you let them know which product you're telling them about
• Plenty of open-ended, verbatim space.  In their product categories, there are an infinite number of observations a customer could make.  Rather than box us in, they let the end customer decide what to mention and what matters
• If a customer happens to let them know they are really unhappy with a product, someone from Logitech will typically get in touch with them to follow up - they try to learn more about the situation and even engage in some customer recovery, if possible
• This Net Promoter survey process is only one part of an overall customer feedback and research approach that also incorporates other forms of customer research, observation and feedback

Here is an interesting Promoter story I just ran across on Facebook.  It is real, and the person is really one of my friends.  

(I've protected the identity of the person who posted it, the salesperson involved, and of those who commented on it, since the whole point of Facebook is being able to protect your information from being shared all over the place.)

Some questions to ask yourself:

• If you were part of the Sears management team, would you applaud the actions of this salesperson?  Or be angry about the lost revenue?
• What motivated the salesperson to take this initiative?
• Is this a powerful way to create Promoters?  What was it worth to Sears to have done this?  How would you know?

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Ron Hollis is the CEO of Quickparts, a company that makes custom-designed parts.  I first learned about them in this Fortune Small Business article last year, highlighting their use of NPS. (The full article is here.)  In addition to founding Quickparts, Ron also wrote a book on design called "Better be Running."

I recently ran across Ron's blog.  In it, he describes the company's use of the Net Promoter approach to closed loop feedback.  He introduces the topic in a blog post (which you can read in full here). I suspect it is from about a year ago and describes mostly how they calculate the score.  In itself, this isn't all that interesting.  In fact, it appears they use a 1-10 scale rather than a 0-10 scale, and he doesn't make any reference to how they collect the data, from which people in the customer organization they collect the feedback, or what else they ask beyond the simple likelihood to recommend.  So it comes across, if you read only that blog post, as if they just calculate a score and that's all.

A Common Mistake (and how to address it)

He also makes the common mistake of crowing about what I am almost certain is what we would describe as a "Bottom-up" Net Promoter Score -- collected only from Quickparts customers with a sample and methodology that can't be verified.  Such scores are notoriously unreliable as indicators of a company's overall performance because the sampling methodology relies on existing customers, introducing a bias because it excludes customers who chose not to do business with Quickparts -- or who did business once or twice but were dissatisfied and switched to a competitor.

Far more reliable for comparing scores is what we call a Relative NPS, collected through a "Top-down" process.  You survey a representative sample of all the customers in the market -- whether they do business with you or with one of your direct competitors -- and compare Net Promoter Scores of each relevant competitor.  The "rNPS" for your company is your own absolute NPS minus the NPS of your best competitor.  If your competitor has a higher NPS than you, then your rNPS will be negative.

It is crucial not to stop there.  You MUST also ask why.  You must understand the drivers of difference for your company's performance versus the competition.  The rNPS approach allows you to understand which factors contribute to differences versus competitors and how much.

Calculating Relative Net Promoter Scores requires a little more cost and time, but it's important.  You need an unbiased sample.  You need to survey customers "blind" (without identifying your company as the source of the survey, which can introduce additional response bias), and you need to use a common methodology to compare your company to the competition.

Unlocking Action Using Closed-loop Feedback

Ron wrote a more recent post, however, demonstrating that they do more than just calculate a score.  This one's a lot more interesting -- you can read it in full here -- because he shares the verbatim feedback from the customer and then describes his company's response.  While this single anecdote doesn't illustrate the full power of a closed-loop feedback like NPS, it at least gives a hint that Quickparts is doing far more with it than just calculating a number and keeping score.  An excerpt from his blog post:

Being a passive customer is NOT the desired result. We take all scores less than a 9 very seriously and attack the root cause to see what we need to change in the system to prevent the experience from being repeated. For this customer, we engaged him to apologize for the issues with the fax. Also, we had our network folks dive very deep into the fax system to validate the issue.

True closed-loop feedback unlocks opportunities to improve individual customer relationships in addition to measuring versus the competition. 

Paul Davis Restoration is an interesting company.  Among other things, they perform restoration services for homeowners or businesses that have suffered some sort of calamity like a fire or flood.  Interestingly, they are a franchise business, making it a challenge to drive change throughout their system.

They joined us at a recent meeting of the NPS Loyalty Forum and shared a little bit about their values, the challenges they face, and how they use closed loop feedback in their business to help keep a far-flung field organization close to customers.

Here's a little video snippet referring to their use of Net Promoter.

The more I collect these post-event surveys, the more fascinating I find them.

Here's a real study in contrasts.  California Pizza Kitchen has a really extensive survey.  The initial feedback survey takes up the first 21 pages of the attached document.  That's the survey you fill out if you go to the website pointed to by the register receipt after you dine at one of their restaurants. (You can see the survey in the document here.)

Some of my favorite questions from the long, long survey:

• Six questions about time:
• The accuracy of the time quoted to be seated
• The overall speed of service
• The time it took to place your order once you were seated
• The time between placing your order and receiving your order
• Did your server bring your check in a timely manner?
• Did your server process your payment in a timely manner?
• Eight questions about the staff and their behavior
• The attentiveness of the staff
• The courtesy of the staff
• Your server's menu knowledge
• Did a staff member thank you for visiting and invite you to return?
• Did your server mention a dessert by name?
• Did your server mention appetizers and/or entrees by name?
• Did your server check back with you to make sure you were pleased with your order?
• Was a manager visible during your dining experience?

• Do you really need to ask such detailed questions in order to find out what really matters to a customer?
• Are there other, better ways to get the answers to some of these questions?
• Should be burden of figuring out whether the server was doing an adequate job of up-selling (mentioning menu items by name) be put on the customer?  Or a supervisor?
• What's the best way to provide coaching feedback to a front line employee like a server or the cooks regarding things like service time or knowledge of menu items?  Is it a score on multiple choice questions?  Or verbatims from customers?
• Are simple "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" graphics the best way to rate a few important items?  Or would a scale provide better quality feedback?

I was waiting for some clients to join a conference call this afternoon and decided to check out a couple of options for replacing my home PC.  It's nearly six years old now, and its fan is about as noisy as I can imagine tolerating.  It takes forever to render videos, and it can't even really show full screen video while running anything else.  So I made my way to the Dell web site, looking to learn a little about the newest hardware.

Now, I wasn't planning to purchase today.  Just learn about which Dell models might be good for video and photo editing.  What base model would be best for this sort of thing and roughly how much might it cost?  I know that Apple has great options for this -- I've seen lots of professionals using Apple hardware to do pretty sophisticated video editing and rendering.  I just wanted to know if there were any PC-based options from Dell, which supplied all my prior home PCs.  I don't really want to make the switch to Apple's proprietary and closed system (even though I know some of you will tell me I'm crazy).

I won't bore you with the details.  If you're really interested, try going to Dell.com and finding out about which machines would be best for video editing and rendering.  If you figure it out, tell me the trick.

For the first time, I filled out one of the site surveys that is generated from a web pop-up ad.  Very interesting.  The first page promised it would take no more than five minutes to complete.  The survey is attached here.  See if you think you could run through it in under five minutes and provide thoughtful feedback.  It would be close.

I can count about a dozen completely silly questions here.  One more example of a request for me to invest lots of time helping a company I don't have faith will listen or follow up.  Really too bad.

I stayed at a Residence Inn recently.  The more post-stay hotel surveys I complete (and share here), the more ridiculous they seem to me.  I'm not saying that the Residence Inn survey is especially bad.  Rather, it's pretty much like all the other surveys I've taken after hotel stays.  It is just long and detailed in ways that I can't imagine make it any more actionable.  Here is a link to it.

The worst part of surveys like this:  they train us, as customers, that our "reward" for opening up an email like the one you'll see in the attached file is a really, really long survey covering a series of topics that may or may not feel very relevant, with a very low likelihood that any of the feedback will result in changes to our experience the next time (or any other time).

It seems Hyatt has discovered a way to surprise guests.  Apparently, they have empowered front line employees to give guests a free meal, drink, or other item of value as a random or surprise act of "generosity."

You can read about it here.

I think this is brilliant.  A few things to consider, if you want to try this yourself:

• These gifts to customers must feel special and surprising.  This implies that they must happen infrequently and unpredictably.  Otherwise you will train your customers to expect them, reducing the impact of the action.
• The delivery of these gifts must be genuine and personal.  In the research behind this approach (described in the article text), it is clear that the good feelings of the gift recipient are conditioned on feeling this was a genuine act of kindness or altruism.  If it comes across as scripted or stilted, it is unlikely to have the desired impact

Tom Merritt of CNET pointed me to this video from Sons of Maxwell, a country group who apparently had a pretty unfortunate incident with United Airlines' baggage handlers.


I just love the creativity unleashed by anger, frustration and a loss of trust.



A few thoughts:

• In some ways, this is more about the relationship United has with its baggage handlers than it is about its attitude toward customers.  Sure, they mishandled the complaint.  But how did the baggage handlers get the idea that flinging guitars around made any sense?
• Huge lost opportunity in complaint handling here.  Probably don't need to say anything more.  But the customer seems genuinely frustrated by all the time and energy expended, only to be rejected.  In fact, the lyrics and video show real compassion toward the front line employees and supervisors who tried to help.

While best known as one of the best cardiac care facilities in the world, the Cleveland Clinic has developed a reputation for outstanding medical care in a variety of fields.

Until recently, Dr. M. Bridget Duffy headed the Clinic's patient experience transformation efforts.  Under her leadership, the organization made a wide variety of improvements.  It was announced this week that she (and her spouse, also an administrator at the Cleveland Clinic) would be leaving.  I hope she built a strong organization and team that will continue the good work she started.

Here's a link to a video of her talking about the role of her group.
 

Downturns present outstanding opportunities to gain market share versus the competition.  Of course, they are also the time that many companies enter a doom loop of slower growth, depressed profits, declining reinvestment in the business, and ultimately erosion of their market position.

The question of how great companies take advantage of downturns to gain market share is one that we at Bain have studied in detail.  I recently published a short article on the topic as one chapter of a forthcoming book on how to manage through turbulent economic times.

A few tips:

• Start by identifying your Design Target -- the few customers who represent the vast majority of the economic and strategic value in your business
• To find them, you might try rank-ordering your customers on profitability, then looking for the subset who are most emotionally and rationally attached to your business -- not just behaviorally loyal, but emotionally loyal.  Typically, in Net Promoter terms, these would be your most profitable Promoters.  Find the subsegment who have similar needs, behaviors and purchase patterns.
• Characteristics of a good Design Target:  Profitable, distinct, influential over other customers, highly loyal to your company and its products, significant remaining economic and strategic opportunity
• You probably know more about how to serve their needs than do your competitors -- generally you have more opportunity there than in any other segment, even if you already have relatively high penetration in that segment
• When you cut costs, make sure to protect those customers.  Most companies think in terms of number of customers, while the economics in most businesses are concentrated in the small group of customers in the target segment
• When you design new products, don't think only in terms of volume, but also in terms of value.  Design rigorously around the needs of the customers in that Design Target segment

On my way to and from the Net Promoter conference a couple of weeks ago (you can see a blog post about my speech here), I had the opportunity to pass through the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow.  I had heard about this fantastic new wonderland for years and years, and was bummed out when it was temporarily closed soon after its big debut.  While I had forgotten all about it until I landed and realized where I was, all the years of hype had set my expectations fairly high.


My reaction?  "Meh."  (That means I was unimpressed, uninspired, unmoved.)  On the other hand, I felt it was a perfectly branded experience -- maybe not what BA intended, but exactly what BAA (the agency that owns the airports) seems so good at creating.

Frankly, its shops, layout and interior decorations looked and felt just like any other fairly new terminal in any other major international airport.  The biggest differences I noted?

• Still had that unmistakably Heathrow experience of taking a bus from the plane to the arrivals hall
• Perfectly fitting my image of Heathrow, the walking distances are monstrous, enormous, gargantuan, neverending, interminable, sweat-inducing, arm-tiring, and at an order of magnitude unmatched by any experience I have ever had at another airport (well, okay, you can get that at CDG, if you are unlucky, too)

At last week's Net Promoter conference in Europe, Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett described the NPS journey taken by his company.  It is an impressive story, and one worth paying attention to for anyone considering heading off on such an odyssey.

Starting life as 42 different cable franchises, Virgin Media was formed through a series of mergers and acquisitions over many years.  The company’s NPS journey actually began back in 2005-2006, when Berkett was COO of the latest combination – what was then called ntl:Telewest.  Working with a team from Bain & Company on a series of issues related to the mergers and cost reduction, Berkett was introduced to the Net Promoter concept and approach by the Bain team and became fascinated.  As COO, he determined that he wanted to start measuring Net Promoter Scores in all the company’s businesses.  Moreover, he wanted to implement the Net Promoter approach to closed loop feedback to make it more than a metric and introduce it as an operating discipline.

The core problem he was attacking:  In a business that had been growing largely through consolidation, organic growth was becoming harder and harder to achieve.  While the company had an outstanding network and cable infrastructure with significant potential cost and quality advantages, net growth of subscribers was becoming more and more difficult to achieve in a profitable way.  The economics of the business were under extreme pressure.  “Our number one problem was that we didn’t keep our customers long enough.  We used to lose 1.8% of our customers each month.  At that rate it is incredibly hard to grow,” he said at the Net Promoter conference.



Unfortunately, Berkett didn’t have the full support of the CEO and the rest of the management team for addressing the churn and customer advocacy issues he had identified.  While metrics and measurements were successfully put in place with help from Satmetrix, operational changes, policy changes and the other actions required to make a dent in customer churn rates simply were not prioritized.  Berkett was frustrated.  The lesson he learned was simple.  “If the drive to improve advocacy is not from the very top, you will fail.  I was COO, and my boss didn’t buy in.  We only made progress once I became CEO.”



CEO Neil Berkett

The capstone in NTL’s growing cable empire was put in place in 2006, when NTL completed the acquisition Virgin Mobile and the Virgin brand.  In early 2007, the company rebranded all its services under the much more recognizable and aspirational Virgin brand.  On the day after the rebranding, with no changes in the operations of the business beyond new signage and advertising, the company’s customer feedback scores dropped precipitously.  Customers, it seemed, had much higher expectations for anything branded Virgin than for the old conglomeration of cable brands.

Once appointed CEO in 2008, Berkett re-dedicated the organization to pursuing customer advocacy after the acquisition had been consolidated.  “We decided NPS was the appropriate tool at the heart of our balanced scorecard.  There is a direct relationship between NPS and revenue growth and lower costs.  But you can’t just measure.  You have to fix,” he said.  "Just implementing NPS doesn't change the way you are running the business."

The results have been impressive.  Churn has been almost cut in half, to an industry leading 1.1% per month.  And the company is on firm financial footing.

A member of the NPS Loyalty Forum, Sheila Normile of eBay, passed along this very funny customer satisfaction survey spoof from February's Esquire Magazine.  She posted the pdf below, which you can download to read.  You can also read it on Esquire's website. 

I think I'm going to start using their scale on my own feedback surveys.

Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time in hotels.  I have visited one hotel in particular around 20-30 times each year for the past eight years or so.  A couple of years ago, the property became a Kimpton hotel, so I enrolled in their InTouch rewards program.

Through the rewards program I received several free nights at Kimpton hotels.  I found these valuable, bringing my wife and kids to stay with me a few times using rewards nights.  A nice bonus for spending so much time and money in their hotels -- and contrary to the Marriott or Hilton points I have amassed, these seem easy to redeem and worthwhile.

On the other hand, there's a tiny aspect of their program I find annoying.  When you join the InTouch program -- or perhaps when you achieve "Inner Circle" status, which is their elite member level -- Kimpton asks you (repeatedly, I might add) to complete an InTouch profile.  Among the questions they ask are things like what sort of pillow you prefer, whether you like a high or low floor, what sort of hobbies you have, what sort of newspaper you prefer, and what sort of treats you like.  Not uncommon in the hotel business these days.

Here's the thing:  after spending time completing this, I have seen no change.  Sure, I get put on a high floor.  But the local hotel staff knows me and has always done that.  It took over a year of complaining to the front office staff to get a Wall Street Journal delivered with any regularity.  And it's still spotty.  I've never noticed anything done with the questions about my hobbies or what I would rather be doing if not working.  And, while I appreciate the Godiva chocolates, fine wines and cheeses most often found in my room upon check-in, I don't regard those as the "healthy" snacks, fresh fruit or water I requested on my profile.

Recently, Kimpton reached out to me and offered something really interesting.  Someone from "corporate" invited me to join them for a free meal at one of their hotel restaurants in my home town.  While I couldn't take them up on the offer (I was, of course, traveling the day in question), I was flattered by the invitation and considered it a sort of honor to have been invited.  The invitation was personal and considerate, and the restaurant is known to be pretty good.

This week, I was also invited to attend the opening party at the newly-renovated restaurant in the hotel in which I stay all the time.  I happened to be in town, so I went.  It was a very nice event, and while I felt a bit like a fish out of water (I didn't really know the glitterati who were in attendance), I was again flattered to have been invited.

My observations:

• The free nights are great, but they're a commodity these days -- sort of like "table stakes" in the hotel business.  Being invested in a program makes me marginally more likely to choose a "sister" property, but as a frequent traveler, I'm invested in almost all the programs.
• Do not ask my preferences unless you intend to act on the information.  I would never have noticed that I wasn't getting the Wall Street Journal if Kimpton hadn't begged me to tell them that I would like to receive that.  I actually like the wine and cheese, but it is NOT a healthy snack.  Again, had they not asked, I wouldn't care.  But they asked and I responded.
• The mere act of inviting me to join these special dinner events was flattering and made me feel special.  The event I was able to attend provided an experience that made me more likely to dine in their restaurants, and further cemented my bonds to the hotel and the brand.  Experiences matter and can be far more impactful than "points" or "free stuff."
• The primary reason I am loyal to the property in which I stay most often has nothing to do with free nights, merchandise, check-in amenities, or free meals.  It is the staff.  They know my name, they know which rooms I like, they ask about my work and family in a genuine and real way, and they go out of their way to help me out in a thousand small ways.
• Therefore, if I had a dollar to invest in building customer loyalty, I'd first make sure I was investing in every conceivable way to help front line employees learn how to make more genuine and impactful connections with guests.  Only after exhausting that would I start adding things like check-in amenities and free stuff.

Hertz responded!  And they refunded the $25 they had charged me for filling up a full tank.

For some reason, I'm just not elated.  Can you figure out why?  Here's the text of the response they sent.

Dear Mr. Markey:

We have received your reply to our previous correspondence.

Since you have provided a gas receipt indicating the vehicle was returned with a full tank of fuel, a credit for $27.90 is being applied to the credit card billed. We sincerely apologize for the billing error.  The adjustment is being made at this time, but may not appear on the next monthly statement due to billing cut-off dates.

Thank you for contacting us again. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving your future rental needs.

Sincerely,

This was not a good example of service recovery.

I noticed a sign propped up on the condiments table at a local Starbucks. I bet very few customers have the time to read a sign this long, but I notice these things. After I read it, I started wondering what this sign really was about. Questions that occurred to me: