Net Promoter Conference Recap

In my last post I shared my plans to be a guest blogger at the Net Promoter conference. While I was quite naive about the time commitment involved, it gave me the discipline to truly learn from each and every session. I tried to capture as much of the information shared in my postings to netpromoter.com. For those that did not attend the conference you can read about my detailed learnings here.

Throughout the event, there were some very consistent themes. These themes came from those that have successfully applied Net Promoter to their business and achieved business value and growth as a result. While many of the detailed learnings have nuances that you should understand, in an attempt to provide an executive overview, here are my key takeaways.

1. Executive sponsorship. Without this, don't bother! This is the single most important element of successful adoption of Net Promoter. This is not a new way to collect customer data; it's a new way of doing business. That requires the tone from the top. This was obvious in case studies shared by Intuit, Filenet, and Charles Schwab. These organizations had a mandate driven from the CEO with resources allocated accordingly.

2. Organizational alignment. To truly benefit from Net Promoter you have to align the organization around delivering a superior customer experience. Everyone in the organization participates in collecting, analyzing and taking action on the data. This was key to the success at Experian who has enjoyed double digit growth over the last 6 quarters in a highly competitive, mature market.

3. Take action or don't do it! Your organization must be held accountable to taking action on the data. If you don't do this you are likely to do more damage than good. If your customers feel you don't value their input, you will lose credibility. This may seem obvious, but the data from Bain is shocking on how few organizations actual change their business or close loop with the customer after they have taken the time to tell you how they'd like to do business with you.

4. Be patient. While there are opportunities to immediately provide value to your customers at an individual transaction or individual account basis, results will take time. This is a fundamental shift in how you do business and requires culture change and time to see results. Stick with it, drive execution, and you will see results. All of the case studies demonstrated business benefits in driving growth, competitive advantage and improved customer relationships.

As I contemplate the lessons learned and think about how to help my clients achieve results, it's clear to me that this is not about designing a loyalty program, it's about a culture change in the business in every part of the organization. Organizations that do this well will be the market leaders, they will create sustainable competitive advantage that will drive growth.

Something big is happening here. This came to light when I sat next to two gentlemen from Amsterdam that had made the trip over the pond to not only attend the conference, but to visit companies being successful with Net Promoter. Their organization is 100 years old and they shared with me that this is the first time their company has ever done this type of investigation and embarked on something this core to the business.

Could Net Promoter be the next business transformation? While you can debate the relative merits of the metric, you can't debate that serving customers in a way they want to be served drives profitable growth. We must shift from a product centric to customer centric business. The time has come.