Creating a culture of customer advocacy

In this final post on resistance to changing customer metrics, we consider some of the tips for responding to the objections.  Our first post catalogued the objections, the second one tried to ferret out kernels of truth among the complaints, and this final one provides some proven techniques for addressing the complaints.  This couldn't possibly be a comprehensive list.  But it is the distilled experience of our clients and members of the NPS Loyalty Forum.  I bet you have other advice, too.

A few tips for addressing metric-based resistance to change: 

• First, make sure they have their facts right.  Many of the purported "studies" that attack the value of Net Promoter Scores or other metrics simply don't provide factual evidence supporting their claims.  Others are fundamentally flawed.  The most popular of all of them actually supports Bain's research under an inflammatory and provocative headline. (See related post:  Don't just read the text - pore over the data.  Also, you should check out some of the other resources, including other blog posts, located on the Additional resources page of this blog.)
• Bring people back to the primary objective:  Taking actions that will earn your target customers' loyalty (both behaviorally, and emotionally).
• Few employees understand complicated, proprietary satisfaction or loyalty indices.  Fewer still find them motivating and energizing.  And they rarely perceive them as actionable.  This is as true in the C-suite as it is among hourly customer-facing employees.  It has nothing to do with the intelligence of the employees, and everything to do with complexity and opacity of proprietary models.
• Sorting customers into Promoters, Passives and Detractors is more important than calculating an aggregate or average score.  It is intuitive.  It motivates action.  It generally makes sense to anyone in the organization.  If you can do that pretty reliably, you have a great metric.  It's no more complicated than that.
• Learning why a customer became a Promoter or a Detractor, what could be done to improve the relationship, and how this compares to what they expect or get from competitors is even more important for unlocking action.  Get people past the numbers and focusing on how to LEARN from the feedback.  For a great example of this, see our video about how Schwab uses closed loop feedback.
• Focus on the operational improvements that closed-loop feedback and learning can enable, rather than the statistical precision of one metric over another.  One of the key reasons to adopt the Net Promoter approach is to enable service recovery with customers, fast learning at the front line and to motivate systematically better product, pricing, policy, process and people decisions.  You can't achieve that with a market research approach that takes months to execute, process, digest and make its way, in report form, back to the front line and middle management.  Few proprietary, index based approaches to customer feedback accomodate this.
• Remind your colleagues that bombing a customer with lengthy surveys that don't result in visible action is a form of disrespect, eroding your relationship.  A good closed loop feedback system is short, respectful of the customer's time, doesn't force the customer into your framework for evaluation, and results in visible action that reinforces the customer's decision to provide the feedback.
• If all else fails, give up on the new metric (for now) and focus on creating robust closed-loop feedback.  In the end, the organization will be forced by both customers and employees to simplify the metric and the data collection.  This is a longer, more painful path.  But don't make it a religious war.  Leave that to the academics.

What tactics have you employed to address resistance to changing customer metrics?  Which ones worked?  Which ones would you do differently next time?  Add your experience to the comments!

In the prior post, we catalogued some of the most frequently-encountered objections to changing customer metrics.  This time, we'll try to give the objectors the benefit of the doubt and search for what might be valid about their objections and arguments.

What about these objections is valid?

The people raising these objections may be disruptive and even irritating at times.  Sometimes, their objections are based on incomplete understanding of what is being proposed.  Often, they choose confrontational and argumentative ways to raise their issues.  In some cases, they aggressively attack the new metrics without making constructive or helpful counter-recommendations.

Nevertheless, they often raise issues out of a genuine concern for the company's best interests.  (Okay, not always, but often.)  Buried deep in many forms of resistance to change we often find kernels of truth.  These can help improve the solutions and actions you take.

A few of the points that may have some merit: 

• Sophisticated and complex multi-question customer loyalty or satisfaction scores often provide stronger statistical correlations to customer behavior than do simpler, easier to understand metrics such as the Net Promoter Score.  In fact, in our client work, we have shown that you can get a 5-15% improvement in explanatory power moving from a radically simple Net Promoter Score based approach to one of the proprietary models based on multiple questions.
• Changing from an existing metric to a new one almost always disrupts the organization in the short term.  Losing a baseline is scary, especially for the people closest to the data.  The anxiety caused by this can last for several months.  So leadership teams should anticipate this and develop ways to bridge from the old world to the new, if necessary.
• Metrics with high sensitivity to changes in customer sentiment introduce more volatility in feedback and demand more attention.  For organizations accustomed to stable feedback scores that don't change much over time, this can create real consternation.
• The scale used to gauge customer feedback matters, somewhat.  It must be simple, intuitive and help differentiate responses meaningfully, so that real differences in customer behavior correlate well with different responses.
• Introducing a new scale can create some confusion, if not done thoughtfully.
• No metric, by itself, tells an organization what to do.  So the new metric won't either.

Bottom line:  If your primary objective is statistical accuracy, stick with your current, proprietary index.  If you value stability and consistency over action, learning and impact, you should probably stick with what you've got.

There may be other "kernels of truth" in these objections.  See any I've missed?  Leave a comment.

Next time:  Proven techniques for addressing the objections.

If you're not truly serious about changing your company's culture, don't even think about adopting the Net Promoter approach for achieving customer advocacy.  Just changing metrics accomplishes nothing but heartache and pain.  Yes, culture change is hard work.  It requires persistence, patience and perseverance.  But only by changing the culture do you create a sustainable focus on earning your customers' enthusiastic recommendations.

Bain Detractor emoticon available for download by registered site membersAttempts to change a company's culture invariably draw heavy resistance.  One of the most common and distracting forms of resistance often involves a debate about success metrics.  Resistance usually starts quite early in the change process, typically with objections to the validity, advisability or practicality of the new approach.

It can be tempting to dismiss those raising objections as complainers, cry-babies or whiners.  Yet, they sometimes raise important points worth attending to.  Well, okay, not very often.  But sometimes.

This is the first in a series of (probably three) posts focused on resistance to changing customer feedback metrics.  In this one, we'll just try to catalog some of the most frequently-raised objections.

Typical complaints and arguments

Do any of the following resonate?  Have you heard them in your organization? (Fill in the bracketed phrases with whatever is relevant to your company.)

• "We have years of experience with [our existing customer metric] and we would lose our baseline if we make a switch"
• "Our existing metric is very sophisticated.  It was developed by [reputable research company] based on [gazillions] of data points and has been shown to be statistically superior to [whatever other metric you like]."
• "I saw a study by [a guy who wrote a book or is a professor or gives speeches or has a blog] that says [new metric] is bunk and is statistically inferior to [what we're already using]."
• "[Market research firm we're using today] says the [new metric] is dangerous and bad.  They say their [proprietary customer loyalty or satisfaction model] is far superior."
• "We already measure [new metric].  It is the __th question in our customer satisfaction research survey already.  We don't need to change anything.  We'll just calculate a score in addition to [what we're already doing]."
• "The [new metric] is too volatile.  [Current metric] is very stable and doesn't change very much over time.  If we base our goals on [new metric], people will be really concerned when it changes."
• "The [new metric] is based on a [different scale than we currently use].  This new scale will confuse our customers."
• "The [new metric] is based on a [different scale than we currently use].  This new scale is flawed because a study by [some professor somewhere] showed that it wasn't as good as [what we currently use]."
• "We don't know how to drive [the new metric].  Setting goals on a metric we don't know how to change will cause [gazillions of problems]."
• "The [new metric] is just a score.  It doesn't tell us what to do.  We don't know why it changes.  So it is not actionable."

Sound familiar?  What have you heard?  Add yours to the comments below.

Next time:  Is it worth listening to the complainers?

Read the article at the Sloan Management Review web siteMIT's Sloan Journal of Management recently published a provocative article that provides a nice litmus test for customer focus.  Authors Patrick Barwise and Seán Meehan pose five questions to ask yourself:

1. Can middle managers accurately describe your customer promise?
2. Can all members of your senior executive team name the three things that most undermine trust among your existing customers?
3. Is your brand really the best option for customers? Will it continue to be next month and next year?
4. Have you embraced any novel ideas that have produced significant innovations beyond the familiar during the past year?
5. Have front-line staff posed any uncomfortable questions or suggested any important improvements to your offering during the last three months?

While there are many other questions you could imagine asking to test the degree to which your organization is customer focused, this is a darned good starting point.  Importantly, they focus on middle managers and front line staff.  Moreover, they focus on what undermines trust, the hardest thing to earn and sustain from your customers.

What's missing?  At Bain, we always start by testing whether an organization can clearly identify its target customers, what they need/want, and what our company is uniquely positioned to deliver to them.  It's an important omission from this list, but I still liked the article.

Click to read more ...

Pete Abila, a lean Six Sigma and operational improvement guy who writes a blog, received an email solicitation from Qwest to take a Net Promoter survey and had a few observations about how the invitation was organized, worded and who it was from.  He also includes screen shots of the survey itself.

It's a pretty good example of a darned good attempt that just barely misses the mark.

You can see his blog post here: Shmula.com