In my latest post on LinkedIn, I discuss the dangers of taking customers for granted. Even if you think your customers have no alternative to your services (and trust me, they’ll find one eventually), their loyalty matters.

Read the post here: Your Customers Aren’t Yours

If you like it, click “follow” and my future posts will show up in your LinkedIn feed.

Detractors are so dangerous to companies that the Net Promoter system weights them more heavily. In my latest post on LinkedIn, I discuss why companies need to take angry customers seriously.

Read the post here: What Does an Angry Customer Cost?

And several carriers use a Net Promoter system as their guide, reports travel editor Scott McCartney in a new Wall Street Journal article. Not only are these companies asking customers for feedback, they’re proving that they’re listening. From the article:

“NPS is core to how we make decisions,” said Robin Hayes, JetBlue’s chief commercial officer. One example: NPS influenced JetBlue’s choice to offer customers one free checked bag when rival carriers began instituting baggage fees. Executives believed that the revenue generated by a new fee would be offset, in the long run, by lower revenue from weakened loyalty.

NPS has been playing an increasing role in the airline industry, from helping to engage employees and improve customer service to supporting the design of a better customer experience. On a personal level, NPS even helped save my family vacation.

So it’s encouraging to see airlines use real-time feedback to help them improve the passenger experience, and realize the importance of earning loyalty. NPS is helping many airlines around the world prioritize and eradicate the root cause of customers’ frustrations faster—and that’s the first step toward solving them.

If you haven’t seen it, check out the Journal article here: ‘Dear Airline, Here’s the Problem…’

Photo credit: Freakland

In the suburb where I live, people regularly demolish 4,000-square-foot homes just because they’re a little outdated, clearing the way for new 8,000-square-foot estates. Everything goes into the dumpster— all the flooring, drywall, window, carpets, fixtures and even the kitchen sink! Our local landfill is full of discarded houses.

Of course, these same folks religiously separate their paper and plastic trash each week, in the name of saving the planet. I’m all in favor of recycling, but in this case, their commitment to environmentally responsible and sustainable practices seems superficial at best.

In the corporate world, there’s a similar pattern. Companies love to use buzzwords like “stewardship” and “sustainability” in their public relations campaigns. But inside their walls, many treat their most precious assets as disposable: people.

These companies act like they’re entitled to customers. They ignore what is in the best interests of their clients, deliver uninspired service and make customers jump through hoops to get their complaints resolved. These companies treat their employees as though they’re lucky to have their jobs. They issue one-size-fits-all dictums from corporate headquarters and rarely take workers’ input seriously.

Maybe it’s time to rethink corporate responsibility and return to the fundamental idea that companies are responsible for the lives of the investors, employees and customers that they touch. Do the company’s actions enrich those lives or diminish them? The makes it possible to measure this important trait. People whose lives have been enriched tend to become promoters. Those whose lives have been diminished typically become detractors.

Let’s put aside the corporate carbon footprint for a moment and consider what the scores imply about the human footprint created by the average company today. Many companies today are turning far less than half of their customers and employees into promoters. This enormous failure rate tells me that companies should feel good about any kind of stewardship. And if they considered the toxic effect those detractors have on their colleagues and customers—and the reputation of these corporations and their leaders—they would realize they are nowhere near achieving true sustainability.

Some might feat that automating interactions and keeping customers away from branches might hurt loyalty, but the opposite is true. In my latest post on LinkedIn, I explain why mobile banking is a great way to delight the customer profitably.

Read the post here: Why Your Bank Wants to Keep You Away

If you like it, click “follow” and my future posts will show up in your LinkedIn feed.

In the latest issue of HR Magazine, the publication of the Society for Human Resource Management, journalist Kathryn Tyler explains why companies are turning to Net Promoter to gauge the true sentiment of their employees. The magazine interviewed HR executives at a number of companies that use NPS, including Carolina Biological Supply, Westpac, Edmunds.com and Concentra.

As noted by the executives at the companies Tyler interviewed, NPS works well for employees for the same reasons it works for customers: It’s simple, fast and clear. When a survey is short but meaningful, the answers are all the more powerful. Anonymity allows employees to provide the honest feedback that managers need to create an inspiring and productive culture.

“We had such great success using the metric to measure customer satisfaction that we wanted to see what results we would receive from the employee perspective,” says Katina Richmond, vice president of HR and organizational development for Carolina Biological Supply in Burlington, N.C.

According to the article, the company categorizes the concerns of its 450 employees by job type and department so that managers can react in ways that matter most to the specific group. When a company shows its staff that its feedback matters, employees feel they have a real stake in the company’s performance. They go out of their way to delight customers, and everyone—customers, employees and the company—benefits.

Tyler interviewed me, too. As I told her for the article, companies should only solicit feedback from employees if managers are prepared to engage them and respond. The only thing worse than failing to seek your employees’ advice is ignoring their input when you get it.

Read more in HR Magazine (membership required).

Q. Would you recommend the Net Promoter score course by Satmetrix and why?

A. You’ll get three major benefits from the training and certification.

First, you’ll gain a much better understanding of the full Net Promoter toolkit. You’ll learn the technical and analytic techniques that help ensure you have a reliable and actionable source of feedback.

Second, you will earn a recognized certification, which is valued by other practitioners.

Finally, you will meet others who are also using the Net Promoter system. Many of them will have valuable experience and connections that will prove valuable to your company and to you, personally.

Q. Does the UK tend to score lower in consumer product Net Promoter scores? We tend to see much lower NPS for the same product in the UK versus Canada.  Is this unusual?

A. We have not found consistently lower Net Promoter scores in the UK than in other English-speaking countries.

On the other hand, when we look at the Net Promoter scores of divisions in some multinationals, their Net Promoter scores vary from market-to-market – sometimes by a lot. Our analysis typically reveals three underlying issues, which vary from company to company and from business to business:

1. Differing competitive dynamics. For some businesses, the UK market (for example) is fiercely competitive, with many companies competing for customers’ business. In others, the UK might be an oligopoly. For example, the UK retail banking market is dominated by a small number of banks. The US, on the other hand, has a significantly larger number of competitors. Competitive dynamics can be an accident of history, a result of regulation or even a result of demographic or geographic differences.
2. Differing performance of the company. Perhaps the UK team is just not as capable as the team in Canada. Or maybe product and service needs are different for customers in that market. Either way, if your competitors meet customers’ needs better, then your company’s NPS might be lower.
3. Cultural differences in response to surveys. This is often cited as a primary reason, but our experience shows it is usually less important than people think. In fact, it’s almost always cited by executives in one company within a market more than by their competitors. Guess which company: the one with the lower scores. Japan is one of the few countries where this is absolutely a big issue. UK customers do not tend to exhibit significant differences in their use of response scales than do respondents from other English-speaking countries.

To determine where your UK business really stands, and to figure out whether its Net Promoter score is “good” or “bad,” you’ll want to use relative Net Promoter scores. You can learn more about those in this article.

I also described how to think about your company’s Net Promoter score in answer to this question on Quora: Net Promoter Score: What is a good net promoter score to have?

Q. Are Net Promoter scores applicable to consumer products business with no direct retail component?

A. Consumer products and packaged goods manufacturers typically use the Net Promoter system in two ways:

1. To collect, learn from and put into action feedback from channel partners (retail and wholesale distribution)
2. As a metric for gauging consumer reactions in new product development

In practice, we have seen many more successful applications of the feedback system for use in channel/account relationship management than for calculating brand scores.

Nevertheless, we have seen cases of such strong correlation between Net Promoter scores and brand strength that we find an increasing number of marketers using NPS for “quick and dirty” brand research.