I recently heard David Deal, Senior Director Marketing at CHEP, speak about their challenges, trials, and triumphs with developing and maintaining their Net Promoter Score (NPS) program. Here are a few things that David had to share.
For starters… you have to ensure that everyone in the organizations understands the relevance. If it is not relevant then you won’t get the support that is needed to get the participation to execute. And the first group of people you need to get buy-in from is the executive team. Find a champion that is either on the executive team or has the backing of the executive team.
Next, align the program with the fiscal year plan and define what “world class” means for your organization. As your organization determines its annual fiscal plan, ensure that the program is tied to it – that it maps to themes and there are measures applied. Once you have buy-in and you are aligned to the annual objectives and goals, then you need to execute. Here are four tips from David:
- Get the right sample
- Commit to the plan
- Close the loop
- Constant Analysis
The right sample is specific to your organizations vision of world-class with factors like marketplace, customer profiles, and target audience persona. Statistically significant sample size is a factor, too. Everyone involved needs to commit to the plan. Remind them of the vision, constantly analyzing the verbatim to drive your action plan that close the loop.
David shared that they would identify the most important issues and work with leaders to address one issue/year and tied those to annual objectives and bonuses. CHEP is a big company with approximately 8,000 employees operating in about 50 countries. There Customer Insights team that runs the program is only three employees that act more as “teachers” with the divisions leaders responsible for developing their action plans and closing the loop with their customers. They do 50 surveys/year (one for each country). Each country division team can add two specific questions for their region to the standard survey.
This should give you something to think about if you are thinking about developing a NPS program for your organization or want to improve the one you have.