TLDR: Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS®) surveys can help you decode many things about your business. Most people start by looking at the global NPS trend.
To get the most value from your analysis, I recommend “double-clicking” on your NPS results and looking more closely at what’s below the surface.
TLDR: Building a Customer Success Team? Start with Customer Feedback
The genesis of a customer success team is often “ready, fire, aim”. Somebody has to manage the growing customer base, and quickly.
But the team should start with a purpose, or else you risk mismatching your hires to the needs of the job. How do you define that purpose? Use customer feedback to create the team charter.
Leaders who work within a governance structure are different than ones who never had governance over them. We’re experiencing the difference right now in our president’s behavior, and nobody should be surprised at what we see.
Why shouldn’t this be surprising? We implicitly assume that all leaders are accustomed to a governance-based structure because they worked within one before. We get surprised by the behaviors of those who never had governance, because it’s a rare circumstance.
Most all of us have a boss. Even as a CEO, you have a “boss” because you have a board of directors to whom you’re accountable, or to investors, or both. When we reflect on recent presidents, they all had bosses too.
President Obama had a boss as a senator; the party leader. Plus his constituents. As a law professor, he had a boss in the dean of the faculty or the departmental head.
President Bush had bosses. As governor, it was his constituents and his party. As a businessman, he was on boards of directors where others’ inputs were accommodated by necessity.
However, our president grew up never having a boss. This is both unusual and very different.
Effectively, he wasn’t ever subject to the governance of independent directors, investors or a supervisor. As a result, his behaviors never had to accommodate persons in higher authority than himself.
By way of analogy, once in a while a company in the tech industry manages to succeed with the founder’s own bootstrapping. Only later does the company accept outside investment and accept outside investors onto a board of directors. The longer the time between initial bootstrapping and initial governance, the harder it is on the founder to modify his or her behavior to accept a governance structure for the first time.
I’ve borne witness to multiple of these situations and I can tell you that the founder/CEO seldom adjusts to this change easily if at all.
Now our country is witnessing this phenomenon on a grand scale as our president experiences the initial shock of governance; there is now a unilateralism in virtually everything he does. This includes but goes beyond having two other branches of government. There are bosses in the form of constituents, the media, other governments, staffers etc. He can’t order everybody around as he was accustomed to. Apparently he doesn’t like it one bit.
We should not be surprised by any of this given an utter lack of governance in his past, let alone taking his personality into account. If Americans thought they were hiring a typical successful business CEO – who had a board and investors – they overlooked the important difference between the vast majority of CEO’s and this one: governance.
Whether he becomes an effective president or not will depend, in my opinion, on whether he can accept governance over himself for the first time.
TLDR: Customer Experience is a holistic approach that covers every touchpoint your customer has with you. You should be constantly vigilant in verifying that every touchpoint is always working.
The Pew Research Foundation published an in-depth analysis of what constitutes “national identity” around the world. The data is based on Spring 2016 survey data.
What struck me is how important being a Christian is to Americans, relative to other countries:
As one might imagine, the importance of Christian affiliation is greater for Republicans than Democrats.
In fact, there are several meaningful differences in the definition of “national identity” between the parties:
We know that city dwellers skew Democrat and rural dwellers skew Republican. This report reinforces the broader basis of our “city mouse versus country mouse” cultural and socioeconomic divide:
I fear this divide is intractable for now. Our cities are becoming more, not less, diverse by every measure thanks to the global nature of the technology and financial service industries.
But the divide is still probably temporal, given the long term demographic trends.
Perhaps we’re experiencing the last stand by those who think our country’s control should rest in the hands of one religious affiliation:
For another blog is the irony of this all. Our founding fathers carefully designed an areligious government system, where no religious bloc could wield power over others. Their motives were rooted in their prior experiences of religious persecution and monarchial control.
If we really want to get along, perhaps the founding fathers should be our true north (again).
TLDR: A lot of work has been done in recent years to develop customer health scores. In B2B SaaS, even more work has been done to automate the process. Interestingly, the underlying approach that most companies use is flawed.
We can draw a lot of lessons from sales forecasting in order to get health scores right.
My 9-year-old son is aware of the recent election and the President’s actions since inauguration. He sees news snippets on TV and brings stories back from school.
It’s been difficult explaining to him why the President can get away with lying.
He understands that the role of President is to be our country’s leader, and therefore should be the “best” person among us. And he’s heard many, many times from us his parents about the importance of truthfulness.
So he’s confused.
Yet his innocent question remains.
Our President is a serial liar. This is not in dispute. He’s done so multiple times in just his first week in office, perpetuating a pattern throughout his candidacy. And his lies are beyond what we’re accustomed to hearing from politicians on both sides, spinning their versions of an issue.
So many questions come to mind:
These are profound issues. Ones that are tempting to ignore but carry untold costs.
Ethics matter if we want to continue to be the country we say we are.
Time for something fun given the serious nature of our nation’s current events.
Over on Facebook, there was a recent meme asking to list your Top 10 records. For many music fans, this is nearly impossible.
So, I’m taking a stab at my Top 107 instead.
Some ground rules:
Here goes….loosely grouped by genre but in no particular order.
TLDR: If you want to be successful with any customer feedback program – NPS ® or otherwise – you need to think of it as a catalyst for change first and foremost. Which means you need to pay attention to the impediments to change, lest all that customer feedback is ignored. Continue reading
TLDR: It’s the start of the year, when companies review their annual goals and compensation plans. Typically, customer retention and growth is a top priority.
Do you have the right incentives in place to meet your customer retention goals? There are two approaches to answering this question: bottoms-up and top-down.
Don MacLennan | High Tech Yankee 