Alain Thys

As companies strive to improve their customer experience, the desire to do more than satisfy customers is becoming increasingly important. 

But at the same time it is remarkable how few companies have a programme in place to capture the profits of turning someone into a brand advocate. This is an expensive oversight. It leaves companies with the investment for improving their customers’ experiences. But they miss out on the (financial) returns this generates.

In a major customer centricity programme I ran a number of years ago, we interviewed over 100 people at all levels of the organisation. We wanted to understand how customer-centric they considered themselves to be and compare these findings to the behaviour of the whole business.

Imagine the following situation.

A man sees an attractive woman at a party. They talk and decide to have a few dates. After giving all the right signals for being a loyal, caring, trustworthy and relationship-oriented guy, he convinces her to spend the night. The next day he is gone and when she calls, it is clear he doesn't want to speak to her....

When implementing a Net Promoter programme, many organisations grow impatient. The initial business case may look compelling, but it may take months or even years before the results from acting on customer feedback show up in the (financial) numbers.

Customer-centricity starts by listening to the customer. But in many organisations it seems that the further you get away from the customer (research) department, the less people actually listen.

When it comes to managing the digital customer experience, there’s an interesting duality all of us need to deal with:

What do you think would happen if during an offsite meeting, 6 members of your 10-people strong management team came up with the most brilliant brand and customer strategy on the planet. In fact it was so brilliant, that it would give Apple, Google and Amazon a run for their money. It would go down in history as the best strategy every written.

But then they decided to keep this strategy a secret, only to be shared by the worthy ones. They’d only tell 1 in 4 employees. 1 in 2 managers and none of the other four executive team members who didn’t participate in the off-site.

When implementing a Net Promoter programme, many organisations grow impatient. The initial business case may look compelling, but it may take months or even years before the results from acting on customer feedback show up in the (financial) numbers.

You can address part of this impatience by clearly managing expectations on what the programme can and cannot deliver in each stage of its development. But you can also plan for quick wins which you can pace across your first year (or even 100 days) of NPS implementation.