It’s 10 years since the development of the net promoter score by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain. It’s been widely adopted. Your bonus may be partly dependent on achieving an NPS target. Its promoters say simplicity – boiling everything down to one number – helps people across the business engage with customer satisfaction. Detractors argue that this simplicity obscures the causes of satisfaction and, more importantly, dissatisfaction. Whatever the chosen method, customer satisfaction scores are often one of the measures most tracked and quoted in large service businesses. Read More

It’s all the rage to talk about purpose in business (I’m keen on it myself) but business also has to be about the numbers. The financial results are the ultimate numbers. Targets, KPIs and incentives are management tools to drive and track progress. But, there’s more to the old adage, “what gets measured gets done” than setting KPIs. Not all customer metrics are good for customers; even the best-intentioned metrics can have unintended consequences. Here are a couple of examples. Read More

That American business import, “the C suite”, gets some bad press. In the FT recently, Lucy Kellaway wrote a whole column about how she abhors it, prompted by the appointment of Charlotte Hogg as chief operating officer at the Bank of England. I confess I was a chief innovation officer for a while, though, in my defence, I never really called myself that. I don’t mind CMOs and CEOs, nor even COOs. But I do take grave exception to the latest addition to the C suite, Read More

Where do you stand on the debate about whether brands, in their role as advertisers, should use their influence to make Twitter and Facebook clean up the nastiness that’s to be found there?

Let’s review the situation. Most media channels need advertising revenue. So brands have power and influence. Equally, brands want to reach their target markets efficiently, i.e. cheaply. Media that get attention, for whatever reason, can offer large audiences, which attract brands. Read More

Have you, as a customer, ever had it patiently explained to you by a sales or service person that “it doesn?t work like that”? Don’t you just hate that! To paraphrase Steve Jobs, it’s not the customer’s job to know how it works. On the contrary, it’s the marketer’s job to know how the customer thinks and acts and wants it to be. All the same, it is possible to create customer behaviour that is efficient and smart for your business. Read More

According to the service profit chain theory, satisfied employees deliver satisfied customers, which means sales will rise and profits will grow. So in a service business, if you focus on keeping employees happy and motivated, that’s job done. Who could disagree with that? I can.

I once worked with a contact centre business in the US mid-west which had the happiest employees in the state, and probably in the entire contact centre industry in the USA. Read More

Jeanette Winterson wrote in her autobiography that her mother despaired of her, saying, “Why be happy when you could be normal?” Mrs Winterson saw conformity as a virtue. In her worldview, Jeanette’s job was to fit in rather than be fulfilled by being herself. Jeanette couldn’t help it though – she wasn’t trying to be different, she was different from the sort of girl her mother expected her to be. Accepting the status quo wasn’t an option for her. Read More

I heard the great Gary Hamel, co-author of Competing for the Future, give a talk on innovation a while back, at the London Business School. He cited the classic hotel clothes or coat hanger as “stupid” – this one. Because it is infuriating to use, isn’t it?

Professor Hamel used it as an example of poor innovation – and of course he’s right, it is rubbish for the end user, the hotels’ customers, Read More

There’s a whole industry built on having sporting achievers speak to business people, and the received wisdom is that we can learn from them. We can – but not what you might think. It’s not so much about the value of commitment, belief, teamwork – all that inspiring stuff – as it is about seeing a fulfilled person, and wanting to share that feeling. Here’s my blog post from Brand Republic.

Sir Matthew Pinsent is a very big man, Read More

Every business needs an effective customer dashboard, which should measure how the business is delivering on its promise to customers (or consumers), and not how well the marketing department is spending its marketing budget (see Dashboard schmashboard). Every function is responsible for managing and spending its budget wisely. Marketing communications budgets may be subject to board scrutiny from time to time, just like other large budgets, but that’s nothing to do with the customer experience. Read More