A central theme in Fred Reichheld's new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers, which releases December 7, is purpose. For Fred, a well-defined company purpose is the engine that drives success. But it’s not enough. To succeed, an organization’s No. 1 goal should always be to make customers’ lives better.
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, USAA took a public stance on racial justice. But Tony Wells, USAA’s chief brand officer at the time, says the organization’s conversation began privately. Given the company’s history of strong internal communication and employees’ deep sense of mission, Wells believed that they were set up for successful discussions and change.
It’s tempting to attribute USAA's success to its special expertise in serving military personnel. But Tony Wells, USAA’s former chief brand officer, says it comes down to empathy for the unique challenges members face. In this episode, Tony shares how USAA lives its mission every day, how the company quickly adapted to support employees and customers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and how it continues to prepare for disruption.
Former tech executive Kara Goldin, author of the new book “Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts And Doubters,” shares the story behind Hint Water: How her quest to find an alternative to diet soda led to the creation of an entirely new type of beverage. Her story reveals how persistence and a singular focus on meeting core customer needs can result in outsized success.
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), now part of NatWest Group, is older than some of the world’s countries. For much of that time, the very essence of the bank was to put its customers first. But in more recent history, the storied bank had lost sight of that mission, says Paul Smith, director of customer insights and marketing at NatWest Group. In this episode of the Net Promoter System podcast, Paul talks about the journey back: From an old-line and challenged bank into a customer-focused organization that is now part of NatWest Group.
Few people are loyal to a body shop. Instead, people find them, literally, by accident: after a fender bender, most customers select a shop from their insurer’s direct repair program. But when Steve Grimshaw, executive chairman of Caliber Collision, first took over as CEO of the body shop company in 2009, he realized that with repair experiences often driving insurer policy renewals and most body shop business coming from insurer referrals, customer satisfaction matters a lot.
Lori Cobb found her passion in a leadership role at Cummins Inc. that included responsibility for customer experience and insights: “I love solving problems, and I particularly enjoy solving customer problems,” she says. “And customers were hungry to have somebody just listen to what their needs are.” Today, she’s CEO of Mockingbird Ventures and a principal of AIM Advisory Services. In this episode, she shares some of the lessons she learned on her journey into customer centricity.
Darrell Rigby believes passionately that Agile is the future. “I do believe that this is the way that companies will be run going forward." His biggest fear, though, is that "there’s a lot of Agile that’s being done wrong. If we don’t fix that, then Agile is likely to turn into the next management fad.” Coauthor of a new book, Doing Agile Right, Darrell leads Bain & Company's Agile practice. He joined me to discuss how, when done right, Agile creates a culture obsessed with customer satisfaction.
Mark Robinson, president of UPS Capital, the financial services subsidiary of UPS, joins me to discuss how the adoption of the Net Promoter System at UPS Capital was turbocharged by Agile ways of working and how Agile teams were able to radically speed up needed fixes to the customer experience that frontline employee identified in their huddles.
Some customer metrics are so good at predicting customer behavior and the value of a company’s customer base, says the Wharton School’s Peter Fader, that “any sensible investor should be demanding these kinds of metrics. And of course, any sensible executive should be obsessed over these kinds of metrics internally.” In this, the second podcast in our two-part discussion, we talk about how executives can use these same metrics to change the way they look at customer investments.
As a professor of marketing at Wharton, Peter Fader has focused most of his career on analyzing data to predict how customers will behave. He is also cofounder of Theta Equity Partners, which offers customer-based corporate valuation—a way of valuing firms based on the quality of their customer base. His most recent work, in the January/February 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review and cowritten with recent podcast guest Dan McCarthy, is called “How to Value a Company by Analyzing Its Customers.”
To provide perspective on the impact of Covid-19 in South America, Rob talks with Luiza Mattos, a Bain & Company partner based in São Paulo, Brazil. Luiza is one of Bain's customer experience, Net Promoter System and Results Delivery leaders, and she recently researched how consumers in South America have been spending their time since the start of the pandemic. She also discusses the strategies companies in the region are using to make sure their customers and employees feel connected and supported.
Stanley McChrystal, CEO of McChrystal Group, knows how to lead a dispersed team in a crisis. A retired four-star general, he commanded US and International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan and was the former commander of the nation's premier military counterterrorism force, the Joint Special Operations Command. He joined the podcast during the Covid-19 crisis to talk about three ways to lead through a crisis: trust, empowered execution and inspiring leadership—all underpinned by connection.
Whether we’ve been deeply, personally affected by this pandemic or are simply trying to get ourselves and our loved ones through it, we’re all sharing a version of the same experience. For customer experience professionals, that’s been a new challenge. My colleague Maureen Burns and I have seen some companies fumble it badly. But many others have tuned into the experience with empathy. They’re creating experiences and offering innovative solutions that are building a deep reservoir of trust and loyalty with customers and employees that will last long after this pandemic is a bad memory. In this episode, Maureen joined me to talk about what it is that customers and employees really need right now, and how the answer varies by company. And I also asked Maureen for her answers to some of the practical questions that Net Promoter practitioners are asking about soliciting customer feedback at a time like this.
A decade ago, when Roger Martin was dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, he called for a shift away from the business world’s focus on maximizing shareholder value to a new era in which value for customers and the value of customers would take primacy. He called it “The Age of Customer Capitalism.” His work had a profound impact on my thinking. Very few leaders have been able to act on his vision, but now, a decade later, the era of customer capitalism that he predicted is finally dawning.
In the second part of our conversation about customer-based corporate valuation, Dan McCarthy of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and cofounder of Theta Equity Partners explains how investor—and executive—behavior would change if companies had to disclose metrics that revealed the true strength of their customer base, rather than the many accounting disclosures today that actually can mask damage done to customers and customer relationships in pursuit of short-term profits.
Dan McCarthy spends his time figuring out what loyalty is worth to shareholders, and how to measure it. As cofounder of Theta Equity Partners and assistant professor of marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, he and his colleague, Wharton professor Peter Fader, have developed a technique called customer-based corporate valuation that helps shareholders value a company by analyzing how its customers behave. Their approach signals a shift from a “growth at all costs” mindset toward sustainable growth based on the acquisition and retention of profitable customers.
How does a banking group operating in multiple countries accelerate improvements in customer experience, particularly digital improvements, while still meeting the unique needs of individual countries? This was the challenge facing UniCredit, and the topic of my podcast with Francesco Vercesi, UniCredit's head of Agile, practice sharing and customer service. The answer, as his title implies, was to create a centralized Agile process, but with product owners in each country empowered to set their development priorities.
Silos are deeply rooted in human nature. We should stop complaining about them and instead ask: How can we harness the tribal behavior that generates silos to create value for customers? To learn more, I turned to Gillian Tett of the Financial Times. Her book, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers, explores the role of silos in the financial crisis and in our everyday lives. “Silos exist for the very simple reason that we’re human,” she says.
In this podcast, Raj Sivasubramanian, customer experience insights manager at Airbnb, explains how Airbnb is experimenting with a system that makes it easy for customers to provide video feedback. I admit, I was skeptical. But Raj explains why that often provides longer, more detailed and often richly emotional feedback. More important, he says, when transmitted directly to frontline employees and leaders, that emotion often generates the sort of empathy that inspires and motivates thoughtful action.
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