“Did You Understand What I Said?”

I think the real step change, though, is when you do this on a proactive level. So you've found every single problem, you've changed your standard operating procedures, you've gone to a whole new different level. So you surpass in every customer's expectations in your B2B model.

Hi, Nigel, how are you doing?

Very well, thank you. Great to be back again.

Yeah, we're back again with another look at how to embed customer experience in your culture and in. In the CPG business. And. Well, the one we're tackling today is this one here you've talked about, which is, do you understand what I said? And talk about the drivers of customer experience, cx, as we call it. So I'm really excited to dive into this. This is my pet hobby or business actually, to really talk about this. So happy. I want to see what you've got for us.

Yeah, it's an interesting starting point. Did you hear what I said? Because you go to the opposite side. How frustrating is it when you go, you've just not understood anything when you're on the opposite side of that, whether it's a parent, it's a B2B relationship, it's. As a consumer, there's nothing worse than being asked for a point of view and then nothing happens with it. And I think this is a great way to be able to start this whole topic because if you start off quite simply, how does it make you feel? Does it put a smile in your face? Are you really unhappy? Are you just, you know what, just passive. And that's the starting point, I think, of most pieces of feedback, you start with that emotional response, I guess, professionalizing it just a little bit further. We add these words on here in terms of customer experience that am I happy you're a promoter? And what do you do when you actually have a great experience? You become very loyal, you're an enthusiast, you start to talk positively to others about the experience. The counter side to that is if I've had a bad experience, I'm sad. I just. It's not done it for me. I'm a detractor and I'm probably going to talk to other people about this. Hasn't been a great experience. Have you tried dealing with these? And it wasn't great. And in the middle is I'm just passive. It was okay. It didn't impress me, it didn't make me sad. But actually I could easily turn by somebody who could do things better and that starting points get there. But I think the real challenge is when you then think, link it back to the professional way you get feedback from a customer base is generally in a scale of 1 to 10. And this is a great way to illustrate how that starting point of an emotion then leads into the scores that you start to get when you get feedback from a customer base. Which is a stepping stone into Net Promoter score.

Yeah. If I can add some of my thoughts on this. What I love about this, you've taken the classic Net Promoter scale from Fred Reichelt, which really asks the question, you know, how likely are you to recommend this to a friend or colleague? And that's pretty good in the consumer state. But we've also found it works really well in B2B.

Yeah.

Would you recommend this company to somebody else because it makes you think about it rather than being passively satisfied. How did they do? It's like, takes a step to do it. And just a word on the way that they name detractors, passives and promoters. I've often found that when I go into businesses and I talk to staff about this, we go into a workshop and we say, you know, detractors, let's make it real. Detractors destroy value. There's another word for that. We call them terrorists. It's quite a powerful word, but it's effectively the same thing in terms of your profit and the promoters. Another way of thinking about that is people who really evangelize your brand. They go out there, but they're so happy, they'll go out and tell other people, hey, Yep, you won't believe it, what these guys did. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit later, but you've got some calculations that we're going to talk about here.

Yeah, because just getting the score or just getting the feedback is one thing, but Net Promoter is actually a score and it starts to rely on those things to begin with. And it's a relatively simple calculation, but it can look a little bit scary first time around. So you take the percentages of your customer base that are promoters away from the percentage that are detractors to give you a Net Promoter score, which basically means instead of a score from 0 to 100, you get a score from minus 100 to plus 100. So it really exaggerates the performance you've got within your business in your B2B environment. So a good way to describe this is with an example. So let's say you've got just shy of 10,000 customers within there. And the one assumption I've got here is we don't Know the response rate on this example, I tried to keep it really simple. It's unlikely to be 100% response rate. That could be 20% of your customer base. But let's say you've got a response of 9755, 4530 are promoters, and you're sat there going, 46% of my customer base. Really rate me as a business would recommend me to others. It can give this false sense of security because actually, the real challenge here is you've also got 4055 detractors and 1170 that could be swayed either way. When you now look at it through that net promoter lens, and you take 46% who are promoters away from 42% who are detractors, you actually have a net promoter score of 4%. And I mean, you know that range pretty well. 4%. It's good that it's positive, but great in this world is you're in this 50, 60, 70% arena consistently, all the time.

I can give you some good news on this. I've been doing this for nearly 20 years, and 4%, well, they certainly exist. That's the sort of rating that banks and insurance companies have. If they're positive, all right, they're down there. Most of the businesses that we've sampled in the CPG business are going to be somewhere in the range of 30 to 60. NPS.

Yeah.

So you're right, Nigel. That's quite that. That. The good news is you've normally got a lot more promoters, roughly double the amount of promoters in your detractors. That's something you can really use later on. And we'll tackle that in a future webinar that we'll do. But there's just one other thing that I wanted to bring out here, which is about the scale. So net promoter, which has this top box and bottom box, gives you the technical thing I really like.

Yeah.

And it helps you divide this because if you don't use that, if you use like an average, often what happens is you get an average between 6.8 and 7.2. If you know what's good and bad about that. It's difficult to see when you break it out like this. It's really good for people in the business, especially in the front line, to go, oh, I know what to do with that. I know what to do with the detractor. And if it's a promoter, I know what to do with this. So this is why I really love doing that promoter.

It is. And you're Right. Because it is all about action. It's not a passive response rate either. You can't be passive as a. As a business in this type of feedback. You need to do something with it because that's what makes change happen.

Yeah. And we can talk about the technicalities of Net Promoter later on, you know, about how you get comments out and actions. But we'll do that in more detail.

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But the most interesting thing, you know, you and I feel strongly about this is about what to do with the feedback when you get it.

Yeah.

And look, there's some pitfalls to avoid the challenge with a topic like this is there are so many books, so many authors, so many experts of which which you and I are just as guilty of. So how do you navigate through the library of different pieces of advice? And I've got to be honest, one of my favorites, you've mentioned his name already, but Fred, I think if there was one book I'd recommend reading for anybody would be winning on purpose about how you get the whole MPS approach to work. And there's four pitfalls that Fred's called out, and I've only heard him talk in person three or four times now, but every time it just makes so much sense. So if we walk through them, the first one is don't ask for a 10.

Has that happened to you recently?

I was very lucky enough to be able to buy a new car fairly recently. And the short story is I've had four phone calls from the dealer telling me they're about. I'm about to get a survey from the manufacturer. Would I rate them a 10? And every time they pick up the phone to me, they say, can I speak to Neil Tordoff? Well, my name's Nigel Tordoff. They can't even get my name right. They're not going to get a 10 no matter how many times they ring me in. And it's just. It's the worst thing you could possibly do. Let the feedback be real every single time. If you force it, then, yeah, frankly, I think you're wasting the money doing any type of program. Let it be truth every single time. Another one that he talks about is trend is more important than the score. And I mean, you talked previously about how you need to be able to get this feedback to become regular. And because things change all the time. Well, actually, the trend is more important. Are you going in the right direction? You could have a score of 90 be going from 90 to 85 to 75 to 65. That's more important than thinking you're in a great spot. It's the trend and it's the direction of travel.

Yep.

The third one Fred talks about, and this is hard to do to try and find the link between mps and. And revenue. I can't remember the exact stat, but you talked about the. The times that promoters had more value than detractors.

Yeah, I can add some color on that. I mean, you know what, what we find is when we put revenue in there is that promoters are worth much more than detractors. And it's somewhere between two and four times that we're finding, you know, so Heineken, happy to quote, that the promoter is worth three times the detractor. So if you can really figure that out and start converting people, it's really good. And in fact, you touched on that on the previous one, Nigel, when he said, start by thinking about 80% of your revenue already. By doing that, you're starting to bring the net promoter together with revenue. So that's exactly the right direction to go in.

Yeah, perfect.

All these back down to action as well. Which is, I guess the real link on the last one is that you quite often just go in and fix a single problem for a single piece of feedback. The real challenge is don't avoid standardizing the methodology within your business. So a problem that happens to one customer is a problem that could happen to every customer. So change the methodology to be able to fix this for the future. Don't just fix each individual problem. Otherwise you start to support the idea of what you praise in your business is people fixing problems, rather than praising within your business people taking out the problem in the first place and putting a new system in or a new process in or a new procedure in that just makes this work every single time for every customer.

Totally.

So I guess the next point is, when you've got all that feedback, what on earth do you do with it? You see, you're smiling, Rhys. You're looking at the screen the same way that I am. This guy, he is looking at me straight on. And it's exactly how it feels when you have to close the loop with every customer. You're already walking into a situation where the customer is unhappy, happy. But one thing I've learned over the years is you can't sell anything to an unhappy customer because you've got to get over the hurdle to begin with. It's hard to sell when you've got a problem to solve for in the first place. And there's two ways you can solve a problem reactively is you've had some feedback. You have to go with that feedback to that customer and close the loop. Solve the issue that the customer's had. One of the things you talked about in your beliefs earlier on was about making sure you've been heard. And there's nothing worse than giving a piece of feedback that nothing happens with it. You don't even know that it's being acknowledged. And when you go back and share with the customer, look, we got this wrong. The solution needs to surpass their expectations, and you need to do that quickly.

Yeah, and quickly for me means within 48 hours. And we've got customers that go back within two hours. That's their service.

Wow.

But that's what I mean. This is how you turn people into promoters. It's dinner party conversation, isn't it? You never guess. They phone me back within a couple of hours to try and fix my problem, or at least start to do it. That is how you make a difference.

It is. Well, it's quickly and it's surpassing. It's beyond the expectation. I think the real step change, though, is when you do this on a proactive level. So you've found every single problem, you've changed your standard operating procedures, you've gone to a whole new different level. So you're surpassing every customer's expectations in your B2B model. And it comes back to what Fred talked about. This is methodical. It's not just doing it quickly. It's methodical for absolutely everyone with inside your B2B relationship, which is hard to do, but what a game changer that turns out to be when it's done.

Good summary, Nigel.

But I guess in terms of all of that, the starting point for all of this, if you think about the four steps to take, is the starting point is just, do you know your company score? Does every person in your company know that company score as well? And actually how to adopt and behave with it. The second part is don't drive into the wrong behaviors where the score becomes the be all and end all that. You're asking for a 10. Let the score be what it is. Allow the truth to prevail in all of this so you can actually start to do something really important with it and act on those detractors quickly. What's your little phrase you have on feedback in terms of pace?

You've got to do it within 48 hours.

It was a fish analogy I was thinking of.

Yeah, yeah. Feedback is like fish. It rots and you know, after three days you might as well throw it away.

Yeah.

So if you haven't done it within a period of time, you've wasted it all completely. So you have to do it quickly. Absolutely right. And I think the final point is don't underestimate the amount of change management that's required in this to be able to change your standard operating procedures. But that's what the ultimately you get. Then the interesting part, having been around, I've seen so many procedures change in businesses over the years and it's been done without that customer feedback. How powerful it is to know that 80% of your customers are giving you this feedback and you need to change the systems to be able to change something for the future. It makes a big difference. So know the score. Don't ask for a 10. Act on the feedback quickly. Otherwise it's going to go off, it will have no value. And change the processes methodically to be able to make this positive for the future.

I love that. If I can just get just one piece of color on this before we go. Nigel, know your company's NPS score. I recently looked at more than a hundred public statements, public accounts from CPG companies. Only two of them reported their net promoter score publicly and only a couple more said they were actually doing it. So I think there's clearly some areas to go forward in this whole fertile topic of do you understand what I said when the I is the customer and really bring it in there. So super summary on that one. Thanks so much, Nigel, and look forward to the next one. Lovely, Sam.