The 2022 Account Experience Year in Review

Hey, welcome back to the Account Experience podcast. This time it's a little bit different. I've decided to ask some experts in my team about how they saw the year, their highlights and the things that they do. And you can see we're all my Christmas jumpers here. I'm joined here by Trishana Changappa, Customer Gauge VP of Product. Trish, how you doing?

Good, Adam. Thank you.

Trishal, I heard that you did quite a lot of product releases this year. What was the total that you did?

Yeah, the team was really on fire this year. We had about 24 releases that were spread out through the year that covered about 450 pieces of improvements, new functionalities, fixes that we brought onto our Customer gauge platform for our customers. So very exciting times and really set for the new year as well.

Now, before we dive too much into the product things, I'd like to take one step back because you've got a really good overview of what's going on in the whole customer experience universe. What are some of the things that you noticed going through this year?

I think the first thing that we noticed with our dialogues with our customers, but also the changing shift in the market is really using an omnichannel approach to collecting customer feedback. Making sure you're using the right channel in the right market for the right touch point really helps in getting that feedback, response rate and the account coverage, which is something that's key for us in everything we tell our clients to do. So using right vectors like whether emails, SMSs, pop ups. That's something that we brought onto Customer Gauge this year, a fully integrated WhatsApp campaign functionality. So I think from our side, we've got a full suite ready for any B2B account.

Now let's dive into that because I like what you're saying about making sure it's appropriate for people. I think one of the things we were hearing earlier was that if you're a bar owner, maybe the best way to get in touch is by SMS or maybe even WhatsApp. But WhatsApp hasn't been smooth saving this year. Can you give some context to some of the issues that we've had getting WhatsApp going?

Yeah, I think with WhatsApp, of course, it's very specific to different markets and it's quite prevalent as a way of communication there. But also then it becomes an expected way of serving customers. But an area that you, I think, have to be careful of with WhatsApp is that it does have some restrictions on certain types of industries. And those are some of the industries we operate in as well, in helping our customers collect feedback. So it's not always smooth sailing then for those particular industries. But we've got emails, SMSs and embed surveys that then cover the need across there. But we've also got the possibility to support our customers to extract customer gauge survey links and then use it in their own vector. So if your need is out there, we've got you covered.

Let's get really specific about this because meta's a meta is the owner of WhatsApp and they don't allow certain types of products on that. Are you prepared to say what type of products that you can't promote or you can't have an account with?

From the customer gauge universe, an area that we've kind of had a bit more of a struggle is in the CPG business, specifically around the alcohol vertical. And that's where we also do see that WhatsApp is used as a form of communication in maybe countries like in Latin America or in Africa and Asia. And then not being able to use that vector as a form of communication also means that you have to find a different way to getting to your customers.

Yeah, I just. Not ideal, I didn't see that coming because, you know, Facebook is, you know, is quite open and free, but actually using that as a vector. So that's one of the things I think we need that the B2C world communications as it goes into B2B. It's kind of a maturation that needs to happen. Okay, so what you're saying is that using different methods of getting to clients, but I'm guessing you've got to be able to report in the same way in all of them, right?

Yes, we do support that back in customer gate. So you can, irrespective of the vector, the data that comes back in, we're able to help our clients really understand the reach, the coverage, the response rate, the close, the loop rate. Because irrespective of the vector, that is the key metrics that we always recommend account experience customers to focus on. And we've boxed all of them in exactly the same manner for each of the vectors.

Would it be unfair of you to talk about median response rates in some countries? Is there any, can you give any guidance for people on the, on the podcast?

I think it really depends country to country. There is a huge variation some countries for say for example SMS's range from a few percentage to maybe 14, 15%. So it really depends on how well you've prepped your Customers that they're going to be receiving survey how close they are to your business and whether they're expecting to receive that and hence responding to it. So I think that is a key area we've seen and also working with different customers who have typically lower response rate. If you're using emails, we've got our benchmarks program benchmarks in the product across 10 key metrics that you can actually look through and see how you're doing versus the other B2B industries and what improvements you need to put into place. Do you have a really bad data set from poor data quality with bounces or unsubscribes and you've got an action there for your account managers or if you've got a high abandonment rate and what actions you can take and we've got recipes in our academy that kind of tie into what each action and a customer can take to also self help in improving their program.

Nice. And one of the things I was really impressed with going through the year was the focus that you put on another kind of response rate, which is account response. Can you, can you talk me through how that differs from contact response rate.

From what we've seen? Most customers always come into this with a focus on contact response rate because I think that's also maybe an industry kind of term that they're used to. Maybe other software providers only offer you that in terms of contact response rate. But if you're in a B2B space, it's really important to look at what your overall account response rate is, not just your contact response rate. Are you getting a good amount of responses from your entire customer base from an account perspective? And that's the difference we offer our clients in customer gauge is both account and contact response rate. And added to the account response rate, the thing in the beginning is the account coverage. What percentage of your accounts have you reached out to? And then what's your response rate? And then the action plans you can put into place with the non respondent accounts or the gray zone accounts that.

You have as well?

Yeah, that's key, isn't it? Because it's not just the contacts when you think about it, it's how much of your revenue you're covering. That's, that's a really important thing. And that's something we're going to see a lot more of in, in the next year, I guess. So I've touched on what we might see next year with more, you know, monetization and revenue coverage. But if you look into your crystal ball well, also, you know what your product roadmap is. Can you, can you peek? Let us peek behind the curtain a little bit and give us a sneak preview on what you're working on.

Yeah, we're actually focused on three key areas for next year. We're starting off with a more empowerment to our customers from a campaign management perspective. Again, making sure they can get that cover they need from their reporting account coverage. We're going to follow that up with really looking at referrals and earned growth. So it's the other side of the reporting. So you've got reach coverage, response rate, close the loop rate and then we want to make sure that you can report on earned rate in the platform as a standard metrics. So we're really looking at Freightsburg, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And, and the last part is to make sure we can continue supporting clients to bring in data from all systems out there so that they can report and also collect the feedback that they need, but also take whatever they need from Customer Gauge to incorporate it back into their CRMs to give that account manager view as well.

Yeah, I think that's. I've been also really impressed with the way that your team has been able to push the data right out to the front line because you're able to empower people to do the right thing and at the end of the day that's what it really, really counts to make the error, the, the relationship work. Trisha Ola, thank you so much for your time and giving us an insight what's happening today. I really appreciate it and happy New Year. Look forward to seeing you 2023.

Thank you, Adam. The pleasure is mine.

Welcome back to the Account Experience podcast and I'm joined here today by Roy Chandra. Hello Roy, how you doing?

Good, how are you?

I am great. Now we have had some fantastic fun this year analyzing benchmark data. Yes, I think it's really been the year of benchmarks, isn't it? And I've learned so much looking at the agglomerations and the anonymized data from customers. It's really quite, you know, interesting. What, what was the first thing you learned about it?

Well, benchmark is not as easy as people think, that is for sure. The other one is benchmark is really like a good way to really glance off your progress, to be honest. Yeah, you can compare yourself again. Comparison. You need to know what's the story behind it, but just for a quick glance, you can see your progressions.

Yeah. And I think that the. So we started, I think the year with about 10 different types of benchmarks.

Yes.

And what do we migrated to? Fewer than that. What was some of the thinking behind that at the end of the year?

Well, when we start the benchmark, we focus on the operational benchmark first, where you can get the, you know, like campaign rates, delivery rates, that, that sort of things. But when we go through the journey, we start measuring, we just think like we should only benchmarking the number that is really important to us, which is like the response rate, the contact response rate, the account response rate, closing the loop within 48 hours, NPS.

And yeah, let me just reiterate those because that's really important. So it's the account response rate also account coverage.

Account coverage, yes.

So how much of your revenue are you covering? That's really number one, contact response rate, which is a measure of how well engaged you are with clients, and then closing the loop within 48 hours, which is about how good you are at empowering your team to do that. Right.

Yes.

And it seemed to me that those are the three best indicators of a future nps.

It is, yeah. Also what we found out through the benchmarks, like what we saw a couple of days ago, like response rate and NPS goes hand in hand.

Yeah. It's strongly correlated, right? Yeah, Yeah. I think it's difficult for us to put entirely our finger on the reasons for it, but there's definitely a strong correlation. When the response rate goes up, your net promoter rate follows.

Yeah.

And the other thing I think was interesting was to do with closing the loop. There was also a finding the more you close the loop, also it has a positive impact on NPS.

Yes. It will give you like around like 5%, like 5 points difference in NPS. You know, like the more you close the loop, the higher your response rate. People will respond to you more because they think like, you know, like their feedback is not going to nowhere. Like people actually, you know, responding to your feedback and then, you know, you drive improvement through it.

Yeah, I. That was really fundamental learning, I think, that we had. Now I'm going to get you just to drill in just a little bit on some of the stats that you've got now. You've been serving or you've got the results on benchmarks across the world.

Yes.

Can you pull out a couple of like median response rates so people can, you know, can get a sense of what they can expect if they're, you know, serving somewhere, let's, let's say in an African country. What would they, what can they. What can they Achieve.

Well, I don't have the on top of my head but we have like around like 15% contact response rate overall. Yeah, I guess that will be different for regions, but I don't have it on top of my head right now.

Yeah, about 15% contact response.

Contact response.

You also have an account response. That's the level of accounts. That's normally a bit higher, isn't it?

Yes, that will be higher.

And if you talk about really world class best practice, can you characterize any.

Numbers there for the contact response rate? I would say around 30%.

Yeah, I think so too. That's really where you need to be heading for. That's. And that seems to be achievable for some of our clients to get there. But that's, that's where you've got to be for a world class program.

Well, you need to achieve, you know, about 50% I would say. But I'm like for conduct response rate you can start with that as a first start.

Yeah. And I think what was interesting from what I saw the work that you did is that you started out with as I said, about 10 quite granular benchmarks. But over the year you foregrounded the three you were talking about contact response. But you've still got those as diagnostics in the back and they would be things like what bounce rate or bounce rate.

We have a delivery rate.

Yeah.

We have a open rate for the email. We have click rate, unsubscribe rate. Because you also need to track your unsubscribe sponsor is important especially in this climate because you know if email starts bouncing that. You mean like for sure.

I mean with all the job turnover that people have gone out there, that's, that's probably the most important.

So that we're still keeping it as a diagnostic to help you with the program. But the, the main focus is on the main metrics that we set before.

That's really amazing. And then as you go into 2023 can you, can you share it a little about what the projects you're working on or what you, or what you'd like to do in 2023 with the.

Benchmarking project, we would like to have more benchmark in the account, corporates, revenue coverage, that kind of things. Also going more granular in the verticals. Verticals benchmarking, more country benchmark, that, that sort of thing. But also like make the benchmark easier to understand and also more solid in the bench.

Yeah, I think that making the benchmarks easy to understand, that has been a good project. That's. It is because sometimes it's quite hard to identify the. The percentile curves that we originally had. That was one of the things that you've been changing. Fantastic, Roy. That's really great. And by. By following the benchmarks, people can expect to improve their program, I guess, right?

Yes.

Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing with us today and best wishes for 2023.

Thank you so much.

I'm joined here today with Camilla Scholten, my co founder at CustomerGage and the COO. Camilla, you've done a lot of customer visits this year and you just recently come back from one. Can you, you know, what was your year like and tell us what's going on in the world of account management?

Thank you, Adam. Yes, it's been. It's gone fast this year. We've had a lot of geopolitical excitement and I think for a lot of our accounts, it was a bit unsure what was going to happen. You can definitely see that there's an impact on how people are planning ahead and there's some uncertainty. On the other hand, I think there's also been quite a steady cadence of just continuing the good work that a lot of our accounts and customers do. So I think more and more, actually, our accounts are taking this whole closing the loop and making sure that you follow up with your customers after they've given you some feedback seriously. I also think we. We didn't really talk a lot in the past about account coverage and making sure that you monetize your program and monetizing your experience management or your Net promoter program has actually become quite a very sort of like embedded talk track. Everybody's looking for ways to monetize. So I think those are some really great achievements for 2022 that we can report on. And I think actually the best practice sharing that we saw this year at Monetize was just as convincing as any of us talking on these podcasts. They like to hear accounts, like to hear from each other.

Yeah. With that in mind, I'm going to play some clips of some of the things that I thought were meaningful this year. Yeah, I'd love your opinion on this. Start with you first. Okay, let's start with you. Top of the window. How did. How did it affect you, you guys at Color hpc? Yeah, I mean, our first response was, was, I suppose, very early in that. In that March 2020. And we really actioned our sales team straight away just to keep close to our customers, to call them regularly, ideally daily, to really understand what was going on, you know, are the customers going to stay open? Are they going to close? What are the challenges they are facing and what support will they need and how can we help them? I suppose I think it was a time as an industry we just got shoulder to shoulder with our customers to try and work our way through this against, as you call it, massive adversity. I thought that was a great podcast. That was with Stuart Ward from Coca Cola Hellenic, David Ainat from Abi, that's Anheuser Busch and Roderick Rosendahl from Heineken. I mean, fantastic to get those three CPG brands on the call talking about.

Very experience leading business as well. Yeah.

You know, I love the way that they were talking first of all, I love the way that they were sharing best practice with each other. That was great. It really shows an openness and about putting the trade first.

Yeah.

But Stuart's point about how they responded to the COVID pandemic was really interesting about how they, they changed their whole customer experience program. You're pretty close to Stuart. Is there anything you can, you can talk about without giving too much away, you know, confidentiality. But you've, you know, you've seen some things going on in that program.

I think it's a real, no nonsense attitude towards what, you know, working with customers is all about. And it's not looking for salvation by making everything a technical solution. It's really being able to see what technology can do to just make work more manageable. And I think actually for the whole of CPG industry there was a lot of demand on the going digital side because that's kind of like where everybody went to order. And I think that opened up a lot more understanding and visibility of all the other opportunities that you therefore have with, you know, enhancing a digital performance around your relationship management. And I think that's what they've really done. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of it is also sort of really embedding it in the process.

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that I've been most impressed about. I mean Anne, Hazel Vish in this, they've been, they've been doing a really good program and I think if I were to really call out Heineken, Kolhlenik, they really, I think they push the frontier of account experience because they've got it right to the front line.

Yeah.

Using it, they're closing the loop.

Yeah.

And those are the metrics that they're really working on to drive that. And you can really see that where they focus on those three metrics, coverage, response rate and closing the loop, is that they are making inroads into their experience.

Yeah. And they also have buy in across the organization. So it's not actually what we usually saw in the past was a more junior smart professional really championing a lot of the work in the experience management programs. And what we see definitely having shifted there is that the caliber of people that are involved in the program is phenomenal. The buy in at the top is very present. And actually I know that you're quoting statistic or kind of like relevant numbers that they go for like coverage, closing the loop and then at the end of it also response rate. And that kind of like feeds into a good net promoter score if you do all these things right. But they also read all the comments. So I think that is what's really powerful.

And it's like in a way it's old school, isn't it? Because they can automate the stuff. And I know that they're doing a ton of analytics out the fact, but it's the power of just making sure that people are seeing and you know, in empowering people when they're on the street and they're about to make a customer visit, that they're using that feedback to get going. I know really lots to learn from that.

And I think we, yeah, we learn so much from, from, from those interactions and from how these people use the system. And it's actually really sort of changed every day that we, we work on our product roadmap or on our release schedule. There are things that are being put in there because there's actual demand.

One of the things I saw from one of the companies, I won't name it, but they're very focused on making sure that their countries are coming up to the same level. So we've developed some special tools to help them compare their country programs. And again, that benefits all of our customers. They're really driving the forefront now. Stuart won a prize for rolling out, but I thought Heineken also did a great program this year. Really pleased on that one actually. And then if we fast forward. So in May we did the second round of Customer Gauge Awards. That was quite something, wasn't it? It was really nice to reward people for that.

Yeah, yeah. And even for me, because when you look at all of these accounts, you tend to look at the ones that are struggling a little bit or that need a bit of coaching or that really need to be told you're doing it the wrong way and this actually looks at it from a different side from the positive spectrum and then you see what is possible. If you actually follow our playbook, it's phenomenal and it kind of like just really also energizes our team to make sure that we keep challenging the customers that we serve.

Now there are so many things I can put on that were positive this year, but I thought our monetized event in September was, was quite something. To see everybody back in, back in a room again was, was, you know, was also quite something. And it seems a few months ago now, but it flew by.

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So I'm going to come up with a few highlights on that. So just before I get some clips ready, was there anything that came up that you thought was particularly impactful?

Yeah, very well, I think we sort of like can't help ourselves. We go bigger every year and, and we hadn't done it for I think two or three years, so we went really overboard. But I do think it's so important that we keep focused on the content and that's. I, that's why this is a different event. It's not sort of like light on content, high on socializing. Unfortunately for some, it's very densely populated with what great best practice sharing from all of our accounts. And I think that was definitely the highlight for me again to see we can just do this. We can bring a group of customers together and they just do the rest.

Yeah, I'm going to play a few clips from what I thought were really good. I mean, there's too many to choose from.

Yeah.

My first one is from Gemma from Briggs, who I really like listening to. Have a listen to Gemma talking about breaking down silos in the business and culture and silos.

You're all familiar with this. So initial actions to start with and this is ongoing, we're not out of the woods yet, but a massive difference in getting the buy in. We're one team, we're one business. And when you get each other blaming other departments, it means nothing. We have to be one business. If sales results are up here, but services down here, guess what? We lose. We have to go at it as a win win. So we started to deliver small presentations to small groups across the business. Not just, oh, I'm not customer facing. I don't speak to them. It doesn't matter to me. Those are the kind of messages we need to eradicate every transaction in our business, your business, there is a customer at the end of that and it's important that we drive that message so much.

I could have played from Gemma stuff. What I really remember about that stuff is how they motivate everybody in the business too, to look forward to those feedback meetings with customers. You know, they really get over that fear of feedback. I love the way that they run that program. You know, rewarding people for. Rewarding customers for taking part in it. I think it's really good.

And she's right. I mean, you know, a customer doesn't see you as the part of the business that you're in. A customer sees you as part of an entity. And she. So she's absolutely right to propagate. That is important.

Now, I know that one of your favorite speakers is Jay Woody.

Well, he was maybe not my favorite speaker, although I think he's fantastic speaker. I think in that sense, I can't choose, but I think Jay is just a really inspirational leader and he flew all the way from Texas, which, you know, I mean, what's not to love about that?

What I love about Jay's work. So Jay runs a chain of urgent care departments. Businesses.

Yeah.

Can you set it up for the listeners, you know, to describe the businesses?

Well, effectively, it's. It's. The model in the US Is different from probably all over Europe, where emergence urgent care and emergency care is something that you can sort of like choose or shop around for. And depending on your choice, it will have impact on your financial position. And so what Jay Woody's come up with is this formula to make urgency care available close by. So he's really worked on scaling his businesses, and he's done a phenomenal job in kind of like growing. And he's done that on the premise that he really wanted to deliver a good patient experience. So not just by being sort of like financially the most attractive, but also by just giving a really good patient experience. And he's done that by using a feedback loop. And I think it's transforming that part of the business because, of course, when people have something urgent, there's kind of like a limited choice. It's not like you're going to shop around for hours. And that's right.

It's about the loyalty stuff. I also love the way that he set it up to say that we're saving the American economy so many billions a year by doing this. It's really wonderful. I love what he's doing here.

Yeah.

The clip I've got here is talking about how he's identified the drivers of net promoter. I think really fascinating.

Yes.

Let's listen to what James Jay's saying.

And what you see here is.

Is a.

Is a graph with. These are all of current facilities that are in operations.

But.

And it's NPS on the Y axis. And it's time door to door time on the x axis. As you can see, NPS like is pushing above 90 as you get. As the time door to door time goes down and as it gets longer, no, no surprise, NPS score goes, goes down. Now our benchmark is 60 minutes. And so we kind of mostly hover up in that area. And patients love that. They're very happy when you hit that. But as, as the time goes out, they get less happy. Now keep in mind the, the bottom of the scale is 70. So even these outliers over here are still doing quite well. And just a little background on these, these two facilities, they're in the state of New Mexico, which is a very, very poor state in the US Very underserved medically. When we opened our facilities, we immediately were seeing, you know, 150 to 200 patients within the first week because these are folks that had nowhere else to go. And so these places like maxed out on, you know, second week, which is a good problem to have. But it, but it's also tough because then get a little bit bogged down. And so we haven't been able to achieve the door to door times that we normally like to achieve, but still doing well. And if you look at the other sort of providers in that area, look at Google ratings and things like that, you know, we're, we're killing it as far as, you know, in relationship to those, which is why everybody wants to come visit us there. We have another facility opening there.

I pause it there, but it's a great story.

Yeah. You know, I think to be honest, Intuitive Health, which is kind of like the brand that they will flag under, is kind of like a very wide range and they've got very big demographic spread in the US of, of these facilities where they do this emergency care for patients. So Jay Wood is also a doctor. Yeah. And he actually reads all the comments. I mean, and talking hundreds of thousands.

Yeah. It's astonishing how much he does, but I love it. I'm, you know, from an analytical point of view about how they isolate this. They say that the door to door time, which is like going into the facility to going out, it's got to be 60 minutes.

Yeah.

Sitting down, curing, getting seen by a medical professional or out the door in 60 minutes. That's the time they want to do. That's fantastic.

Right.

I think most health organizations around the world really learn from that.

Yeah, yeah.

It's really impressive.

Yeah. Now he is. So that's some of the parameters that they look at of course, he's also then correlated to the growth of his organization, which I think is part of the presentation a bit later. But I think that kind of like approach to patient focus in an industry where that's not so common was a. I think why it was just wonderful. But also the fact that he shares that kind of data, I think it's just kind of. It's nothing hidden about it. And they really celebrate their successes as well. It's part of the marketing formula that they have and they educate their team on this as well.

They really do. I mean, we can dig into this. I mean, of course, the. The slides are available on the monetized site. Customer Engage Customer. You can see this. But this bit about does NPS drive revenue? Was really key. And he really went into the details of how, you know, how the metrics work and does that again, that was. I think that was an astonishing thing that we saw this year. For the first time, all our customers were focused on how do we drive revenue from this. That was. That was really the big thing I took away from the programme.

And I think partly also because they already, from the start, always gave the feedback of that the patients would leave to the physicians that were working that particular patient or looking after that. So there's this transparency of making sure that everybody sees that data a little bit to Gemma's presentation where she was still really trying to champion it in her organization and they did a fantastic job and I think now they are kind of like sitting at every relevant meeting. But from Jay came from the top. He wanted to make sure that the company that he built had this embedded in the culture. And I think that's why he's definitely one of my favorite.

I really agree. He also lives the. What. You know what I think is really interesting, the title of his present was the Earned Patient. And that feeds into the metrics here. This is about, you know, the new. If you promote a patient, that's how. That's how they build the business. Almost zero marketing. They literally jump from word of mouth and that's because they keep the so high. And I think it's a big. A great segue into to my last clip here. I was really delighted that we had Fred Reichelt speaking at our event because he really topped it off and he answered loads of really granular questions about Net Promoter, which I loved. He was very generous with this time. Yeah, 40 minutes of questions. He was in really like searching stuff. Let me talk about this. He talks about earned growth. Let me see if I can I can line the clip up here or.

Decliners plus their referrals. And I thought, oh my God, if a bank can do it, anybody can do it. And that's what I'm saying, do it. You have to have this understanding if you want to have people understand that loving customers is the right philosophy of business. And you won't know who's doing a good job. Yeah, you know, NPS shines a light on it, but surveys, response rates, sample bias. Earned growth is an accounting metric. Just tell me how much of your growth is coming from existing customers, coming back for more and bringing their friends. And suddenly we have something that everybody can relate to in, in the, in the finance world. So this is the mindset and Adam and Camilla's business. It's important. The medallions, the Qualtrics, all of the tech platforms. This is vital in order to live this, because standard accounting does not do it for you. Earned growth, as you heard earlier in this present or in the conference, it's your net revenue retention rate, which is sort of a standard statistic in some businesses, plus your earn new customers plus the bought new customers that equals total growth. And as you know, the only one of these numbers that is visible to accountants is the one on the far right. They don't dissect it down into its components. And you must remember the importance of the gold bars versus the black bars. So earned growth, back to moral philosophy. We've been in finance for a while here. We started with love and loyalty. We're getting back to love and loyalty. Earned growth is when customers feel the love, when you have made their life better so much better, they refer their friends.

I'm going to pause it there because there's a lot of depth in that. And he goes into some of the stuff behind him. He was so much about customer love. Did that surprise you?

Well, I'd never heard Fred speak and I'd only met him briefly. And I think the first thing that surprised me was, well, he's clearly very sharp and he's got a vision that I think is really, really needed in the world. And he has found a way to make it really relevant to look after your customers. I think he's figured out that most businesses are all about growth, but he delivers it in such kind of a clear way. And I think what surprised me was that whole mixing kind of like the philosophical component of doing the right thing with being able to prove that it also actually pays off. Maybe it wasn't even surprise. It was just almost like going to church and Having a revelation of somebody hearing you explain it to you, really straightforward in a way that makes you really understand that you were not wrong, that you can believe and that it is good to focus on, well, in this case, customers and do the right thing.

Yeah. Pulling that apart though, what he's saying is that everything we do in Net Promoter, all of the survey responses and getting those metrics right, all we trying to do is to get people to promote us. I think it's most of the time in programs that we do, we're trying to find ways to reduce churn. You know, the Net Promoter is useful at doing that. It helps rescue customers and it helps you upsell customers.

Yeah.

But this new frontier of earned growth and referrals is something that I think most businesses are not working on and that's what I'm looking forward to doing most in 2023 and 24. So that was.

Yeah, we actually launched a product feature. No, I fully agree. And I think actually if you haven't read his book, I can definitely recommend it. I think it is his best book so far and I think it just maybe uses a few obvious examples. It'd be great if he could add maybe healthcare. Maybe he can go and talk to Jay Weddy because I think we're all a little bit okay. You know, all these big companies that do the right thing. What about these sort of real hidden gems? Like, you know, when you look at Gemma's presentation, where are they in that? But I think it is really good for him to still go back on the road because it is his legacy and he is the best one to hear explain it to you. He almost doesn't get phased. There were some critical questions even in the audience and he just goes, oh, why is that? But he's completely okay. He also goes, yes, lots of companies have implemented Net Promoter in the wrong way. That's why you need to focus on own growth. Because this you can't do the wrong way. It's basically just a measurement use Net Promoter almost like as a. What is it? It's not the metric, but it's a methodology. It's almost like don't focus on it, don't set a target on it. It's kind of like just a way for you to have a method around customer feedback. Put it in the loyalty bucket. It's the only thing that's really relevant. And then measure earned growth.

And just there's like two things that occurred to me out of this. You even mentioned Fred's gold bars in a presentation this Week. How can we create gold bars the way that Fred was? I thought it was a wonderful way of bringing it to life. And then finally, what was Fred's parting words on this? Do you remember as he walked, just before he walked off the stage?

I think that really surprised me the most. You asked, do you have any tips? And I just thought, because I think this is being European, you kind of expect Americans to have kind of something ready. And I think it's when I really fell for him because he, again, he went back to, well, you know, just decide what you want to stand for and choose the tribe that you want to do that with, and then just go and do it. And it was. It's almost like, you know, let. Don't let me convince you that creating loyalty and working hard for your customers is the right thing to do. Make your own mind up and then choose the company or the, you know, the. The outfit or whatever where you can do that best. At least that's how I interpreted his words. I might have completely, you know, tried to fit it into my own.

Yeah, it was like, just love what you're doing and make sure that, you know, you do that really well.

Yeah. I really thought he was incredibly authentic, of course, very skilled speaker, but also very human. So I didn't feel it was slick at all. I thought it was actually something we should do every. I think everybody should have a chance to hear rifle speak.

Well, I think it's a wonderful way of ending it. Look, we've. I've got my Christmas jumper on to some extent.

I mean, at least in a Christmas color. But, you know, this is a bit of a surprise, this podcast.

So thinking about. But thinking about customer love, I think is a really good thing to do at this time.

Yeah, especially.

And especially as we think about the new year, lots of challenges. But on the other hand, holding that as a candle, making sure that we have customers at the forefront of it, is really the right way.

Yeah. And I think what we've really got to still talk a lot more about is how can you get going simple, because you can get so dazzled with complexity. And I think that's a lot of work that we still have to do is make sure that our customers that want to do a B2B program understand that, you know, you can do it by getting started, and it can grow from there, and it will grow from there. It's inevitable. Yeah, Sorry.

That's fine. I really like to hear from the organization, because at the end of the day, that's what you guys have got to deliver and your side of the business.

Happy to. We love our job. I love my job. Yeah.

Well, thanks for joining me today.

Thank you.

I'd like to thank everybody listening who've been on the Account Experience podcast through the year. Thank you very much. We really love the feedback that we get. Look forward to speaking to you in 2023. Take care.