In this interview at the Net Promoter® Conference, Symantec’s former CEO John Thompson and senior executive Enrique Salem discuss how Symantec’s executive team operationalizes customer loyalty. They describe a multi‑layered governance model: a quarterly Global Leadership Council of 25 senior vice presidents reviews loyalty performance and decides on corrective actions; a bi‑weekly cross‑functional leadership dashboard tracks key loyalty drivers such as support, quality, ease of doing business, and licensing, with a focus on measurable progress. The most impactful initiative highlighted is the requirement that each executive personally call 20 detractor partners, document their issues, and use those insights to prioritize resources. This direct executive‑partner engagement not only signals seriousness to the partners but also drives internal awareness and prioritization of loyalty‑related projects. The program’s results include a 20‑point Net Promoter Score (NPS) increase for partners in one year, a 6‑point NPS rise for consumers over six quarters, a 15% uplift in support‑call satisfaction, a reduction of license‑fulfillment steps from 22 to 7, and a shortened quote‑to‑cash cycle.
about how the executive team, the most senior team in the company, actually connects with this in a very, very practical way. Perhaps you could talk about that.
Yeah, I think that one of the things that's important is, again, do you really believe in customer loyalty, and what are the actions that are visible to the employees? And I'll give you a couple of things that we've been doing at Symantec. First and foremost, John Thompson, our CEO, has a— what we call the Global Leadership Council, which is the 25 senior vice presidents of the company get together every quarter for a day and a half. And what we cover is look back at the quarter we just finished and think about what are the things that worked and what are the things that we need to do or improve to make the coming quarter more successful. One of the few standing topics every quarter is a review of how we're doing on customer loyalty. And so what— the way that process is run is Ashlyn gets up and she talks to the leadership team specifically about how we did. But that's only a short part of the dialogue. That's 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And then we spend the balance of the hour focused on, "What are we gonna do differently?" And so that's the first way that the executive team gets involved is every quarter we review how we did and what we're gonna do differently. The second place is we've got what we call our leadership team that gets together about every other week and works on the key loyalty drivers. And that has the business unit heads, that has operations, that has sales and marketing. And we have a dashboard that we review that says, "Here are the things that we're tracking. Here's what's going on in support. Here's what's going on in quality. Here's what's going on in ease of doing business. Here's what's going on in licensing." And we track that every 2 weeks. And we're maniacal about saying, "We've got to make progress from meeting to meeting." It's not about, "Okay, we all get together, sit in a room, have a discussion, feel good about what we're doing, and walk out." It is about follow-through. And so we drive— that every 2 weeks, and I think that starts getting more of the company involved. Now, the most innovative thing I think that the team did, which I think has had the biggest impact, is they decided that it was important to get the execs to actually absolutely connect with not the folks who were the promoters, but to connect with the partners who were detractors. And so each exec got 20 partners to call. 20 partners who had said they were dissatisfied. And they had to go down and call those partners, and there was a form that we had to fill out that described what were the issues. By doing that, the executive team got a real connection to folks who were experiencing some form of pain in interacting with our company. Now, why was that significant? Because like any company, we have to allocate resources, right? We have to decide how much of our IT time is spent on projects related to customer loyalty, how much of our dollars How many dollars are going to be spent on support? And so by having direct contact with folks who are detractors, I think it heightened the awareness of the organization around, here are the issues that need to be resolved, and how big a priority it needed to be. And quite frankly, I think that one, while maybe sounds simple, activity of getting the execs engaged with the detractors, I think was probably the single biggest thing that has made sure that this is something that is gonna absolutely be a part of everything Symantec does.
And it sends a pretty big signal when someone gets a phone call from you or John Thompson that they're serious, right?
Yeah, and I think that's another thing that's important to note is that, you know, as Richard said, we had the situation where once we talked to that partner, that partner invariably, in many, many cases, now became a little more connected to our company. And if you talk to them a follow-on time, they actually were like, "Wow, Symantec really cares." And so at a minimum, not only did it send a good message into the employee base, but it also started to build some loyalty directly with those partners.
Symantec has realized the following results: partner loyalty, net promoter score increase of 20 points in a year. Customer support: 15% improvement in satisfaction on support calls. Consumer relationship: Net Promoter Score increase of 6 points in 6 quarters. License fulfillment has moved from requiring 22 steps to 7. The quote-to-cash cycle time has been reduced.
