Optus announced its new look last week. It has abandoned its
menagerie of wild animals in favour of a cute cartoon character and insists
that the changes are more than skin deep, that they reflect a new
customer-focussed Optus.
However, until prompted Optus said little about what it is
doing internally to bring about this change. All the talk was about the new
brand and what it signified.
When asked about this at the press conference announcing the
new brand, Optus managing director, customer, Vicki Brady, said that internal
change had been underway for at least a year. “Our focus has been how we
support the people who are closest to the customer to do great stuff. We had a
focus on training and empowerment of our front-line staff. They are making sure
that when people go to our different touch points: contact centre, online, in
store there is a consistent experience.”
She said that customers were surveyed after every
interaction and there had been consistent improvement, “but we still have a
long way to go.” Vice president, corporate and regulatory affairs, David
Epstein added: “What are now saying to people internally is that the whole
culture of ‘Yes’ has to go through the firm from top to bottom and for everyone
is about the customer contact chain. Everyone must recognise that they have a
part to play.”
A major measure of the success of this transformation will
be Net Promoter Score (NPS), a tool that is becoming hugely popular with
customer service organisations. Brady said that Optus had rolled this out a
year ago. “We now measure NPS across every touch point in our company, every
interaction: on the phone, in store, online. Customers have an opportunity to
give us feedback they rate us in terms of their willingness to recommend us.
That has been invaluable. We have been using that feedback to start to address
changes and priorities in our business. We do research and we have analytics
but for me the real-time feedback from customers has been a big change for four
us.”
So Optus has a lot riding on NPS, but so do Telstra, iiNet,
the Westpac Bank, CommBank and NAB to name but a few.
The technique has its origins in a 2003 paper in the Harvard
Business Review ‘One Number You Need to Grow’ by US business author and business
strategist Fred Reichheld, but is now a proprietary system registered
and promoted by Reichheld and Bain & Company along with Satmetrix.
NPS separates customer responses into three
distinct categories:
•
Detractors: those who rate their likelihood to recommend a
company at between zero and six.
•
Passives: customers who record a rating of between seven and
eight.
•
Promoters: those who give a score of between nine and 10.
The actual NPS score is calculated by
subtracting Detractors from the Promoters.
Telstra is full of praise for it. “NPS is a quick and easy way to measure the perception of a
company, an individual product or a specific service, allowing a company to
focus on areas that require attention. … If we’re not providing outstanding
service worthy of a 9-to-10 rating, the NPS research demonstrates customers are
unlikely to recommend the company and remain loyal over the long-term.”
It adds: “What’s remarkable in today’s business
climate that values complicated analytics, weightings and metrics, is that NPS
ultimately presents business leaders with a very simple set of results by which
they can run an organisation.”
If that sounds too good to be true, it probably
is. The technique has many detractors. Check out the Wikipedia entry on NPS and you’ll see that most of the entry
is devoted to “Criticism of NPS”.
And whatever its merits, NPS does little to provide feedback
as to what organisations are doing right to create ‘promoters’ and doing wrong
to create ‘detractors’. Asking someone to rate their interaction with a company
doesn’t necessarily get close to discovering the root cause of that rating. For
example if a customer is asked for their NPS score after calling a call centre
to try and resolve a major stuff up it may not be possible to link their score
to its root cause - the stuff up.
The mantra in telcos today is to deliver an exceptional
customer experience and there are other ways to get an understanding of that
relationship and to assess whether a company is delivering a good customer
experience. Optus may well be using them, but if so it kept quite about them
One way is to actually be a customer and rate the
experience. Melbourne-based Global Reviews does this by deploying ‘customer
surrogates’ who interact with the service providers’ contact centres.
Earlier this year its customer surrogates made 350 live
sales calls across nine major Australian telcos regarding two products –
Internet and mobile phone service providers. Each surrogate played the part of
a ‘warm sales lead’ and went through one of 20 scenarios.
Its conclusions were not encouraging. “Many companies lack
the ability to present the customer with a convincing value proposition. … Even
though the industry is more fiercely competitive than ever, performance in the
needs discovery process (uncovering the customer’s broad and specific needs)
has decreased in the last 12 months, impacting the industry’s ability to
prospects into customers.”
It ranked the top three telcos as being Vodafone with “an
industry-leading score of 58.3 percent, due to sustained efforts in
establishing which features the customer is interested in,” followed by iiNet
with 56.2 percent and Virgin with 55.8 percent. Global Reviews unfortunately
did not publish Optus’ and Telstra’s rankings.
However it’s worth noting that poor performance in
“uncovering the customer’s broad and specific needs” might not result in a low
NPS rating - because customers don’t even know what they are missing out on.
The technique clearly has its limitations - only real
customers can sample the true customer experience by interacting about a
current service, but it does show that there is a lot more to delivering a good
customer experience than getting a good NPS result.
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