David Ambler, Kathleen McBride and I just attended the Net Promoter Conference in New York.  What an amazing and empowering event!  As Andy Sernovitz put it in his blog post, “200+ executives are sitting in their seats -- focused, taking notes, and absorbing the presentations. What you don't see is people drifting around the halls, chatting, and making phone calls. Amazingly, I can't see anyone on their blackberry either.”

I’d like to share with you the themes that we heard emerge over the last two days:

1. Segmentation. In their excitement to adopt the Net Promoter discipline, many people are forgetting about a basic business concept—customer segmentation.  If you measure and react to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) without understanding your customer segments and the value you deliver to each, you will likely fail as you adopt Net Promoter.  Why?  Because you’ll focus on “detractors” rather than on the right detractors. The right detractors are those that fall into your most profitable segments or those segments which offer the most growth potential.  Of course you must also use the segmentation filter when determining how much you focus on your promoters and passives accounts.
2. Executive Sponsorship.  This theme was omnipresent and is pretty simple.  If you don’t have executive level sponsorship and engagement, you have zero chance of achieving success.
3. It’s a Journey.  Many presenters reported beginning the Net Promoter journey assuming they’d see results in a quarter or two.  But that’s not what happened.  It takes time to get your organization to align around the new customer focus and it therefore takes time for the results to manifest.  Laura DeSoto, SVP of Innovation and Synergy at Experian reported that they saw virtually no improvement in NPS for 5 quarters.  But once things took hold, they saw their NPS more than double over the next six quarters. 
4. It’s a Discipline, Not a Metric.  There’s been a lot of criticism about Net Promoter, with cynics focusing on Net Promoter only as a metric and failing to focus on the broader aspects of what it offers.  What became clear through many presentations at the conference is that while Net Promoter is brilliantly simple and easy for everyone in the organization to understand, achieving success requires a broader understanding of the concepts and a commitment to putting the customer first.  Zane Safrit in his blog talks more about Fred Reichheld’s comments on this topic.

To learn more about best practices in B2B, visit Deb Eastman: Best Practices in the B2B Space blog post.

Want to learn more about what happened at the conference?  Visit the conference blog hosted by Satmetrix.

Steven Nicks, VP Steven.Nicks@phelongroup.com