Net Promoter Score and CRM Vision

An explosive mix of social media, online communities, text analytics & visualisation technologies together with Net Promoter Score (NPS) programs is presenting marketers with the opportunity to deliver on the type of Customer Relationship Management vision promised 10-15 years ago. In my humble opinion of course... but as practitioners, we are now seeing some of the more innovative companies closing in on this position.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) approaches espoused in the 1990's by gurus such as Peppers & Rogers "one-to-one marketing" ("treating different customers differently") and Fred Reichheld's "Loyalty Effect" were very influential at the time but there were several forces working against successful execution including:

• CRM technologies (not to mention the internet) and customer management practices that were insufficiently mature
• Technology vendors and Tier 1 consulting firms (systems integrators) who over-promised and turned 'CRM' into a 'technology only' concept
• And customers who were not ready, or perhaps more likely - not enabled - to throw their weight around

The consumer trend to social media has provided the fuel - the consumer data, insight, advocacy, innovation that was always missing from the elaborate transactional CRM systems that sat largely irrelevant within large organisations.

The next hurdle then becomes the organisation's ability to analyse this raw customer input - and that is where new text analysis and visualisation technologies will come into play. As an example, check out this technology as way of delivering customer verbatim comments to front line staff.

The final and largest hurdle, of course, is the willingness and ability of large organisations to act on this customer feedback and interaction.

This hurdle is nothing less than a transformation program... but the good news is that Net Promoter Programs are now reaching the maturity where they provide not only the focus but the broader framework.

Particularly encouraging here are developments in so-called transactional (as opposed to relationship) NPS programs - where customer feedback is collected at critical touchpoints and provided back to frontline staff for action.

Interest declared: Resonate has now developed 'Active' NPS program services and technologies to service these requirements