#12 Customer vs. employee happiness, NPS Forum

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Welcome to the 12th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

  1. Proof there is no general relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
  2. Progress with Net Promoter® System (NPS) Forum on LinkedIn
  3. Latest blog posts
  4. Notable items from other sites
  5. Our books are available as of today!

 

Employee and customer satisfaction

As promised last week, I have refreshed my January study on the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. The scope is 366 large companies selling to American consumers. Back in January, I was missing the 2016 customer satisfaction data for 71 companies. I now have that, and have replaced the 2015 numbers for the relevant companies. In January, I was able to show that there was only a small relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. I can now go further and say that there is no relationship at all, on average across all 366 companies. Bear in mind that employee satisfaction and employee engagement are two different concepts, as I explain in this week’s blog post. I am sure you will find the research as surprising as I did. Feedback welcome. The link to the study is in the blog section below.

Progress with the Net Promoter® System (NPS) Forum on LinkedIn

I got a surprise a week ago when I learned I was the new manager of the 23,000-member NPS group on LinkedIn. What I discovered surprised me, and not in a good way. The group had not been actively managed for years. Over a thousand posts were in the moderation queue. Several hundred membership requests had never been approved. The group rules were unclear, to say the least.

After taking a few days to clean up the mess, I sent a message to all members announcing the ‘re-birth’ of the group. I posted new purpose statements and new group rules that will be enforced from Friday. The group is now designed to be a place where NPS practitioners can learn, share and innovate. The Net Promoter System has evolved in the years since The Ultimate Question 2.0 was written, and it will continue to evolve. I hope that this community will be an innovation hot spot. You can find the LinkedIn group here.

Our latest blog posts Older posts are of course still available on the blog page.

image Proof there is no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
Many will find this surprising. I used publicly-available data to prove the absence of a relationship between employee and customer happiness for 336 large businesses selling to American consumers. Personally, I don’t find this surprising at all. Read on to understand why.
How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer
Calculating the lifetime value of a customer is somewhat like calculating the value of a company you would like to acquire. While you can find many methods of doing the calculation, only one is completely correct. There are also a number of satisfactory approximations…
image How to evaluate customer survey text analysis software
Customer research of all types can be divided into two categories: rating questions and open questions. You are dealing with rating questions when you are asked to provide a number on a scale as an answer to a question. Open questions let you say whatever you want. The software challenge is then how to analyze all of those responses without human bias…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

McKinsey: Putting Customer Experience at the Heart of Next-Generation Operating Models

Thanks to Ricardo Gulko for suggesting this article on the McKinsey consultants’ website. There is a lot of good content here. The main insights I took away came from the examples about speed. An insurance startup that processes client claims “within seconds” is an example. The article reinforces my view that cost reduction and customer satisfaction can be compatible. Making processes simpler and more effective for customers often costs less. The article is by Shital Chheda, Ewan Duncan, and Stefan Roggenhofer. You can find it here.

Humor: The customer is apparently not always right

Some funny customer stories from this website I had not seen before. All of the humor I have seen there so far is ‘clean’ and suitable for sharing with others. The site is here.

Our books are now available

The Kindle versions of our books are available as of today (as of midnight local time Thursday) on all Amazon sites worldwide. Anyone who pre-ordered should see them arrive automatically in their Kindle libraries. They are also in the Kindle LendingLibrary, meaning they are free for Amazon Prime customers who participate in that program. We decided to go exclusively with Amazon for eBooks, so you will not be able to find them anywhere else. For those new to Kindle, you don’t have to have a Kindle device. Free Kindle applications exist for iOS, Android, PC and Mac. Print versions will follow in April.

The most helpful thing anyone can now do is to review the books, no matter what you think of them. Reviews will help us to improve as we finalize the print versions in the coming weeks. Any resulting eBook updates should be delivered to you automatically, without any further charge. The images above are linked to the US Amazon site. You can find links to the major Amazon stores on our books page, here.

Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for the newsletter here. I have put links to past newsletters on the subscription page. Finally, please feel free to change or cancel your subscription using the link below.

You can also email me, Maurice FitzGerald, at mfg@customerstrategy.net.

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