#31 – Join the sales team – Strange happenings in the LinkedIn NPS group

If you are successful in measuring and improving customer experience, you will sell more. Your sales team should find that value proposition quite compelling. The customer experience leader needs to have an excellent relationship with sales and should be part of their leadership team. I am not suggesting that he or she should report to the sales leader, simply that they must be in the team.

My own approach has been to start by proposing to attend an internal sales meeting to present competitive benchmark data. Sales teams find the insights about their competitive advantages and disadvantages to be really useful, so they have always been attentive. Using that positive feedback, I then propose to be a permanent member of the sales leadership team. That has usually worked for me.

OK, that is the positive perspective. A more negative perspective is that sales teams are the ones that are most likely to try to prevent you interviewing customers or partners. The objections usually take one of two forms. The most common is “Yes, I support what you are doing, but we have a big deal going on right now [or any one of a list of ‘exceptional’ situations] so I don’t want to risk upsetting the customer in any way. I will give you a call when it is all OK again.” The second variation is “I already know everything there is to know about our customers.” That is a bit harder to deal with. Joining the sales team helps immensely with both.

One of the first things I have been doing at around 6 a.m. each day is to check whether there are new membership requests over at the LinkedIn NPS group. I have been managing it for the last six months. Las week Monday, I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the name of the group had been changed, and that I had been excluded from the group. This came as a shock. I have had no communication of any kind with the group owner. He has not responded to my messages asking for clarification. Indeed, part of the reason I was asked to manage the group was that he had not posted anything for several years, and several hundred people were waiting for replies to their membership requests.

I have no ideas what is going on here. If any of you have any insights, feel free to write to me at mfg@customerstrategy.net. I raised a help ticket with LinkedIn to find out. However, they replied that they do not interfere with, or get involved in groups in any way, so they could not help me.

	A modern fairy tale – You don’t need a customer experience strategy – you already know what to do (Part 1) Don’t bother with a customer experience strategy. You already know what to do. Well, most of us think we do. Including me. We all have lots of ideas that will improve customer experience. Here is a story about how that all works.
	Use emotion and ‘identifiable victims’ in customer experience reporting No strategy is worthwhile and no project is worth doing if you cannot communicate it effectively. Once the communication is about how your customers and partners feel about your company, emotion enters into play. Here is how to deal with it.
	Net Promoter Open Question Analysis – Survey Results Thanks to those who have taken the survey on analysis of open-ended questions. I would like to summarize what I have seen, provide a link to the results, and invite analytics vendors to study the resulting text data.