#70 – Official NPS training, importance of project management
 New NPS ‘Masterclass’, importance of project management. Welcome to the 70th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:
Official NPS certification has been modernized and moved online
Since Fred Reichheld, Satmetrix and Bain own the Net Promoter System and NPS trademarks, they are the only ones who can designate the ‘official’ NPS training provider. Up to now that has always been Satmetrix, via classroom training. That has now changed. Satmetrix and NICE merged last year. At that time, Satmetrix CEO Richard Owen decided to found his own company, OwenCX. He and Satmetrix agreed that OwenCX would refresh NPS training and create an online certification system. That system is now live. I became involved in an odd sort of way. I approached Richard in early July with a proposal to work on online certification together. He told me that they had already done it, and that it was almost ready to launch. The result of that discussion was that I became the pilot student and the first person to be certified. Proud. And literally as I started writing this sentence, they announced that certification would be available free of charge to CX consultants for a limited time, and at a greatly reduced price for teams. Read all about it here. You can’t fake project management skills. (I know, I tried) I had been managing projects for over 20 years when I had an unpleasant surprise. I had recently moved to a new manager and met him in his office in Munich. We reviewed progress on my latest project. After about an hour, he looked at me and said, “Maurice, you know nothing about project management.” After blustering and arguing that I had been doing it for a long time, so that could not be true, I finally asked him what he meant. He asked me some basic questions, like “What is a deliverable?” and “What is a task?” I did badly in answering. The root cause was that I had never had any formal training in project management. This had consequences. The main one was that I could not communicate effectively with people who had full Project Management Professional (PMP) training. We used the same words, but meant different things. My definitions were wrong and the PMP experts were correct. I fixed the problem by taking a ‘light’ course. Anyway, that memory surfaced this week as I was managing a project in a more personal domain; a house move. Worth thinking about.
Our latest blog posts Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.
Notable customer experience items from other sites Ian Golding: The Accidental Customer Experience Ian often writes about his personal experiences as a traveler. Most of the time, he chooses to write about what I will call less than perfect customer experience. In his latest blog he writes about the many unexceptional air and train travel experiences he has had over the last two years. He counted 206 trips in all, and he says he can remember something about just 11 of them, though in most cases he is not quite sure which flight or train trip it was. His theme is that these companies and many others are mainly producing customer experiences ‘by accident’. It’s a nice read. Enjoy it here. Forbes/Bain: With CX Tools, Master A Few Rather Than Dabbling With Many Three Bain leaders just published a summary of their research into the adoption of 20 types of customer experience management tools around the world. Asian companies lead in predictive analytics, as you might expect. Furthermore, they recommend concentrating efforts on just a few tools, rather than spreading resources thinly across many efforts. That seems quite tricky advice to follow. To me it seems worthwhile doing a proof of concept on a range of tools, selecting some of them for pilot, and then deploying the best ones. Perhaps that is what the authors really mean. Read the summary here.
Looking forward NPS is not the only CX certification-related thing going on in my world at the moment. For NPS I have to think about how to answer someone who wants unofficial NPS training for an association but has no money. Outside NPS, I am looking forward to seeing an announcement of another type of CX training being available in a new language. More soon. Here are links to all of our books on Amazon.com. Kindle versions are available in all stores. Print versions are available from the major stores only, with the notable exception of Australia, where print versions are not available from amazon.com.au. Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation Net Promoter – Implement the System Customer-centric Cost Reduction “So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Color edition) “So Happy Here”: The Absurdist but Essential Guide to Better Business (Black & White edition) Please share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up for it 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. To change your subscription, click here.
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