employee satisfaction

October 1, 2019

NPS (33) – Why not ask your employees what your customers want? (ceNPS) – 33rd article in a series on the Net Promoter System®

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Employee Satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS / ceNPS, Customer Experience, employee satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS, strategy /

Welcome to the 33rd article in my series on the Net Promoter Score and System. I want to introduce a new concept this time. I call it ceNPS and here is what it is about: Your employees have quite a bit of knowledge about your customers. Why not ask them what your customers want you to improve? Employee ideas tend to be easier to implement and the whole process costs less and is faster than going systematically out to customers.

You can read all of the prior articles in the NPS series on our blog page here.

We have talked about asking customers what to improve, and improving it. We have mentioned the same approach for employees. I now want to introduce a hybrid concept: ask employees what to improve for customers. Let’s call it Customer-Employee NPS, or ceNPS.

Why should the customer be the only source of customer knowledge?

Customers are the best possible source for information about what they would like to see improved. As to how to improve it, well, they leave that up to you. Your employees have a different perspective. Most are aware of things that could be made better for customers. Many also have precise ideas about exactly how to do so. I therefore suggest testing the following survey with your employees to see what value it provides:

How likely are our customers to recommend our company?
Why?
What should we improve for customers and how?

Use the same techniques as for customer research to prioritize the input. I don’t see why this would not work in all industries, bearing in mind that ‘customer’ means the direct customer of the company, which could be a retailer that sells onwards to end customers.

Compare with customer feedback

In a rational universe, there will be at least some overlap between customer feedback and employee views on what customers need. Compare the top five suggestions on both lists. Items that come up high on both lists are ideal; the customer’s expression of the need will match employee suggestions on how to implement the improvement.

Employees will have different ideas

Employees may have insights in areas that would not naturally occur to customers. One example that springs to mind happened shortly after HP set up a centralized pre-sales group in Bucharest, Romania. When the new operation started up, it would be fair to say that the people were quite passive, just doing what was asked. Sales people and resellers asked them to provide price quotations to customers, and they did that work well. Then the team supporting the Benelux noticed something. As negotiation cycles continued, sales people removed things from orders to meet a customer price point. Notably, offers for servers and storage that started with round-the-clock support services were often reduced to a cheaper business-hours-only proposal.

The Benelux team in Bucharest decided to systematically give the customers two proposals: one exactly as requested, and one with the service levels they believed the customers really needed, at a higher price. The initiative was a great success, with about half the customers taking the more appropriate service proposal at the higher price. For customers who accepted, it completely eliminated the situations where they would call during a weekend to be told that their contract did not cover the repair. A customer would never have thought of this double-proposal idea.

Employees should lead the implementation of their own ideas

Unless you have an excellent reason for not doing so, the person who made the suggestion should always lead implementation. Letting anyone else lead eliminates a career development opportunity and allows one aspect of human nature to creep into the picture: rejection of other people’s ideas. Just as the golden rule of project planning is “Those who implement must do the planning”, the golden rule of ideas is that the idea generator must drive the implementation. Yes, it is true that really creative people are usually awful at implementation, and that will be their career development opportunity.

Include your subcontractors and partners

If you use resellers and subcontractors, they should be included in your improvement culture too. Simply follow the same approach as for employees. I know of no example of any company doing this and am sure the reaction will be positive. It is to be expected that your partners will have privileged relationships with some of your end customers. You need to learn from them.

Next time

The next article will be about employee development in the context of customer experience work.

As is often the case, the above is a slightly-edited version of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Net Promoter – Implement the System All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide, and from your better book retailers.

September 28, 2019

NPS (32) – Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) – 32nd article in a series on the Net Promoter System®

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Employee Satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS / Customer Experience, employee satisfaction, eNPS, Net Promoter System, NPS, strategy /

Welcome to the 32nd article in my series on the Net Promoter Score and System. This time the subject is a variation on the Net Promoter Score: the Employee Net Promoter Score or NPS. Bain revised the initial concept just under two years ago so some of what follows may be new to you.

You can read all of the prior articles in the NPS series on our blog page here.

What is eNPS?

Most medium and large companies, NGOs and public sector organizations measure employee happiness in a structured way, on a regular basis. The purpose of such research is usually to help executives to understand what the general employee population would like them to improve. The CEO also gets to find out what improvements the executives would like to see. Almost everyone uses excessively complex survey methods that take too long and provide limited information about improvement suggestions. Applying the Net Promoter System solves these problems.

Darci Darnell of Bain announced Net Promoter for People in a Bain Net Promoter System podcast on November 30th, 2017. It enhances the original eNPS by adding an additional question. Employee Net Promoter Scores used to simply be the answers to the question: “How likely are you to recommend our company as a place to work?” The additional question is “To what extent do you agree with the following statement: I am inspired by my job.” It is measured on a five-point scale.

Bain research showed that verbatim comments relating to recommendation were mainly about basic needs and things about which employees are dissatisfied. The inspiration question produces verbatim responses that are about their higher-level need and suggestions for a positive future. The two rating questions are followed by the standard “Why?” and “What could we do better?” questions. Note that I continue to use ‘eNPS’ to refer to the new format. And it is also the case that the Bain website still (as of September 2019) contains references to the old eNPS format.

How not to measure employee satisfaction

Most companies that measure employee satisfaction do so once a year. Data collection is a significant exercise and a typical survey has about 80 questions. Analysis is often done by a third party. Results are usually available four to eight weeks after the survey period ends. Companies may further delay publication for various real or imagined reasons, such as not wanting them to compete for attention with quarterly earnings messages. Sub-scores are calculated for areas like employee engagement, or compensation & benefits. There may or may not be open questions with free text input.

To use an old saying, the result of such surveys is far too much data and far too little information. Let’s suppose your employee engagement questions score lower than last year, and lower than the average for your industry. Since you only have numbers, you don’t know why it happened. The usual first phase is one of denial, “Well, we had a major management change right in the middle of the survey period, so the change is understandable. Let’s wait until next year to see if we need to act.” If you can get through that sort of reaction, the next phase is one of focus groups. You may have collected data from 10,000 people, but the decisions about what to do are given to a group of ten people, for example. You could just have started there, skipping the survey, if you think that is a good approach.

Benchmarks

There are no recognized benchmark suppliers for eNPS. The Mayflower group in the USA and the RACER group in Germany have set up agreements among member companies to share employee survey data. The IT Survey Group (ITSG) is a recognized source of non-eNPS employee survey benchmark data for the IT industry. Member companies agree to ask 60 survey questions in exactly the same format, and using the same rating scale. They then use the average ratings as a norm for their own scores. There are no verbatim questions in the ITSG data set, so there is no information on what the average IT industry employee would like his or her company to improve.

The 24 companies shown below are the ITSG members as of September 2019. They all use the long-format surveys ITSG membership requires. At HP, we took the comparison with ITSG numbers seriously. We just did not directly know what to do.

Let’s make it a lot simpler

The new four-question eNPS format used for Net Promoter for People presents an obvious way of doing simpler surveys. You already have all the demographic information you need about them, so analysis should be easy. Yes, the demographics matter a lot. Men and women tend to give radically different answers, for example. Happiness also tends to decrease with increasing length of service.

No matter what the demographic group, the trend is more important than the absolute number. This brings us to another advantage of the eNPS method. I recommend sampling one-sixth of your population every month, sending new survey requests each and every day. The great advantage this brings is that you will be able to see the effect of different things happening in your company, such as earnings announcements, new product announcements, executive arrivals or departures, and even external factors such as a stock market crash or an election.

Follow the NPS framework

The NPS framework works for eNPS as well. Employee feedback is usually anonymous. Typically, a manager will only receive a report if at least eight of her employees have provided feedback. The Inner Loop then takes place at the level of each team. The Outer Loop addresses company-wide improvements. Regular Huddles are the correct way to drive progress and ensure interlock between inner and outer loops.

Indirect advantage

On top of simplicity and the ability to do continuous monitoring, there is an indirect benefit. All employees will become familiar with NPS. They will easily understand that you are asking customers and employees similar questions and follow the same improvement process. Of course, if you take no visible action on the employee feedback, it will be harder to persuade employees that you are indeed acting on customer feedback. You need to do both.

Cultural differences matter a lot in traditional employee surveys and less in eNPS

While cultural differences matter somewhat in customer surveys, they seem to matter a lot more in employee surveys. CEB (www.cebglobal.com) has published the graph below that emphasizes the point. In short, unrealistic self-perceptions of performance are common. These differences are greater than those found between countries for customer surveys.

Personally, I find the table surprising. North Americans use ‘curve grading’ in their schools. Curve grading means that a fixed proportion of a class gets an ‘A’ grade, a ‘B’ and so on, no matter what the objective level of the class is. Most Americans therefore grow up having a realistic view of how they compare to others in the classroom. Apparently, this knowledge is discarded when they enter the world of work. Curve grading is rare in the other countries on the list. Could these facts be related? I could speculate, but don’t really see how they could be.

In short, unrealistic self-perceptions of performance are common. These differences are greater than those found between countries for customer surveys.

An additional communication challenge

We have seen that you should not compare countries to each other in your reporting. A fair way of reporting on countries would be to show only the trends, not the absolute numbers. Just leave the numbers off the y-axis in your graphs. There is an additional communication challenge with eNPS. I have generally seen eNPS scores that are about 20 points lower than the customer scores for a given business. What that means is that eNPS scores are far more likely to be negative numbers than are customer scores.

As previously advised, if your first report on a topic only contains bright red negative numbers, your audience will intuitively deny the reality of your report and ignore it. Rather than perverting the system by (say) adding 20 points to all the numbers to ‘normalize’ them, I suggest devoting the first report entirely to the improvement suggestions and the answers to the Why question. You can supply the positive or negative eNPS trend numbers from the second report on, without necessarily providing the absolute scores at all. You may like to believe your audience will have a rational response to a set of negative numbers, but they will not. Intuition rules. Deal with it.

Conclusion

Use eNPS as your primary ongoing survey methodology and execute it continuously. If you (mistakenly, I believe) think you get value from participating in a benchmark consortium, continue to do that huge survey for a year or two, comparing the actions you take from each survey type. I am confident you will discard the consortium survey, particularly as it does not give you direct insight on the performance of any individual competitor. If you genuinely want to improve things for your employees, just ask them what to do, then do it. The Employee Net Promoter System and Score are the most efficient and effective way of doing so.

Next time

The next article will be about a new concept: asking your employees to tell you what improvements customers would like to see.

September 23, 2019

NPS (31) – Does employee happiness matter? – 31st article in a series on the Net Promoter System®

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS / Customer Experience, employee satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS, strategy /

Welcome to the 31st article in my series on the Net Promoter Score and System. This time I dig into the question of the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. The answer is not what most people believe. While this series is about the Net Promoter Score, I have used American Customer Satisfaction Index data for the analysis as I was able to study 398 companies. I have since been able to do the same type of study using Temkin NPS benchmarks for 223 companies, with very similar results. However, I still consider the ACSI-based study to be superior, just because of the number of companies and industries I was able to include.

You can read all of the prior articles in the NPS series on our blog page here.

Contrary to popular wisdom, happy employees are not terribly important to customers. My research shows that employee happiness contributes about 6% of customer happiness. This does vary by industry.

Source of data

In February 2019, I compared American Customer Satisfaction Index data with Glassdoor.com employee ratings for 398 large companies that sell to US consumers. The research has been described in detail in our companion book Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation. Using linear regression, just 6.2% of the variability in customer satisfaction is due to employee satisfaction. For the stats experts, the number does not change with quadratic regression. This was our third annual study on the subject and prior results were similar.

Reasons for the surprise

There are a number of reasons the link between end customer and employee happiness is not as high as you might expect:

First and foremost, a happy employee is not necessarily an engaged employee. A person can be happy with their short commute to work, their pay, and the free food in the company restaurant. None of these involves doing anything positive for customers. Engagement is a more complex concept, with no standard definition. However, every study I have seen shows a positive relationship between employee engagement and a range of things, such as financial results and customer satisfaction.
Many brands do not actually interact directly with customers at all. This is the case for franchise businesses. The company grants a right to use a brand in a geographical area to a franchise operator and the franchisee is the one who interacts with the end customer. Even the largest corporations that deliver physical goods do this to an extent. Almost none cover every country in the world themselves, depending on local third-parties to cover their gaps. The happiness of the employees who have no interaction with the end customer is of course invisible to them and has no impact on their NPS scores received from those end customers. The parent companies should be more concerned with the happiness of franchisees. There is no easily-available public data on franchise operator NPS.
There are web-only brands where you are unlikely to come into contact with a human. Amazon is a company with a great ASCI score of 82, and a relatively ordinary Glassdoor score of 3.8.
Some brands have monopolies and can afford to treat customers poorly. This seems notably to be the case for many cable TV companies and Internet Service Providers. Their customer and employee satisfaction scores seem to be opposites. Who would have thought it possible? Happy employees and unhappy customers. I suppose another explanation is that these companies provide services that we only notice when they are not working. When everything is OK, we don’t think about them. When our internet access is down, we quickly get angry.

There may be sectors where it matters a lot

My research suggests there are high-touch industries where employee engagement makes a difference to customers. There were 17 supermarket chains in my study, and the variations in employee happiness explained 49.1% of the variations in ACSI scores, (as measured by the r-squared number.) For hotels, the number was highest of all, at 68.1%. However, those companies include hotels operated by franchisees, rather than employees of the parent company, and ten is not a great population for calculating correlation coefficients. Perhaps surprisingly, the number was just 7.2% for specialty retail stores. There were 25 companies in this category. I have to speculate that this may be due to the negative environment created by competition with eCommerce. Bearing all of these factors this in mind, I nevertheless selected 129 of the 398 companies covered as ‘High touch’ and found that variations in employee satisfaction explain 8.8% of the variations in customer satisfaction, using linear regression, and 16.8% using quadratic regression. Still quite low really.

Think about it

If you were to assemble a team of people and ask them to brainstorm potential factors that affect customer happiness and loyalty, I believe you would come up with a long list. Employee satisfaction would probably make the list, but I doubt it would be in the top five. Things like the reliability of your products would be higher up on the list. It is only when the question is asked in isolation that people say employee satisfaction is the most critical factor. It is a case of an intuitive reaction, rather than a rational one. It would be tempting to believe that employee satisfaction is a hygiene factor, meaning that unhappy employees do indeed have a negative effect on customers, and that there is a diminishing rate or return on improving happiness, making no difference at all above a certain point. However, the ACSI analysis does not support that theory either. The relationship is close to linear at the cross-industry level.

Full details

If you would like to read about this in far more detail the full blog posts, which are slightly-edited versions of chapters in our book Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation are here and here.

Next time

The next article will be about one way of measuring employee satisfaction_ eNPS.

March 28, 2019

#91 – Critical difference in B2B vs. B2C feedback, Speaking experience in Amsterdam

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction, Newsletter, NPS, Strategy / ACSI, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, employee satisfaction, Net Promoter System, research, Speaking, strategy /

Differences in the way B2B and B2C customers answer open questions. Speaking experience at CustomerGauge event in Amsterdam. Welcome to the 91st edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Unexpected (to me) difference between B2B and B2C customer feedback
My recent speaking experience in Amsterdam
Latest blog posts – Answers to CX leadership questions, employee/customer happiness
Notable items from other sites – Annette Franz and Rosaria Cirillo Louwman
Looking forward

Unexpected (to me) difference between B2B and B2C feedback

While working at HP my experience was that NPS Promoters write the longest answers to open questions. My operating assumption is that such customers like you and want you to continue to improve, so they do their best to help. Rob Markey confirms that this is what they see with Bain clients too. However, all of this is for business-to-business customers.

Since retiring from HP, I have been exposed to the situation at a number of B2C companies. I have seen data that shows the opposite pattern. Detractors write the most. In one large data set, Promoters used about 8 words to answer the ‘Why?’ question after the NPS rating, while Detractors used twice that, with Passives half way between. It may interest you to know that it made less than half a word difference for Promoters when people answered on their phones. Single-word responses from Promoters were quite common in all cases. “Great!”, for example. It would have been nice to know what exactly was great.

Since the data sets I have looked at are for companies without annual contracts I suspect this may just be true for companies that have a purely transactional relationship with their customers. Unfortunately, none of these data sets came from research that included the standard ‘What could we do better?’ question, so I don’t know whether the same would be true there.

Your views would be most welcome.

My recent speaking experience in Amsterdam

I spoke at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in Amsterdam two weeks ago. What a great experience! The event was held in a theatre that has been created inside an old church. The lighting was great, and the general atmosphere was wonderful. Customer Experience work has advanced quite a lot in the last few years. It was great to see leaders from DHL, Electrolux, Salesforce and other companies present their achievements and concerns.

As is often the case, half of what I learned came from discussions during breaks and during the evening between the two days. Fascinating stuff. One of the blog posts in the list below covers my answers to the two most common questions I was asked during these informal interactions.

My main stage presentation was based on two different blogs that you may remember. The first is my ‘Valentine’s Day’ blog about the similarities in the relationships couples and companies have. The second is my recent work on using stories and emotions to communicate effectively. And I just received the preliminary results of the feedback request sent to all participants. My session was the top rated one on the first day. I have not seen the results for the second day, and don’t expect an overall ranking to be published. Anyway… Yay me! (And thank you to all the attendees.)

Congratulations to Camilla Scholten, Adam Dorrell, Sarah Frazier, Katerina Sinitskaia, Cvetilena Gocheva and the rest of the CustomerGauge team on a great event.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Answers to two questions from new Customer Experience leaders: Where do I start, and to whom should I report?

I attended and spoke at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in central Amsterdam last week. It was fabulous event, held in a theatre that has been created in an old church. Here are the answers to the two most common questions I was asked during breaks…

The best and worst of customer and employee satisfaction (Part two in a two-part series)

And here is today’s Fake News (though the quotes are real): “Our core values: … Put the customer first…” – Frontier Communications website… In reality there are many companies that customers hate though employees love them, and vice-versa. Here are the results of my research on the topic…

Do happy employees bring you happy customers? (Answer: In general – No!)

“Everybody knows that happy employees make happy customers.” “Satisfied employees are the single most important driver of customer satisfaction.” In reality, I don’t believe employee satisfaction even makes the top three for most companies. There are exceptions. I recently completed my third annual study on the (non-) relationship between employee and customer satisfaction…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Annette Franz – Putting the customer at the center of every conversation

While this memorable article just came up in my LinkedIn feed yesterday Annette actually wrote it on her ‘CX Journey’ site back in 2002. It includes a mention of my ‘favorite hate’ in customer experience work. As she puts it, “I think hearing requires a subsequent action or reaction. And in the customer conversation, that part is often missing.” Annette goes on to suggest that only 5% of companies tell customers what they have learned from their research and what they are going to improve.

I think Annette is an optimist. In my own experiments in which I provided a total of 150 B2C companies with feedback, just a single one wrote back to tell me what they had learned and what they were going to improve. (Just FYI, that company was British Airways, which may surprise you. It surprised me as I have probably sent them about 20 survey responses over the years. At least they closed the loop that one time.)

Read this classic blog post here.

Rosaria Cirillo Louwman / Wow Now

I was able to meet Rosaria for the second time on the afternoon before the CustomerGauge event in Amsterdam. I first met her a few years ago when I spoke at a Satmetrix event in London. It was great to catch up, especially to discuss Yellow Goldfish, the recently-published book she has written together with Stan Phelps.

Rosaria founded Wow Now back in 2013. Her focus is not customer satisfaction or customer experience. I think it would be safe to describe it as happiness, meaning happiness of everyone involved in customer interactions, especially the customers, of course. Her framework builds a new layer on top of the well-known Maslow motivation pyramid: Happiness. She describes her focus as ‘happiness driven growth’ and has invented the Happiness Contribution™ Factor.

Read more about Rosaria’s book, training courses and Wow Now here. And you should be able to find the link to download her Happiness-Driven Growth booklet quite easily.

Looking forward

April will bring the second birthday of our first three books. My co-author/brother’s son is preparing a special birthday animation that you will see a few weeks from now. Thank you for your support during these two years. We are happy with the way the book has been selling, and especially the way they continue to sell well, even two years later. The CX strategy and NPS books occasionally make it up into the top 2% of all Amazon book sales. The cost-reduction book does not do quite as well. I suspect we need another economic downturn to make it more relevant.

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. If you have already read any of our books, please write reviews on Amazon.

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.

March 8, 2019

#90 – The relationship (or not) between employee and customer satisfaction

Maurice FitzGerald / Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction, Newsletter / ACSI, Customer Satisfaction, employee satisfaction, Glassdoor /

A different sort of newsletter this week. I have combined two blog posts on my annual study on the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction to make this special edition. Just like the last two years, I found that the relationship between the two factors is far weaker than most of us would like to believe. This year’s study is a bit larger and now covers 398 businesses that sell to US consumers. I hope you enjoy it. Please forward it to your colleagues and friends as you see fit.

“Everybody knows that happy employees make happy customers.”

“Satisfied employees are the single most important driver of customer satisfaction.”

In reality, I don’t believe employee satisfaction even makes the top three for most businesses. And I think I can prove it.

This is the third year in a row that I have studied the relationship between customer and employee satisfaction for large companies that sell to US consumers. The results have been consistent: There is almost no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction across the 398 business covered this year. Employee satisfaction explains just 6% of the variation in customer satisfaction across these companies. Mind you, “Almost no relationship” is better than my findings in 2017, which were simply that there was, on average, no relationship.

Within the overall results there are exceptions and surprises. There are industries and entire sectors where employee satisfaction matters a lot more. There are also striking examples of companies whose employees hate them while their customers love them. The opposite is also true. And these are big names.

Let’s begin

Back in 2017 I asked myself whether there was any actual evidence for the many statements that I could find that were similar to those at the top of this article. What I found was highly disappointing, to say the least. I found low-volume studies. I found attractive anecdotal studies based on single companies. I found low-volume and single-company studies about employee engagement, which is a different subject. More on employee engagement later. In short, the whole subject had not been studied scientifically. Repeating my searches before writing this article gave the same result. Nothing useful.

It is not surprising that the subject is tricky to study. Companies do not disclose the results of their own internal employee surveys. High-volume public benchmark data about customer satisfaction is also rare. However, it does exist, as does a single high-volume source of employee satisfaction data. I use Glassdoor data for employee satisfaction and the American Customer Satisfaction Index data for customer satisfaction. This year I was able to match the two for 398 businesses. Here are the highlights:

Overall results

ACSI Glassdoor

At the top level and across all businesses, variations in employee satisfaction explain 6.2% of the variations in customer satisfaction. However, I somewhat arbitrarily decided that 129 of these businesses, such as hotels, retail stores and airlines, are ‘high-touch’. By this I mean that employees have regular face-to-face contact with customers, where their smiles and empathy may make a difference. The remaining 269 are ‘low-touch’. I have used quadratic regression for the graphs below and think they are interesting.

High-touch businesses

ACSI Glassdoor High-touch

For the high-touch businesses, variations in employee satisfaction explain 16.8% of the variations in customer satisfaction. Among well-represented industries, the nine hotel chains top the list at 61.8%, followed by 17 supermarket chains at 49.1%.

Low-touch businesses

ACSI Glassdoor Low-touch

At the other end of the scale, low-touch industries have an average of 8% interdependency between employee and customer satisfaction. The energy utilities industry is represented by 23 companies and shows no relationship at all. I don’t find this surprising. When was the last time you spoke face-to-face with an energy company employee? In my own case, they don’t even need to come out to read our meters anymore.

Performance by industry sector

ACSI data is provided by company and by industry, and the industries are grouped into sectors. Some sectors do better than others as you can see in this table:

ACSI-GD by sector

Retail does rather worse than last year. While it might be tempting to say that this is because Internet Retail is now included in Retail, that’s not the problem. Health and Personal Care stores now have no relationship between employee and customer satisfaction.

Performance by Industry

I removed all industries represented by less than five businesses from the table below. This may not be entirely fair. After all, if there are only three large businesses in a particular industry in the USA, the ‘Normal distribution’ rules of statistics don’t apply. If there are only three and you cover them all, you have a good sample. Similarly, there simply aren’t 30 major hotel businesses in the USA, so any preconception you may have that you need a minimum of 30 for a valid sample is simply wrong. In any case, you will be able to make your own judgments when you download the data.

ACSI Glassdoor by Industry

It should not surprise you to see hotels, supermarkets and restaurants at the top of this list. For hotels, employee satisfaction variation explains 61.8% of the variation in customer satisfaction. Employees are an integral part of the experience in these industries. For many of the industries close to the bottom, we never come into face-to-face contact with the employees, so the lack of a relationship between employee and customer satisfaction should not be a surprise either.

And here is today’s Fake News (though the quotes are real):

“Our core values: … Put the customer first…” – Frontier Communications website

“We take pride in knowing how to take care of you.” – Message to potential employees on the State Farm website

“Our team members are the key to our success. Whether they work behind the scenes or are out there delivering great service to our guests.” – Frontier Airlines website

This is the second article about the results of my third annual study of the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. The first article is here. This time I will cover love and hate, stars and goats. (What a program!)

Love-hate relationships

Here are the companies whose employees love them while their customers hate them. From a data perspective, this means they are in the top 10% of the Glassdoor scores while being in the bottom 10% of the 398 ACSI scores. There are just four companies in this category:

ACSI Glassdoor love hate

Should we be surprised by the positions of the three social media businesses here? Great employment conditions and the fact that the customers seem to hate them is not really a major source of concern. We could debate whether the US consumers answering the ACSI feedback requests are actually the customers. After all, the companies’ main source of income is from advertisers, who were not asked. As for United Airlines, I think the few high-profile nasty incidents they had with passengers last year and in 2017 made a difference to perceptions. They had the biggest drop of any airline. My prediction is that it will all be forgotten in 2019 and they will have the biggest improvement.

And there is just a single company in the opposite category. Kraft Heinz employees give them an appalling Glassdoor score of 2.9, while customers give them an ACSI score of 82. I think it is safe to say that Kraft Heinz employees have a lot to deal with these days and never come into contact with end consumers.

Companies that seem to get everything right – The heroes

Yes, they exist. Here are the companies that are in the top 10% on both the ASCI and Glassdoor lists:

ASCI Glassdoor best performers

Note that the list is in the order of the Glassdoor rankings. Hilton topped the ACSI list for hotels for the fourth year in a row, and their employees love them too. Do you see anything surprising here? I don’t.

Companies that seem to get everything wrong – The goats

Personally, I think goats are cute and I am not sure why various BCG-style business models cast them as the villains. Anyway, here are the companies that managed the difficult task of being in the bottom ten percent for both their customers and their employees:

Should we be surprised to see the lower table almost exclusively populated by ISPs and TV service providers? I think not. Telecommunications companies have a reputation for disdain of both customers and employees.

Are these comparisons fair?

No, the comparisons are not fair, at least as far as customer satisfaction is concerned.

Customer satisfaction varies strongly by industry. There are industries, such as telcos, cable TV companies, and Internet Service Providers, that have little or no opportunities to ‘delight’ us. If they do their jobs perfectly, we simply don’t notice them. We only notice them when things go wrong. So it is to be expected that they would do relatively poorly in customer satisfaction comparisons that cross industry lines. However, that is no reason for them to treat their employees badly.

Conclusion

We should not find the lack of a strong relationship between employee and customer happiness very surprising, for two main reasons. First, a company’s products and services are generally far more important to customers than the employees. The main exception to this rule is where the employees are the product. Second, employee happiness and employee engagement are two quite different concepts. Employees can be happy with their pay, the food in the company restaurant, and their commute to work. None of these do anything for customers.

Employee engagement is a more sophisticated concept that lacks a standard definition. When I worked at HP the Employee Engagement Index was an aggregate of nine questions. Other companies use different standards, as does every study I have read on the subject. (For the experimental scientists among you, this smells of ‘p-hacking’. Ask a lot of questions in your employee survey. Determine after the fact which set of ten have the best correlation with revenue growth. Combine them in some way and call that your ’employee engagement index’. That’s cheating!)

Data

I have put an Excel sheet with the data here. There are four tabs. It is not very pretty. I have inspected it in various ways but may still have made some sort of error. If you find one, please let me know.

Lots more writing like this in our books. All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

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

To change your subscription, click here.

March 7, 2019

The best and worst of customer and employee satisfaction (Part two in a two-part series)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction / ACSI, Customer Satisfaction, employee satisfaction, Glassdoor /

And here is today’s Fake News (though the quotes are real):

“Our core values: … Put the customer first…” – Frontier Communications website

“We take pride in knowing how to take care of you.” – Message to potential employees on the State Farm website

“Our team members are the key to our success. Whether they work behind the scenes or are out there delivering great service to our guests.” – Frontier Airlines website

Love-hate relationships

Companies that seem to get everything right – The heroes

Yes, they exist. Here are the companies that are in the top 10% on both the ASCI and Glassdoor lists:

Companies that seem to get everything wrong – The goats

Are these comparisons fair?

No, the comparisons are not fair, at least as far as customer satisfaction is concerned.

Conclusion

Data

If you enjoy this sort of thing, there is lots more on this topic and many others in our book Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation. All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide.

March 6, 2019

Do happy employees bring you happy customers? (Answer: In general – No!)

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction / ACSI, Customer Satisfaction, employee satisfaction, Glassdoor /

“Everybody knows that happy employees make happy customers.”

“Satisfied employees are the single most important driver of customer satisfaction.”

In reality, I don’t believe employee satisfaction even makes the top three for most businesses. And I think I can prove it.

Let’s begin

Overall results

High-touch businesses

Low-touch businesses

Performance by industry sector

ACSI data is provided by company and by industry, and the industries are grouped into sectors. Some sectors do better than others as you can see in this table:

Performance by Industry

This is part one. What’s next?

This is the first instalment. Here is a link to the data so you can download it and do your own analysis. Note that the Excel sheet has four tabs. In the next article I will cover the companies that employees love while customers hate them, and vice-versa. I believe these lists will be quite enlightening and will make it seem more logical that employee and customer satisfaction do not necessarily go together. I will also provide details of the companies that are at the top of both lists, and of course the opposite. I also go on to suggest why these results should not be a surprise.

February 28, 2019

#89 – Employee and customer sat, Consumer subscription service feedback

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Newsletter, NPS, Strategy / ACSI, Avis, Bain, Compaq, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, employee satisfaction, Hertz, HP, Net Promoter System, research, strategy, Willie Pietersen /

Welcome to the 89th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Relationship between employee and customer satisfaction
The right time to ask for feedback on a consumer subscription service
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – Willie Pietersen, Eric Smuda ex-Compaq, HP, Avis, Hertz
Looking forward

Relationship between employee and customer satisfaction

The American Customer Satisfaction Index people released the final part of their 2018 customer satisfaction data earlier this week. I have been able to match the scores against Glassdoor employee satisfaction data for 398 large businesses that sell to US consumers. This is up from 345 last year and hopefully makes the data more reliable.

There are a few surprises, though the overall message has not changed: there is not much of a relationship between employee and customer satisfaction. Variations in employee satisfaction across the 398 businesses explain just 6.2% of the variations in customer satisfaction. This is up from last year’s number of 4.4%. There are industries and indeed a whole sector where there seems to be no relationship at all between the two. The big surprise is that the relationship for the retail trade has dropped significantly. This turns out to be an artefact of the ACSI including eCommerce sites in retail this year while they were separate last year.

At the moment I am doing extensive data validation. This is the third time I have carried out the study. I made minor mistakes each of the first two times and am in the process of ensuring I have at least not made the same mistakes again. I will then write a series of blog posts. The ones you should expect are:

Overall results, including an analysis of ‘high-touch’ and ‘low-touch’ businesses.
Lists of companies that employees hate but customers love, and vice-versa.
Lists of companies that both the employees and customers love, and of course the opposite view.

Based on the feedback I receive each year I suspect most of you believe my study is wrong. Indeed, I submitted it to one academic publication and one business publication the first year and it was rejected by both as not being credible. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, has been able to present a scientific analysis that proves anything different. I look forward to the feedback this year.

The right time to ask for feedback on a consumer subscription service

I just answered a question about when you should ask customers for feedback about a ‘box subscription’ service. This is the type of service where you receive something different every month. Kiwico is an example, with their scientific toy kit subscription service, and I have seen subscriptions that give you a new book every month. Here is how I answered the question:

If you have no people or budget to work on improvements that customers may suggest… well… you are better off not asking them for feedback at all. So, if you have no resources, the right time is never.
You want to be able to work on improvements and tell the customers about them before their subscription deadline comes up. If all customers do not have the same renewal date, this really means working on a single improvement every quarter, then telling the customers when you have completed it. Once again, if you don’t have the resources needed, then please don’t ask for feedback.

Your input welcome.

Our latest blog posts

Nothing new this week as I have had my head down working on the employee-customer satisfaction research. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Valentine’s Day classic blog – How to stay married – to your customers of course!

It was Valentine’s Day a few years ago, and I was puzzled by the results of some HP customer experience research. The data source and volume were impeccable. However, the results were surprising. Then I remembered what day it was, and everything became clear…

What skills do you and your customer experience team need to be successful? (5-minute read)

While pure luck was a major factor, my use of Microsoft Project version 1.0 on my personal Mac certainly had a major positive influence on my promotion to the European HQ of Digital Equipment Corporation…

The nature of customer-centric strategy and why your team needs one (Intense 3-minute read)

I have been broadening my writing horizons somewhat over the last few weeks. Among others, I have contributed thoughts on customer strategy to discussion on LinkedIn, Quora and the members-only Customer Experience Professionals Association forum. Some clarity seems to be needed…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

Willie Pietersen – Five time-tested ideas for success

Many of you know that I consider Willie Pietersen to be the greatest strategy teacher on the planet. As a former CEO of some major companies, his advice is intensely practical. His latest blog post is no exception. The five concepts covered are easy to understand. They are:

Our only sustainable competitive advantage is our ability to learn faster than our competitors
Success means putting the customer at the center of business decisions
Strategy is about achieving differentiation by making choices
Leaders must be able to simplify a complex world
To move people at the deepest level, you need compelling stories

Willie’s first strategy book is the only book I have ever read a second time immediately after finishing my first read. I did the same with this blog post. Read it here.

Bain NPS podcast – Interview with Eric Smuda, former CX leader at Compaq, HP, Avis, Hertz

A fascinating and insightful interview with Eric Smuda. My time in CX at HP started after Eric left and I never heard of him at Compaq. I wish I had. He is clear and insightful about what it takes to develop and implement a customer experience strategy. I learned a lot about the car rental business and found some of the stories fascinating. Like the one about the need to reposition cars around New York. Hertz uses a single car fleet. The weekday demand is at the airports. The largest single weekend demand is from people who live in Manhattan and want to get away for the weekend, starting on Friday evening. So Hertz drives huge numbers of cars from the airports into town. It is a constant stream as there is not much space for them in Manhattan. That’s just one story and there are many others. Listen to them here.

Looking forward

I will be speaking at the CustomerGauge Monetize! event in Amsterdam on March 13th and will stay over to enjoy the other speakers on the 14th. I look forward to meeting any readers who will be there. And of course I want to complete my blog posts on the relationship between customer and employee experience. I am sure you will find them interesting.

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)

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

To change your subscription, click here.

October 26, 2018

#78 – My new NPS podcast on Healthcare, customer and employee satisfaction research, dropoff rates, Temkin/Qualtrics

Maurice FitzGerald / Cost reduction, Newsletter, NPS, Strategy / Bain, Customer Experience, employee satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS, Podcast, Qualtrics, response rates, Surveys, Temkin /

My new Net Promoter System podcast on healthcare with Rob Markey, customer vs. employee satisfaction research . Welcome to the 78th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Starting my annual research on customer and employee satisfaction
My new Net Promoter System podcast with Rob Markey is available
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – Survey completion rates, Temkin & Qualtrics
Looking forward

Starting my annual research on customer and employee satisfaction

Most of you know that I have published research on the relationship (or lack thereof) between customer and employee satisfaction in March this year and last. My process is to assemble employee satisfaction data from Glassdoor in October and November, and to add the American Customer Satisfaction Index data for each company the following March. The thought process is that changes in employee satisfaction should lead to changes in customer satisfaction. We would not expect the effect to be instantaneous.

Once I have three years of data I should be able to do my first investigations of the trends over that time. If a company has had three straight years of employee satisfaction improvement or decline, has that had any effect on customer satisfaction? And I expect to investigate market share trends for some industries.

I was going through some Glassdoor data today I was wondering whether employee satisfaction has declined at companies that have had major scandals of whatever kind. This is not the place to describe the nature of each scandal, but here is the 2017 to 2018 employee satisfaction trend for a few such companies:

Wells Fargo: No change from 2017, and the 2017 score was up slightly from 2016.
Facebook: The 2018 score is lower than the scores for 2017 and 2016, again slightly.
United Airlines: Employee satisfaction improved slightly.
Apple: No change.

Two remarks. First, I did not decide that these companies had notable scandals. I just did a Google search on ‘Corporate Scandals’. Second, employees don’t seem to care much about scandals that affect their employers.

It will be interesting to see how the customer satisfaction trends turn out.

My new Net Promoter System podcast with Rob Markey is available

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had recorded a new ‘Net Promoter System podcast’ with Rob Markey of Bain. It went live on the iTunes podcast feed just before I wrote these lines. The subject this time is customer experience measurement, or I suppose it is really patient experience measurement and improvement in the healthcare industry.

The podcast is the first in what I hope will be a series on specific industries. I feel strongly about healthcare because I believe it is the extreme example of an industry that measures things for its own benefit and does so in a way that does almost nothing for patients. I believe this is easy to understand.

If you have been hospitalized for any reason, think back on how the hospital asked you for feedback after the intervention. Let’s pick the semi-random example of a hip-replacement operation. It takes some time after the operation before you can understand how effective it was. So… when did the hospital ask you for feedback. It almost always seems to happen just as you are preparing to leave or are walking out the door. Did anyone (including the surgeon) ever come back six months later to ask you how functional your hip was, and whether you would recommend the operation to someone else? I thought not.

I write these lines, the iTunes podcast feed has pushed this one to my phone. It is not yet live on the Bain site. You can find all past Net Promoter System podcasts, including the eight I did with them, on iTunes and at http://www.netpromotersystem.com/resources/podcast.aspx.

Our latest blog posts

Older posts are still available on the blog page.

Tips for communicating the purpose of cost reduction (7-minute read)

I was talking to a former colleague yesterday. He described a recent meeting where he learned that major cost cutting still continues where we used to work. The discussion made me reflect on the horrible mistakes and best practices I have seen when cost reductions are communicated…

When should you ask for customer feedback? And should you survey customers at all? (5-minute read)

I have a sort of hobby: answering companies’ requests for my feedback and seeing whether they will write back to tell me what they have learned and what they are going to do to improve. They almost never do…

Contra Revenue: Could it be your easiest way to improve profit margins? (5-minute read)

On the general subject of ‘customer-centric cost reduction’ I would like to discuss an area that many medium to large companies do not examine at all, and the rest do poorly. If you have never heard of Contra Revenue, please read on…

Notable customer experience items from other sites

SurveyMonkey – The effect of the number of questions on survey completion rates

Please read the title and what follows carefully. This is not about response rates, but about completion rates. There is a difference. The question the people from SurveyMonkey answer comprehensively is whether adding more questions causes a significant number of people who have started to respond to a feedback request to stop responding when they are part way through. The answer is that there is only a very small effect. To study the question, they looked at 2,000 randomly-selected surveys with one question, 2,000 with two questions and so on, up to 2,000 survey with 50 questions.

There is, however, some evidence elsewhere that the quality of responses goes way down as survey forms get longer. After a while customers may just pick random answers from a list in a bid to get finished quickly. People creating surveys also do silly things. An example would be a popup survey that appears immediately when you open a web page, and which asks you what you think about that web page. You may be prepared to answer any number of questions randomly in a bid to get to a comment box that lets you say that the feedback request should come after you have been able to actually use the site.

The study is about ‘dropoff’ or ‘dropouts’. This is not at all the same as response rates, as the research only covers people who answered at least one question. If they did not answer any questions they are not included in the research. I have to say that I have tried to work out how to study the effect of the number of questions on response rates, and I can’t come up with a good scientific method. Suggestions welcome. Read it here.

Temkin Group acquired by Qualtrics

Bruce Temkin just announced that his company has been acquired by Qualtrics. They simultaneously announced the creation of the Qualtrics XM Institute which Bruce will lead. The institute will provide both customer experience benchmarks and thought leadership in a variety of areas. I admire the work Bruce has done up to now, including the creation of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. He publishes an annual NPS benchmark report as well as reports covering his own more complex metrics. Read all about the new setup here.

Looking forward

October has set a new book sales record for a month of October! Thank you. Of course there was only a single month of October available for comparison. But still… October last year was by far our record month at the time. Other than that, I am looking forward to hearing what you think of the new Net Promoter System podcast and which industries you would like us to cover, assuming the series moves forward.

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.

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)

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

To change your subscription, click here.

April 24, 2018

#55 – Facebook, recommending where you live, vodka, cognitive bias

Maurice FitzGerald / Newsletter / Cognitive bias, Customer Experience, CX, employee satisfaction, Facebook, Glassdoor, NPS /

Facebook employee and customer satisfaction continue to be opposites. Recommending the place where you live? All vodkas are identical! More. Welcome to the 55th edition of my customer strategy newsletter. The five topics this week are:

Facebook employee and customer satisfaction continue to be opposites
Recommending the place where you live?
Latest blog posts
Notable items from other sites – All vodkas are identical, Cognitive Bias
Looking forward

Facebook employee and customer satisfaction continue to be opposites

Those who read my recent articles about the (almost non-existent) relationship between employee and customer satisfaction in large American companies will remember Facebook. They made the list of companies in the top 10% for employee satisfaction, while remaining in the bottom 10% for customer satisfaction. So… how has the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal changed things?

So far… not at all. Now I don’t have any new customer satisfaction data, but I do have some new employee satisfaction data. They are now #1 on Glassdoor’s ‘Best Places to Work’ list for 2018, based on employee feedback. Here are some quotes from this month:

“Unbelievable company I’m proud to work for.”

“A place like no other.” (With a five star rating, out of five)

“Dream company!”

“Amazing place to work.”

These are representative comments. I could find nothing negative at all. I could go on, but the message should be clear. All the negative feedback from customers has no effect whatsoever on employees. They love Facebook, while American consumers continue to hate it.

Go figure.

How likely are you to recommend your town as a place to live?

Imagine receiving a survey from your local authorities. “Dear Mr. FitzGerald, we want to improve Smallville and hope you can help us. We just have three questions for you today. We promise to let you know what we learn from this research, and what we plan to improve.”

I listened to a Net Promoter System podcast about improving customer experience in a ski resort a couple of years ago. It made me think about starting a business whose purpose would be to help Swiss villages, towns and cities to improve the perceptions of their citizens. (In Switzerland, taxes are raised at federal, cantonal (= state) and local levels, so local authorities are able to make local spending decisions.) I did not start that business, but thought quite deeply about what I wanted my own village to improve.

At that time, I noted issues to do with the local garbage dump, where we sort and dispose of things that are not picked up by the regional domestic garbage collection service. I also thought they should find ways of cutting down the road noise level for people living along the main streets that have thousands of passing cars each day. That work has just started, with all the main road surfaces being replaced by low-noise tarmac. Mind you, they didn’t really have a choice, as this type of noise reduction was the subject of a federal mandate 20 years ago, and 2018 is the last year allowed for compliance.

Anyway, I still think implementing three-question NPS-style surveys for towns would be a great business. I think citizens would react well. I have not heard of anyone doing this so far. What do you think?

Our latest blog posts

Here are the latest posts. Older posts are still available on the blog page.

How do you know whether your latest relationship survey score is better than your last one?

This is not a stupid question! Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to an LA-based reader and head of customer experience for a very large company. He wanted to understand how to tell whether the organization was improving or not. Here are the main points we discussed.

Useful if you have no NPS® benchmarks for your company – Please help me to improve this ACSI to NPS converter

As many of you know, public competitive NPS benchmarks are exceedingly rare. This article proposes an approximate solution for translating American Customer Satisfaction Index data into NPS numbers.

Yet more reflections on why corporate cost benchmarking is often evil and destructive

Regular readers will know that I am not a fan of cost benchmarking. The reason is simple. I think it is almost always misused, sometimes producing disastrous results. The primary reason is that the cost cutting takes place in the absence of clear statements and actions to spend more on the areas where companies want to invest and grow.

Notable customer experience items from other sites

NPR Planet Money podcast: The Vodka Proof [All vodkas are identical]

Regular readers of our books and blogs will know we are fans of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology. People (including us) are far less rational than we like to believe. I listen to every episode of the National Public Radio Planet Money podcast. The topics are always interesting and sometimes surprising. A recent episode was one of the surprising ones. They start out by explaining that almost all vodkas are identical, no matter what they cost. Indeed, the ones most likely to taste a tiny bit different just happen to include low-quality distillation residue. The identical nature of all vodkas is driven by US legislation about how it must be distilled.

As you might expect, almost nobody believes this. They pick the entertaining story of Grey Goose vodka as an example. Grey Goose is pure marketing. They do not even distill their own product. And wait until you hear the blind taste test, done live during the podcast. This all changed the way I think about vodka, especially expensive brands. If you are a major fan of premium vodka, you will hate this show. Listen to it here.

Raconteur.net: Cognitive Bias Infographic

When we listen to others expressing their opinions, and I suppose when we listen to ourselves too, we need to be aware of cognitive bias. My brother sent me an outstanding infographic on the subject. It includes simple examples of each of the common sources of bias. You can find it here. I hope it will be useful.

Looking forward

April looks like being our fourth record sales month in a row. Thank you! If you would like to help us, the best way is to post a book review on Amazon.

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)

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

To change your subscription, click here.

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