Net Promoter 3.0 Checklist

With thousands of firms now utilizing at least some core components of the Net Promoter System, our suite of organizational tools and processes comprising NPS continue to grow and evolve. We at Bain invented only some of the components of this system; we helped launch an open-source movement and integrated the best of what we observed working well at innovative practitioners.

Many of the leading innovators are members in Bain’s NPS Loyalty Forum who regularly share best practices and seek help on their thorniest challenges.¹ This group deserves enormous credit for helping us at Bain understand the essential elements of today’s state of the art.

So, what follows is a summary of the elements that comprise today’s NPS management system, what I call Net Promoter 3.0. I have detailed most of these practices in the body of the book, but I bring them together here to serve as a sort of checklist. How many elements of NPS 3.0 has your organization already implemented? If you can check most of these boxes, then you should feel confident that you are on your way toward building a Golden Rule culture that persistently focuses on enriching customer lives.

I’ve distilled the system to seven main components, with their associated subsystems:

1. Embrace an unbeatable purpose

Leaders embrace enriching customers’ lives as the organization’s primary purpose

Leaders clarify that enriching customers’ lives stands as the organization’s primary purpose. They teach team members how this philosophical North Star should guide priorities, decisions, and trade-offs, thus illuminating the path to personal and organizational success.

• Regularly declare the primacy of customer purpose and commitment to Golden Rule treatment of all stakeholders (through symbols, words, and deeds).
• Create and embrace strategies true to this purpose.
• Measure progress toward this purpose as your North Star.

2. Lead with love

Leaders practice (act as role models), preach, and teach Golden Rule principles and values

The primary duty of leaders is to their people. Leaders must inspire teams to embrace this customer purpose and enable their success by allocating sufficient time, education, and resources to accomplish this mission. Leaders must practice (model), preach, and teach Golden Rule principles and values that systematically reinforce a loving culture through symbols, words, and deeds.

• Act as a role model for the right behaviors and explain major decisions and priorities in terms of core values.
• Foster a culture that embraces playing the long game, ensuring that short-term financial goals never trump principles.
• Make the customer the center of every decision—from product development to employee hiring to digitizing customer service and operations.
• Break down barriers (organizational and other) that impede progress.

3. Inspire teams

Team members should be fully engaged and supported in the mission to enrich customer lives

Team members must feel energized by this mission to enrich customer lives and be empowered to root out policies, procedures, and behaviors that are contrary to the Golden Rule, confident that they will be supported in their efforts to always do the right thing.

• Teams should be recruited, trained, structured, and organized to facilitate (and be inspired by) delighting customers.
  • –  Teams’ ability to enrich customer lives should be constantly monitored; leaders listen/act on team feedback and identify and prioritize constraints/roadblocks requiring resolution.
  • –  Employees are trained how to give and receive feedback in a way that reinforces and nurtures a culture of loving feedback.
  • –  Teams provide upward feedback to leaders in a carefully designed process that provides useful coaching and is appropriately linked to leadership evaluation.
    • A safe feedback process should enable employees to signal how well principles are being followed and where improvements are required.
    • A system should be in place to protect teams from abusive customers (warnings, sanctions, and appropriate process for firing customers, including lifetime bans if necessary).
• Recognition/reward/promotion systems should reinforce principles.
  • –  Safeguards should be established to ensure that executives cannot prosper at the expense of customers, employees, or investors.
  • –  Customer-based accounting results (including earned growth) and relationship NPS relative to competition should appropriately impact senior executive rewards.
  • –  Survey scores for individual frontline employees should not be corrupted by being made into targets or linked to individual frontline compensation so that they can inspire and guide learning and improvement.
  • –  Leaders at every level must embody (in the eyes of peers and teams) core principles to be considered for promotion to more senior roles.

4. Unleash NPS-caliber feedback flows

Real-time NPS, signal, and other customer feedback should be integrated with core systems to accelerate learning, innovation, and progress

Systems and technology support timely and reliable feedback from customers and colleagues, augmenting surveys by incorporating the entire signal field of purchase behavior, usage, online commentary, ratings, and customer service interactions. Constant innovation is required for collecting, curating, and distributing the right feedback in a world overwhelmed with dataflow that has grown tired of surveys, a world that relies increasingly on digital bots, data science, and algorithms.

• Timely, reliable flow of NPS feedback should be measured at the right places with the right methodology and objective.
  • –  Utilize the external NPS Prism–caliber competitive benchmark NPS to understand performance versus key competitors overall and at the product and journey level.
  • –  Use internal relationship, product, and journey NPS to identify specific themes and systematic opportunities.
  • –  Use individual touchpoint NPS primarily for team and individual learning, coaching, and improvement.
• Map customer journeys, identify priority episodes and touchpoints, and utilize clear, sustainable strategies for fixing defects and creating wows (results tracked versus NPS Prism–caliber competitor benchmarks).
• Use the entire signal field (call centers, social media, ratings, chat, email, etc.) to augment/replace surveys. Calibrate Promoter/Passive/Detractor categorization to actual behavior and utilize continuous innovation (e.g., predictive NPS).
• Regularly upgrade the survey process to reduce friction for customers, evidenced by high response rates and rich verbatim.
• Continuously innovate to find reliable alternatives to traditional surveys.

5. Nurture relentless learning

Rhythms should be embedded to enable team members to listen, learn, and act on feedback

Leaders must create a culture of loving feedback, a prerequisite for honoring the Golden Rule. This includes training on the most effective techniques for giving and receiving feedback and providing a safe space for processing it.

• Team Learning and Improvement
  • –  Team Huddles
    • Teams should be trained in how to best utilize daily/weekly huddles, incorporating agile rhythms and best practices.
    • A portion of team huddles should focus on issues/solutions to ensure that team members are inspired and working together effectively. Safe space should be provided for contemplating feedback. Messages and structured anonymity should be utilized to enable candor.
  • –  Inner Loop (loop closed with all Detractors and sampling of Passives/Promoters)
  • –  Team members (or their supervisor) close the (inner) loop with every Detractor and an appropriate sample of Passives/Promoters.
    • Teams use feedback to set priorities and to solve problems within their control.
    • Issues that require elevation (outside a team’s control) should be prioritized with clear accountability for resolutions.
  • –  Outer Loop (identify and prioritize changes requiring policy/process changes, things outside the team’s control)
    • Top Down (executive call-listening)
    • Accountability should be assigned for all priority issues (along with required resources/time frame).
• Executive Listening/Learning
  • –  Board members and senior executives receive continuous education on organizational purpose, principles, and primary challenges/obstacles.
  • –  Use empathy training for all leaders so that decision makers understand customers and their needs.
  • –  Executives should regularly listen in (or handle) customer calls/problems and should read customers verbatim and follow up when appropriate.
  • –  Cross-functional reviews of customer survey and signal feedback should drive priorities/actions.
    • Resolve issues cited by frontline employees as priority constraints to delighting more customers.
    • Fix policies/processes that teams cite as being inconsistent with principles (including work/life balance, sustainability, and impact on environment and social priorities).
    • Periodic communication should update employees on actions taken based on their feedback (“you said, we did”).

6. Quantify earned growth economics

Utilize CFO-certified customer-based accounting that guides decisions and that investors trust

Leaders and employees must understand and utilize customer-based accounting metrics (provided and endorsed by the CFO) to evaluate trade-offs and investment decisions.

• CFO-certified earned growth economics should be quantified and utilized to evaluate investment options.
• Earned growth economics should be integrated into strategy, customer acquisition/retention, and operations.
• Customer-based accounting enables the calculation of customer lifetime value and guides investment decisions.
• Referrals and word of mouth should be rigorously tracked and incorporated into customer lifetime value calculations.
• Audit-worthy customer-based accounting results should be reported to investors. There should be full transparency in how any publicly reported NPS ratings were derived. Publicly reported NPS scores are ideally derived through a double-blind research process (the same rigor as for standard financials), with a clear understanding of the valuable roles played by other NPS categories and how they relate to double-blind benchmarks.

7. Regularly redefine the remarkable

Leaders and teams must humbly recognize how much progress and innovation is still required to make sure each customer feels loved

Leaders and teams must humbly recognize how much progress and innovation are still required to make sure each customer feels loved. Leadership should strive continuously to invent new ways to delight customers through remarkable products and experiences. Each individual, team, and group feels empowered and responsible for creating such remarkable experiences that customers come back for more and refer their friends.

• Macro innovation
  • –  Every executive feels responsible for generating and championing new product and experience innovations that add more value for customers.
  • –  Regular competitor benchmarking (by episode and overall relationship) highlights opportunities and keeps a focus on “how high is up.”
  • –  The elevation process enables frontline employees to escalate their best candidates for increasing customer “wows” and decreasing customer “ows.”
  • –  The executive team prioritizes customer experience upgrades through capital and budget allocation processes (clear accountability and the time frame for deliverables).
  • –  There should be consistent focus on leveraging new technology to reinvent products and experiences.
• Micro innovation
  • –  Empathy training should be used so that every employee can relate to customers, utilizing their own personal perspectives and experiences as consumers in search for intelligent wows.
  • –  The “Jenny Question” (what can we do better?) should be incorporated to augment employee idea generation.
  • –  All employees should be encouraged to find innovations to delight their customers, confident that these efforts will be recognized appropriately.
  • –  Frontline employees should understand how to analyze the cost/benefit of proposed innovations so they can demonstrate sustainable best practices.