Maximizing Super Promoter Impact

I've recently been active on the topic of Super Promoters and the value they offer for businesses.  My earlier posts were mostly about finding out who super promoters are and the value they bring.  In my opinion super promoters bring value in two distinct ways.  They recommend a lot, bringing in new prospects.  And, they do things for you, either absorbing costs or contributing more revenue, that help you be more profitable as a business.  I believe most businesses have super promoters.  But, that they struggle with finding them and what to do to create new ones (or both).  Neither do most businesses know how to activate their super promoters.  Since my earlier posts were mostly about finding super promoters, I thought I would delve a little deeper into how to create more super promoters as well as how to "activate" the ones you may already have.

I've defined Super Promoters as "promoters who recommend a lot more than the average promoter". Other people who study customer advocacy have concluded that super promoters should also be "influential" with your customers and be demonstrably more profitable for your business.  I tend to believe that super promoters are likely to be influencial generally and are already provably more profitable.  So, I don't really believe in expending lots of energy, money and time studying your customers for "influentialness" or "profits" in order to identify super promoters.  Though, admittedly, there other good reasons to why you might want to study customers for those data points.  And, if you have customer influence or customer profit data, marrying it with results of a net promoter survey can't but help with the identification of super promoters.  Also, if you have a lot of promoters, the additional data could help you determine where to start with your super promoter activation program.

Finding Super Promoters.

My earlier blog post talked primarily about how to find super promoters and why you should know who they are.  So, I will only summarize the process here.  I've used a two question sequence:  The "likely to recommend" question followed by an additional question, "How often have you recommended in the last year", which is delivered only to promoters (9s and 10s on the "likely to recommend" question).  In my earlier post I arbitrarily assigned super promoter status to promoters who reported recommending ten or more times over the preceding year.  For your business the number may be different and its something to think about before asking the question.  My earlier blog post can be found here if you would like read it.

Creating Super Promoters

For many smaller and mid-sized businesses it seems to me that creating super promoters is the simplest and easiest way to create organic business growth as well as to build the basis for a marketing campaign that helps you go from a smaller to a larger business.

In my experience promoters require two things in order to become super promoters.  First, an opportunity to make recommendations.  And second, a triggering event that causes them to actually recommend.  Therefore, if you want to create super promoters you need to find ways to give your promoters opportunities to recommend and then to trigger events that spur the recommendation.  Big companies often do this kind of thing haphazardly by, for instance, inviting all their customers and prospects to company-wide user conferences.  These firms often feature super promoters in presentations, but have detractors (and promoters too, to be fair) mingling with prospects the rest of the time.  If you have lots of detractors amongst your customers this could have unintended consequences, as promotion triggering events (i.e. people meeting and talking) are mainly accidental.  Meaning that a prospect might talk with a detractor as easily as a promoter.

Making promoters into super promoters doesn't have to be an accidental process, nor does it have to be difficult to do.  Here are some thoughts:

• Invite your promoters to attend events that your prospects attend.  Make it free for them (its already likely to be free for prospects).  Give them special badges that identify them as somehow "knowledgeable" in ways that will appeal to prospects.  Then just let them mingle with prospects.
• Organize a special access on-line community just for your promoters.  Incentivize them to participate in the community.  Then, let targeted prospects ask questions of them as a group.  Promoters will become super promoters by making recommendations on-line.
• Reward your promoters.  Give them things they value at irregular intervals (provide them with an unanticipated moment of delight).  If you do, many of them will promote more (becoming super promoters).  An anecdote:  I'm a member of American Airlines Advantage program and have lots of AA miles to my credit.  I used to fly a lot, and when I'd check-in an agent would occasionally upgrade me to first class or give me an upgrade certificate to a future first or business class upgrade.  As you can imagine, after they had done that a couple of times, I became very loyal to AA.  Importantly, I'd tell my friends about how great AA was to me. 
• Use a Blog.  Send it to everyone, but only allow promoters to make comments (or at least un-monitored comments).  When promoters comment, if appropriate, tweet their their comments.  This will engage other promoters and will spur re-tweets that many prospects will see.

This isn't an exhaustive list of ways to create super promoters.  But, the point is that by engaging with your promoters in multiple ways you can offer them more opportunities to promote and trigger events by which they might recommend.  Thus, making them more likely to become super promoters.

Activating Super Promoters

The process for activating super promoters is the same as for creating super promoters.  But, super promoters should be engaged with at a deeper level than that for promoters.  For instance, super promoters should be:

• Asked to create blog posts (not just comment) on your company blog. 
• Put on the company's customer reference list.
• Invited to write articles in customer communications vehicles like newletters
• Invited to participate in prospect oriented marketing like webinars or user group meetings. 
• Asked to have their stories developed into abstracts for use by media outlets who want perspective on topics they are knowledgeable about.

None of this is new from a marketing perspective.  What is new is that these opportunities be offered to your super promoters, not just to your biggest customers.  Again, if you have lots of promoters you may want screen them for desirable account characteristics first, but the point is to do everything you can to push promoters and especially super promoters into contact with prospects.


Stewart Nash
s.nash@questback.com
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to try QuestBack

Text Analysis as a Service - Low Cost, Highly Consistent Analysis

I have long wondered if there is a market opportunity for "one off" Text Analysis projects that utilize automated solutions.  It seems to me that the benefits of automated text analysis are equally valid at smaller sample sizes than the 10-20,000 verbatim comments per month that most Text Analysis vendors need to make the ROI to work. 

So, I have decided to try and test my theory by offering automated Text Analysis to the market as a service.

The service will essentially allow anyone with a customer, employee, partner or other survey to send in an MS Excel file and receive back a report detailing topics and associated sentiment for a given set of survey verbatims.  I'll also also be able to generate some number of filtered data subsets, based on background variables, whereby a topic / sentiment analysis on verbatims could be generated for a subset of a company's verbatims such as, for instance, "Detractors" or "Promoters" in an NPS scenario.

Sample Etuma360 Verbatim Analysis

I'm looking for a few test accounts that have significant amounts of survey verbatims they'd like to analyze.  My initial pricing model would be $1,000.00 for up to 2500 verbatim comments and $2,000.00 for up to 5000 verbatim comments.  At higher amounts of verbatim comments pricing would be TBD. 

The software that I use (Etuma) has a series of industry specific templates designed to easily interpret verbatim comments from customers, employees and others.  So, no set up is required to analyze the data. 

If anyone is interested in trying out the service you can contact me at: stew.nash2010@gmail.com.  Or you can click on the link below for a contact form and I will reach out to you after you complete it.  For the contact form Click Here.

Examples of the kind of report data that will come back from the service can be accessed at www.etuma.com.  I will provide specific examples as part of each engagement.

More Consolidation in the EFM space

A little over a year ago I wrote a piece on the consolidation occurring in the EFM market.  Just prior to the post being written QuestBack had announced the acquisition of Global Park, Germany's largest EFM player.  The subject of the post was the acquisition of Vovici by Verint a large vendor of contact center solutions.  The post I wrote can be found here.

Since July of last year SurveyMonkey has made two important transactions.  First acquiring a 50% stake in ClickTools, a UK based EFM vendor.  And, second the acquisition of the Zoomerang and Panels businesses from MarketTools. 

And, yesterday, MarketTools took the additional step of selling it's remaining EFM business -CustomerSat - to ConfirmIt, of Oslo Norway.  Consolidation in the EFM space is clearly continuing.  I expect more to come. 

So what is the rationale behind all this merger activity?  I have some thoughts and opinions....

Thought #1.  The EFM space is getting crowded at the top end of the market.  Gartner, Forrester, Aberdeen and others have been beating the drum for Enterprise Feedback Management for a long time, at least five years by my count.  Since most of the EFM vendors focus their efforts on selling to  "Enterprise" class customers, as time has passed more of them have adopted solutions, leaving less growth available to the rest of the players.  Hence, acquisitions of high-end products.

Thought #2.  Serving the small and mid-tier customer segments normally requires that companies have either scale or distribution in order to effectively market.  SurveyMonkey has scale, QuestBack has distribution (I'm a QB reseller), Vovici has partnerships (Oracle in particular) and ConfirmIt now has scale at the high end of the market. 

Thought #3.  Many of the smaller players in the EFM market have neither scale nor distribution.  They have to rely on organic growth while competing with larger, better funded and more effectively structured companies.  It is amongst this group of companies that I expect to see further consolidations.  Some companies on the list:  Qualtrics, Medallia, Satmetrix, Allegiance, SNAP surveys and KeySurveys.  These firms serve Enterprise customers or mid-tier customers using a direct sales or assisted direct sales model.  They could all use more scale, more distribution or both.

All markets undergo consolidation eventually as they mature.  EFM is maturing and so is consolidating. 

Stewart Nash - stew.nash2010@gmail.com





 

Another "Super Promoter" discussion

In my last post I discussed an example of "Super promoters".   People who are both "promoters" in the net promoter context and who "report recommending a lot more" than the average promoter does. In the example I cited, a soccer club, "super promoters" also exhibited other value adding characteristics to the organization, making them very valuable to the organization in a number of dimensions.

Earlier today, in the "Customer Experience Professionals" forum on LinkedIn I saw a post on Customer Advocacy citing a recent study by Market Probe on Bank customers: "2012 Retail Banking Customer Advocacy Monitor".   To read the Market Probe's blog post Click here:

The folks at Market Probe use a term called "Advocates".  I equate "Advocates" to "super promoters". They define Customer Advocacy as:

"Customer Advocacy is a metric involving two constructs: (a) Reports of Recent Expressive Behaviors - How often a customer has recently made positive or negative statements about their bank to others, and (b) Attitudes – The emotional response to their bank that fuels or powers this expressive behavior. Rather than stop at hypothetically-asking a customer their likelihood to recommend, we go beyond that and ask how many times have they spoken positively or negatively about their bank."

The two things Market Probe is measuring: emotional attachment and recommendation behavior seem to be very similar what I'm measuring using the "likely to recommend" question (emotional attachment) and the "how of often have you recommended" question (recommendation behavior).

I don't know Market Probe's entire methodology, so I'm not sure what questions they are asking to determine emotional attachment.  But, it seems to me that for organizations seeking a simple way to get to the same place, the two questions I've used may work.

I encourage readers to look at Market Probe's research on Advocates. The article in their blog I reference above has a lot of good information in it about how Advocates add value in the form of providing better profits and higher revenues to the business (retail banks in this case).

Stewart Nash - stew.nash@gmail.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to try QuestBack

A "Super Promoter" Example

When promoters are really active, good things happen

Proponents of NPS (which I am one) argue that by increasing the number of customers who are "likely to recommend" you, your business will prosper.  They also argue that by focusing on increasing the numbers of an often indeterminate class of promoters who both recommend and provide "good" profits, businesses can generate out-sized growth over time.  I believe in this approach.  But often, I think businesses struggle with defining the characteristics of these extra profitable highly loyal customers - their "Super promoters".

In my own experience with NPS I have seen that promoters are found within all classes of customer profitability.  So, determining which groups to focus extra effort on often isn't easy, especially if the customer base being evaluated is large and diverse along product, business unit, revenue or other categories.  Knowing these challenges, I've always looked for an easier way to identify customer groups to focus on.  I think I may have found one.  I'll call it the "Super promoter" question: "How many times have you recommended [company] in the last year". 

I have a great example to share about the use of this question.  I just can't divulge the organization's name.

For the last two years I've been working with a fairly large local soccer club on their annual membership survey.  We ask a number of questions regarding people's experiences in the program, the coaching their kids are getting, the skill development they observe in their kids and their affinity with the club and it sponsors. And:

• We've asked club members the Net Promoter question: "How likely would you be to recommend [Club] to your colleagues and friends". 
• We also asked just "promoters" a follow up question: "How many times have you recommended [Club] in the last year".  Response options included: Never, 1-3, 4-7,8-10 and more than 10 times.

I looked at those promoters who recommended "more than 10 times" in the last year.   They were this organizations' "Super promoters".   It's my opinion that the growth this soccer club has experienced is to a large degree based on the recommendation activity of these "Super promoters".  But, more importantly, when comparing survey responses of "Super Promoters" to those of other club members (both "regular" promoters and the average of all respondents), "Super Promoters" exhibit substantially more loyalty across a range of value categories.  For instance, they are more likely to:

• Wear gear from the club's sponsor
• Be interested in becoming a team or club sponsor themselves
• Be interested in becoming a "Host" to one of the club's coaches (important as each hosted coach doesn't require a rent allowance as part of their pay). 

All of these metrics indicate a willingness to "add value" for the club, beyond just paying the club's (substantial) tuition fees.

Two other very interesting factoids stood out in this club's survey response data:

1. "Super Promoters" for this organization are more likely to be key influencers of other people (2/3 of them are town-based soccer coaches).  Clearly, when town coaches recommend a club, parents naturally consider that club for their kids.  This effect is clearly benefitting this club.
2. "Super promoters" report "Major improvement in their kids skills" at much higher rates than do other members.  Since the club's mission is player skill development, these members appear to be reacting very positively to the achievement of that mission for their kids.  And, it reinforces their recommendation by the increased skill sets their kids demonstrate in town games, in front of other parents.

This soccer club has grown substantially year-over-year.  It seems clear to me that recommendation activity of "Super Promoters" is driving much of that growth.  As a group "Super promoters", by my estimate, are responsible for roughly 35% of all recommendation activity made by all promoters. Since for this organization, "Super promoters" are influential to begin with, it's my guess that their recommendations had a very high impact on overall growth in club membership.

The "Super Promoter" lesson 1 - Identify and Engage them

The lesson from this club's survey data is that their "Super promoters" have an outsized impact on getting prospective customers to engage with them.  Organizations, and especially those seeking to grow by word-of-mouth, therefore should try to identify their "Super promoters" and get them engaged with other prospective customers.  For this organization, engagement with other potential customers is a natural consequence of their proximity with, and influence over, other prospective customers (both parents and kids).  Since most businesses don't have this natural mechanism for promoting engagement, the challenge is one of assisting "Super promoters" to engage with other potential customers in ways that will influence them to buy from that business.

The "Super Promoter" lesson 2 - Market to other potential "Super Promoters"

For this organization the "Super promoter" question easily identified the key group of potential customers to focus on.  Town program coaches.  Now, conceivably, a "super promoter" question wasn't necessary to figure out that developing affinities with town soccer coaches is key to generating recommendation activity.  But, it's my belief that "super promoter" customer characteristics will often be pretty easy to identify and leverage without a lot of expensive consulting and analysis.  By comparing "Super promoter's" survey responses with other customer responses, characteristics of "Super promoters" should almost self identify in the data. 

A couple thoughts on how to engage with "Super promoters":

I believe that for most businesses social media is the most suitable mechanism for engaging with their "Super promoters".  Once identified, I believe "Super promoters" can be stimulated to recommendation behavior in a number of ways.  Obviously, incentives are one way.  Others potentially include:

• "Liking" things they say on your Facebook page or websiet
• "tweeting" their posts on your website, Facebook page, LinkedIn forum, etc.
• Interviewing them on-line via chat sessions (what do like most about [company]) and re-posting (with permission) the conversation elsewhere
• Soliciting their input on blog posts, tweeting and liking what they say
• Setting up LinkedIn forums for them to engage with you via questions and tweeting, liking, etc.,  good comments.

Doing this kind of thing regularly would - in my opinion - generate lots of engagement between "Super promoters" and other potential customers, including other potential super promoters.

 A couple of notes:

For this soccer club, the "Super promoter" question characteristics were developed in completely arbitrary way.  "More than 10 times" might be too many for your company, or too few.  I thought about writing this article a year ago when I first noticed the correlation between high amounts of recommendation activity and high "value add" to the soccer club.  But, I wanted more than one year's data before discussing it.  My theory being, that some level of high reported recommendation activity will define an organization's "Super promoters".  And. that those customers can then be leveraged for business success.

I'd love to hear other people's comments on this.  Anyone wishing to dialogue with me privately can reach me at stew.nash2010@gmail.com

Stewart Nash
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to Try QuestBack