Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

Most of us think about Uber as a true digital disrupter. Yet, there is a very large human side to Uber. When a driver, a rider or "an eater" (someone ordering food through Uber Eats) needs help resolving something that can't be addressed purely in-app, they contact Community Operations, an organization of some 30,000 people run by Troy Stevenson. In this episode, Troy describes how he helped Uber navigate its rapid growing pains. He also has something many customer-focused executives would envy: vast amounts of real-time customer data, most of it in modern, accessible databases. In this podcast, he shares some of the ways that he makes sure that data gets turned into action, and talks about why that's both a science and an art.

When veteran leader Amy Cribbs took on the challenge of improving customer experience at Vanguard, the world's largest mutual fund company, she felt ready for the challenges of adopting new, Agile ways of working. But her experience proved to be full of surprises. A expected, the new cross-functional teams helped Vanguard design better customer experiences and deliver them faster. But there was a lot more. In a previous episode, Amy described how the Agile approach had revealed unexpected insights about what really mattered to customers, which helped the teams design even better customer episodes. As it turns out, the new insights extended well beyond customer needs. The biggest and most rewarding surprise, says Amy, came when she saw individual employees blossom. The unexpected customer insights the Agile approach delivered also reinforced the need for humility when it comes to thinking she understands what customers want. Similarly, she says, she has learned the importance of being a servant leader so she can nurture, not control the new ways of thinking that Agile encouraged on her teams.

When Vanguard, the customer loyalty leader in its industry, decided it needed to do more to keep pace with rapidly changing client expectations, that meant more than just investing money in client experience or in digital or mobile technologies. It meant shifting to new ways of working that would give Vanguard the flexibility and speed necessary to respond continuously to changes in customer needs. In this episode, Amy Cribbs, who leads Customer Experience for the mutual fund giant, explains how Vanguard began using an Agile, cross-functional approach that made client experience everyone's ongoing responsibility.

Andrew Clayton, global head of customer experience at E.ON, talks to Rob about how you inspire an organization to respond to customer feedback, not once or twice, but continuously, with unflagging energy. Since the early 2000s, he has scaled sustainable NPS programs at three major companies, Allianz, Bupa, and now E.ON. He has become an expert at winding that customer feedback loop into the DNA of the company, so that NPS self-replicates, even into new teams and new projects.

Alex Terpstra, head of innovations at ABN AMRO Bank, was born and raised for customer service. His father, a retailer in the Netherlands, never failed to remind young Alex who put food on the family's table. "Every day on our dinner table we were talking about customers." On this episode of the Net Promoter System podcast, Alex explains how he helped ABN AMRO to launch radically new services for its customers, even at the risk of a short-term profit hit. The payoff, he says, has been highly lucrative customer relationships that pay dividends far beyond the initial costs.

A recent Wall Street Journal article ran under a catchy headline, "The Dubious Management Fad Sweeping Corporate America." The dubious management fad, according to the article, is the Net Promoter Score. Of course, the headline bothered me and my podcast guest, Maurice FitzGerald, the former vice president of customer experience at HP. But once we read past the attention-grabbing headline, we agreed with much of what the authors had to say. They provided a sober summary of many ways a company can misinterpret or misuse the Net Promoter Score. In fact, I'd encourage NPS practitioners to ignore the headline and read the article with an eye towards all of the things you shouldn't do with the score. While NPS has gained tremendous popularity, many companies have cut corners or failed to invest in understanding the benefits of a comprehensive Net Promoter System. The article offers a jumping off point for a deeper conversation about the mistakes and errors that we wish all practitioners of the Net Promoter System would avoid, once and for all.

IBM used to collect customer feedback through longitudinal surveys—until Kathy McGettrick, the vice president of market development and insights at IBM, realized the surveys put all responsibility for creating quality experiences on IBM's sellers and ignored other aspects of the customer experience. So Kathy launched a digital platform that sent client feedback deeper into IBM. Today, some 40,000 IBMers use a client experience management platform that tracks hundreds of thousands of data points.

Razia Richter's path to the executive suite at Petco took her on a wild, winding tour of the company's operations and back-office functions, from accounting to inventory analytics to supply chain, to name a few. By the time Razia was put in charge of Petco's customer experience and the adoption of the Net Promoter System, she had personally busted through just about every organizational silo imaginable. And because she had walked in the shoes of so many of the company's line leaders, her early days as chief customer officer were marked by surprisingly little of the resistance often encountered when companies adopt the Net Promoter System. Her practical experience guided her to pursue an approach that earned the trust of business leaders and functional teams. Without that trust, many companies fail to achieve the culture change that the Net Promoter System demands. In this podcast, Razia shares just how far you can go when you have executive buy-in from the start.

Loyal listeners may recall my last conversation, with Joshua Rossman, formerly the senior director of global customer loyalty and NPS at eBay. Since that interview, Josh has left eBay and consulted with a variety of companies on using the Net Promoter System to help guide customer experience improvements. Now he's at McAfee, one of the world's largest security technology companies. Josh has mastered the art of creating a customer feedback system that supports senior executive goal setting and decision making, while also providing the platform for frontline learning and growth. His approach gets to the very heart of why a customer becomes a promoter or a detractor in the first place. By developing a rich set of qualitative insights and combining it with the quantitative data surrounding NPS, Josh seizes the attention of executives across the organization and draws leaders into a fast-moving feedback loop with the customers.

Kevin Parker is the chairman and CEO of HireVue, a platform for automating job interviews. Hirevue combines video interviews of job applicants with an AI-powered algorithms that can filter for qualifications faster than any HR team. Of course, an algorithm doesn't evaluate candidates the same way a human could. Like any breakthrough in machine learning, it's a grab bag of promising signals, emerging from the noise, and, well, noise. As Kevin will tell you, though, the signal-to-noise ratio is falling fast.