Bytes Document Solutions’ Xerox division employed Net Promoter, the customer loyalty metric created by Fred Reichheld, to ascertain and enhance its customer loyalty and now the company has measured an improvement and continues to do so.
In relationships, people understand that sustainability includes working around occasional dissatisfactions, and that is precisely what we are doing, said Hennie du Plessis,CEO of Bytes Document Solutions.
Most organisations measure customer satisfaction and then live under the mistaken impression that once the customer is satisfied they have done their job. That’s not the case, as satisfaction and loyalty change over time, which is why we continue to measure loyalty every month and drive improvement.
The loyalty metric is used by some of the world’s largest and most successful businesses, including General Electric, Procter and Gamble, Allianz, Verizon Wireless, American Express, eBay, Symantec and many more.
I introduced it successfully during my time with Bytes Healthcare Solutions, said Du Plessis. The information is fed back to our service centre immediately and is invaluable in our drive to improve. With technology and business expectations changing all the time we can improve on a continuous basis.
Du Plessis says patterns began to emerge over the course of the past year that allowed the Xerox division to put new processes in place or alter existing processes to proactively improve service delivery for other customers.
The satisfaction score can garner an emotional response without explaining the science of it, said Du Plessis, but the gist is that we are continuing to strive for improvement. That said, companies that claim to be perfect are clearly misled and we are not in that category. Customer service is not one-dimensional or used to flippantly energise sales teams and service staff. It touches the fibre of your philosophy internally about customer service with people inside the organisation before it reaches people beyond the organisation. We aim in the next two years to create an experience in our customer base that would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate.
