It is practically impossible to escape news about the economic upheaval these days. So when Satmetrix released the 2009 Net Promoter Score (NPS) rankings, revealing trends in the financial services, telecommunications, technology, and online services industries, it was no surprise that companies in the financial services sector word choice the bottom. While the brokerage and investment segments saw an overall decline in NPS, online firms floated to the top.
Satmetrix studied more than 90 brands for its 2009 Net Promoter Score rankings, evaluating each company based on a customer's likelihood to recommend it to others. While the big banks saw a decline in customer satisfaction, one bank emerged as a clear winner in the category. USAA, a credit union for members of the military and their families, got the highest NPS in its category, at 89 percent. This was 100 points higher than the industry loser, Citigroup.
This success is part of what seems to be a trend with bank customers. "Credit unions are seeing a tremendous uptick in their business," says Deborah Eastman, chief marketing officer at Satmetrix. She credits this to customer-centric business models. "USAA clearly focused on long-term customer loyalty and maintains a focus on superior customer service as illustrated in its customer comments. It has the benefit of a captive market that may allow it to focus more on retention than acquisition. Citigroup, on the other hand, appears to be offering 'teaser' rates that adjust once you are a customer, which creates a negative customer experience."
No matter the industry, success is driven by the customer experience. "When you really focus on delivering a good customer experience...you reap the benefits of that," Eastman says. According to the research, companies that deliver top-flight customer service and a differentiated customer experience rise to the top of each industry. That's why so many of the same companies do well year after year.
Eastman pointed to the technology sector's top company, Apple -- with a NPS of 77 percent -- as one of the companies that seems to really "get it." The Apple stores, for example, were originally built with the customer experience in mind. This customer priority resulted in impressive long-term success for Apple, which now boasts some of the highest sales per square foot of retail space.
Apple isn't the only tech-savvy company getting high marks with its customers. Eight out of the top 10 highest-scoring companies came from the online category. "Customers are much more demanding than ever," Eastman says, and online companies like Amazon and Google -- consistently among Net Promoter's highest ranked companies -- seem to get this. Customers reported ease of doing business and product/service reliability as some of Amazon and Google's best attributes. In other words, these companies keep it simple, providing dependable services where users know they can find what they're looking for. Eastman credits the success of these businesses, at least in part, to an absence of bureaucratic corporate legacies that older companies in sectors like telecommunications have to contend with.
Don Peppers, founding partner at Peppers & Rogers Group, suggests that willingness to recommend is directly linked to the level of trust that a customer has in a brand. Companies like USAA and Amazon are legendary for the lengths to which they will go to earn each customer's trust - not just with flawless service and easy access, but also by constantly acting in the customer's interest, even when this sometimes flies in the face of the company's own short-term financial interest. "For example, two months ago I went online to order a book from Amazon," Peppers says, "and when I clicked on it to have it sent to my house I got a 'Warning' message from Amazon, reminding me that I had already bought this book once, a few weeks ago, so was I sure I wanted to buy it again?"
Peppers said this kind of service is a sign of a company that is able to forgo short-term gains in order to win the long-term benefits of increased customer trust and loyalty. He added that one reason financial service firms have plummeted in NPS ratings is probably the general perception that they are all so focused on propping up immediate sales, no matter what's in the long-term interest of their customers.
Despite the telecom's sector's overall low rankings -- the average NPS was -7 percent -- Vonage shows promise with a score of 45 percent -- significantly higher than average for the telecom industry. Eastman says consumers pointed to the quality of service they received for the price as a big factor in their decisions to be promoters of the service.
The same economic forces that plummeted financial institutions to the bottom of the rankings seem to be forcing customers to think differently about how they spend their money, say Eastman. At the same time, she says, the importance of word of mouth to a brand's success has increased, making the customer experience all the more important. "You can't advertise your way out of this anymore," Eastman says.