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Are Rising NPS Scores a Red Flag?

Reports that track NPS scores across a range of sectors—recently reported that NPS scores in the enterprise software sector have increased across the board – most vendors have seen an uptick in their scores. While good news, it raises some questions about the accuracy of NPS scores.

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Make your product’s champion, don’t search for one

Conventional wisdom says the best way to sell a B2B product or service is to find the highest level champion in the prospect organization and follow their lead. But does that approach really work? Separate studies by the Corporate Executive Board (published in the April 2015 edition of the Harvard Business Review) and the media group B2B Marketing (published in its 2015 Buyersphere Report) indicate that this may be easier in theory than in practice.

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Customer-centric IT: 4 tips for technology marketers

stomer centricity is reshaping IT in many organizations, as customer experience becomes an increasingly important source of competitive advantage. We’ve seen this trend developing over the past few years and it is now gaining widespread attention. Customer centricity means aligning IT’s resources and objectives to optimize the customer experience. Increasingly, IT’s strategies, organizational structure, and role in the organization are evaluated in relation to the external customer.

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Improving the B2B Customer Experience

Accenture recently released the results of a study of how B2B companies perform in providing the customer experience (CX) B2B markets want today. They don’t expect to buy enterprise software or raw materials on their smartphone. But they do want their experience to be focused on their needs and for complexity to be reduced as much as possible.

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Consistency of Experience and Customer Satisfaction

The March 2014 edition of McKinsey Quarterly makes the case that providing a consistent experience across all customer interactions is more important to satisfaction and loyalty than the performance in individual interactions. This runs counter to conventional market research wisdom, which says that not all customer experiences are equal in driving customer satisfaction and that the goal of research is to uncover the key drivers. While we are not ready to endorse McKinsey’s point of view just yet, it does deserve consideration.

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The value of NPS in B2B enterprise markets

A client recently asked our opinion of the value of the Net Promoter Score. As with all flavor-of-the-month management technique we followed the pattern of curiosity, skepticism, and finally came to a set of beliefs regarding where NPS provides the most value – and where it does not.  Our beliefs are based on our experience helping B2B enterprise clients implement and interpret NPS results.

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It’s not “all about you”: A more customer centric approach to customer satisfaction research

The irony of most customer satisfaction research, including Net Promoter Score, is that it uses a vendor-centric lens to evaluate the health of the customer base.  The most commonly-used metrics in customer satisfaction research are more about the vendor than about the customer (e.g., likelihood to recommend, satisfaction with vendor’s service, satisfaction with vendor’s product, etc.) The reason for the vendor-centric approach is a desire to focus on the levers that the vendor controls and can take action on using the data.

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5 Questions to add to your Win/Loss analysis

Many companies conduct win/loss analysis on a formal or informal basis. These efforts often focus on product features, pricing and the performance of the sales reps which are critical to understanding the sales process.

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When the voice of one customer is too loud

It is important, often critical, to respond to the needs of key customers. However, it is equally important to determine which requests represent one-off customizations for key clients and which represent an opportunity with other customers. Primary market research – especially quantitative data—helps to safeguard against over-reacting to a single customer incident. 

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Satisfaction, NPS, Share of Wallet and other Holy Grails

At Isurus we believe that the best approach is to keep tabs on many facets of the relationships you have with customers and prospects and use these metrics to help inform business decisions rather than on managing around a set of high level metrics.

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