July
2010
Engaged Marketing Releases 2010 Annual Net Promoter
Benchmarks for Customer Loyalty
Reports Highlight Customer Experience Rankings in Banking, Property Insurance,
Cars, & Motor Insurance
Brisbane consulting firm Engaged Marketing released findings from its 2010
Consumer Loyalty Benchmarking Study outlining customer experience outcomes for
the banking, property insurance, motor vehicle and motor insurance industries.
The survey revealed some surprising results with Bendigo Bank and Bank of
Queensland joint winners in the banking sector. Customer loyalty leaders from
other service industries include APIA winning both the property insurance and
motor insurance categories and Subaru taking out the motor vehicle category.
"Importantly our benchmark study allows companies to transparently see how
consumers rate them relative to their competitors when it comes to customer
loyalty," Engaged Marketing CEO and Founder, Chris Roberts said.
In addition to loyalty indicators the report also highlights the volume of
positive and negative comments consumers make about their brands and identifies
the impact of these.
"Our study shows that typically if a consumer hears one negative comment about a
brand they need around four to five positive comments from others before they
will seriously consider this brand again. Effectively one negative comment
negates four to five positive comments which further illustrates the destructive
nature of negative word of mouth," Mr Roberts said.
Of course in the age of social networking negative impact can be amplified to
impact thousands of other potential prospects and current customers in a very
short time frame, highlighting the critical importance of word of mouth as both
an acquisition channel and retention strategy.
45.1 per cent of respondents said word of mouth is the greatest influence when
making a purchase decision for a product or service.
"What these indicators clearly show is that the ability to deliver a superior
customer experience which is worthy of recommendation must now be a key focus
for organisations wanting to drive growth and increase loyalty." Mr Roberts
said.
The Engaged Marketing Benchmarking Study covers four key service categories and
displays results for the nine most popular brands with largest market shares in
each category. Rankings are based on survey responses from more than 1,800
Australian consumers that were asked questions across all four categories
resulting in more than 6,000 responses. All respondents were existing customers
of their respective brands.
Net Promoter Score®, the world's leading customer loyalty metric, was used to
measure loyalty. A company's Net Promoter Score (NPS) is based on customers'
likelihood to recommend the company's product or service. NPS is calculated as
the percentage of customers who are Promoters, rating the company nine or ten on
a zero-to-ten point scale, minus the percentage who are Detractors, rating six
or lower.
Banking: There was a tie for the top performing brand with Bank of Queensland
and Bendigo Bank both achieving the highest score of 30 per cent. The overall
industry average score for the category was only three per cent. In terms of
categories the results are as follows:
Building Societies are clear leaders achieving a score of 49 per cent.
Credit Unions also achieved an excellent score of 37 per cent.
Second Tier Banks (Bank of Queensland, Bendigo Bank, Suncorp, St George &
Bankwest) jointly achieved 12 per cent.
The Big 4 (NAB, ANZ, CBA & Westpac) achieved -21 per cent.
Australian banks didn't fare nearly as well as US banks who achieved an average
category score of 20 per cent.
Property Insurance: The top performer was APIA with a score of five, which might
not be much to celebrate except when comparing to other scores in this category.
Every other brand achieved a negative score and the overall category average was
a staggering -22 per cent.
Australian property insurance providers may need to take a few customer
experience lessons from their US counterparts who achieved an average category
score of 27 per cent and the best US performer achieved a score of 69 per cent.
Motor Insurance: Winning both insurance categories, APIA was also the top
performer with a score of eight. Again, every other brand in the study achieved
a negative score and the category average was -18 per cent.
Australian motor insurance providers did not fare as well as their US
counterparts who achieved an average category score of 33 per cent and the best
US performer achieved a score of 78 per cent.
Motor Vehicles: The top performer in this category was Subaru with a pleasing
score of 35 per cent. The category average was just two per cent. As a category
this was the best performer with five brands achieving positive scores.
The report demonstrates that many organisations have huge opportunities to
leverage word of mouth which is easily the most trusted and powerful marketing
channel.
"Of course it is not enough to just conduct surveys, the critical aspect is to
listen carefully to what customers have to say and then take action
strategically and systematically to create experiences that are truly worthy of
recommendation," Mr Roberts said.
Full reports are available for purchase from
www.engagedmarketing.com.au
To find out why it is important to measure Customer Management competency as
well as commitment and satisfaction
click here
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April 2010
New article from Neil and Andy: Social CRM as a Business Strategy
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The 2009 Consumer Recommendation & Loyalty Study
Published 31st March 2009
The objective of the 2009 Consumer Recommendation & Loyalty was to understand
the depth of loyalty Australian consumers feel towards their chosen brands
across five categories. These include financial institution or banking, health
insurance, online shopping, property insurance and mobile phone networks. 1501
Australian consumers were surveyed and asked to rate their chosen brands across
these five categories.
The study reveals that many organisations have huge opportunities to grow via a
largely untapped resource – their very own customers, before resorting to
traditional methods deployed in recessions such as cutting costs and shedding
staff which can have long term detrimental effects. Only 7 out of 31
organisations displayed in the survey achieved positive scores and only two
organisations were truly world class. To download a copy of the report go to
www.engagedmarketing.com.au
To find
out why it is important to measure Customer Management competency as well as
commitment and satisfaction click here
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The Importance of the Customer Experience in a Down
Economy
Early on in the current economic crisis, Customer Futures’ teamed up with San
Francisco-based associate, John Todor of The Whetstone Edge, to commission some
of the world’s top experts in Customer Experience Management (CEM) to write
short papers on “how not to lose customer focus when difficult decisions
have to be made”. The resulting publication “The Importance of
the Customer Experience in a Down Economy”.
To download a free copy
click here.
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The case for professional customer management has never
been stronger
Friday, November 14th, 2008
Neil Woodcock, The Customer Framework
Short-term earnings vs. long term sustainability
CEOs know there is an uncomfortable relationship between the need for short-term
returns, to appease the demands of shareholders, and the requirement for
long-term investment and sustainability. When we first wrote about this in 2002,
we learned from the Enron, Worldcom and Equitable Life scandals that the balance
sheet can be misleading. Sadly, in 2008 we now have a host of examples of this.
A company can make excellent profits this year and look good on the balance
sheet even though it acquires high risk customers, acquires a competitor which
confuses its core business, cuts customer service standards to decrease costs,
fires 30% of its staff, encourages a hard-sell policy to existing customers,
reduces its marketing budget by half, fails to invest in product development and
cuts all of its IT development budgets. There is one US publicly listed company
we worked with who, against advice, did all of this and received a triple A
investment rating. Subsequently they were acquired at a knock down price by a
smaller competitor. Analyst reports and their interpretation of P&Ls can give a
false picture of ‘business performance’.
Click here for the complete article
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Aligning Stakeholders behind CM
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
The definition of ‘Winning outcomes’ for different stakeholders may conflict
‘Business performance’ is one of those terms where we all think we know what it
means, but when we try and define it, we find that we have very different views.
This is because any organisation , including the public and voluntary sectors,
involves many stakeholders. These include customers, employees, directors,
shareholders, lenders, creditors, suppliers, government, regulators, state
agencies, voters, local communities, taxpayers and patients. Performance means
different things to each of these groups. While in theory positive performance
for one in the long run means positive performance for others, in practice their
interests often conflict, especially in the short run.
Click here for the complete article
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Exclusive CMAT
license - 15/02/2008
CM Frameworks and Customer Connect join forces for exclusive CMAT license
CM Frameworks
and Customer Connect Australia (
www.customerconnect.com.au ) have formed a joint venture to perform CMAT
assessments and develop FRAME implementation plans in Australia. The commitment
of the two organisations to CMAT and FRAME is reflected in the exclusive license
that has been awarded to the joint venture by QCi UK.
CMAT is the global benchmark in Customer Management best practice. FRAME
provides a standardised implementation framework to allow Customer Management
implementation plans to be constructed, based on maximising return-on-effort.
A number of CMAT assessments have been conducted in Australia to date, in
industries such as banking, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, insurance and
not-for-profit (charities). At the time of writing, another two large CMAT
assessments have been requested by our clients, to be completed by mid-2008.
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Recent Articles - IncNet Newsletter - May 2008
The Expert View
In the course of their ongoing data quality work IncNet researchers encounter
many varieties of job title. Two titles which we are seeing with increasing
frequency these days are Customer Manager and Customer Experience Manager,
particularly in the Financial Services and Telecommunications segments.
To find out why this is we invited Elaine Kirby from CM FrameWorks to be our
expert contributor for April and to explain what business trend has brought
about the increase in these roles.
Elaine has gained wide experience in senior customer management and marketing
roles in Telstra, IBM and American Express, where she recently worked on the
regional marketing strategy to drive Amex sales growth across the Asia Pacific.
She is a principal of CM FrameWorks, a Sydney based consultancy specialising in
customer management.