Net Promoter System: 8 Steps to manage change and succeed

The business environment is constantly changing and with that the customer expectations. Established businesses are used to protocols, which have helped them achieve results in the past. They strongly believe in these methodologies and their effectiveness.

These may have worked in the past but the winds of change make it mandatory for the organisations to adjust their sails. Organisations adjust to this new environment, either risk the chances of losing track or in the worst-case scenario perish!

The Net Promoter System is a leading indicator of an organisation’s customer experience heath and requires a shift in the culture of an organisation. To help your team cope with this shift it’s important to have a change management process in place. It helps your employees adapt, succeed in their careers, and emerge as the next line of business leaders in your organisation.

Managing change can be a daunting task. Dr.John P Kotter’s 8 step process for leading change is our saving grace here. It equips businesses with the means and methods to transform themselves quickly, continuously and with powerful results.

Let’s see Dr Kotter’s 8 steps process to leading change and my take on how it can be aligned to implementing the Net Promoter System successfully.

8 Steps to Manage, Change and Succeed

Create a Sense of Urgency

Craft and use a significant opportunity as a means for exciting people to sign up to change their organisation.

Sensitise your team on the importance of Customer Experience. Show them how the business environment is changing faster than the company and the need to adapt to this change. 

A change is successful only when it is driven from the top. The message should be loud and clear that this is not just another management fad but the company is serious about and strongly views good customer experience as their biggest differentiator.

Build Guiding Coalition

Assemble a group with the power and energy to lead and support a collaborative change effort.

Customer Experience is not an individual’s responsibility. It is the guiding principle of the entire organisation. You need to establish a governance structure, which ensures that the team is on track. 

A steering committee that manages the general course of action, a process team to execute the plan and cross-department collaboration to work towards a common goal i.e. delighting customers. 

Mapping the customer journey with the steps a customer takes in doing business with you, identifying the touchpoints and the teams that are directly and indirectly involved at each touchpoint provides good guidelines for inter-department collaboration.

Form Strategic Vision and Initiative

Shape a vision to help steer the change effort and develop strategic initiatives to achieve that vision.

Defining the company’s vision helps you to take steps every day to realise that vision. Evaluating each step tells you if it is taking you closer to your vision or away from it. Zappos has the vision that one day 30% of all retail transactions will be online. 

People will buy from the company with the best service and the best selection. Zappos.com will be that online store. 

Zappos takes steps every day to realise this vision, even if that means having an army of customer support executives taking calls from customers directly and the support number easily accessible on their website. 

Maybe this does not help them achieve operational excellence but takes them closer to their vision of becoming the online retailer, which people buy for the best service and the best selection.

Enlist Volunteer Army

Raise a large force of people who are ready, willing and urgent to drive change.

Success with customer experience comes when an organisation embeds delighting customers in its culture and all the teams work towards this common goal. 

Excite your team to be a part of this initiative. This provides them the platform to evolve as individuals, get visible across the organisation and to groom themselves for career advancement opportunities.

Enable Action by Removing Barriers

Remove obstacles to change, change systems, or structures that pose threats to the achievement of the vision.

A successful initiative requires time, resources, and money investments. Show the belief in your team and empower them with the required resources. Processes and beliefs need to be revamped with changing times. 

Your existing process may be a barrier in providing an experience to your customers, which is aligned to your business goal. Take an objective look at them and get rid of them if required.

Generate Short-term Wins

Consistently produce, track, evaluate and celebrate volumes of small and large accomplishments – and correlate them to results.

Once you have created the buzz it is important to show some quick results. Your team has put in the effort to kick start the Net Promoter System in your organisation and focusing on some early wins helps keep up the morale and instil faith in the system. It builds the team’s confidence for bigger initiatives in the future.

Sustain Acceleration

Use increasing credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don’t align with the vision; hire, promote and develop employees who can implement the vision; reinvigorate the process with new projects, themes, and volunteers.

Implementing the Net Promoter System is a long term goal so keep up the tempo. Having proven that the Net Promoter System works, it’s time to move on to bigger bets. Early wins should have developed the confidence and respect of management so business cases for big bets like product design change, process change, etc get approved easily.

Institute Change

Articulate the connections between the new behaviours and organisational success, and develop the means to ensure leadership development and succession.

Make Net Promoter System the DNA of your organisation and the language of communication. 

Both action and performance of the organization should be measured on its impact on customer experience and departments should be clear how their actions impact customer experience.

Conclusion

To summarize, change management is solely about performance and more specifically about out-performance. Measuring Net Promoter System sets a benchmark to work towards and ultimately surpass.

It gives you the information that enables you to initiate change management initiative, so embrace the change and adjust the sails as that is what will help you realise your vision.

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