Ryan Powell’s Blog

As I write this blog entry I’m making my way up-country aboard a National Express train.  Not only is the train clean but we left on time too, which was a pleasant surprise.  That said my experience over the past 12 months or so is that British trains are more punctual on the whole.  Progress!  In fact, the most satisfying and surprising thing for me on this journey was discovering there was free wireless Internet access available throughout the entire train. Bonus!

I’m heading to Newcastle to speak to businesses from the North East of England at the third Service Excellence Seminar.  I’m quite excited actually!  This is the first time in about a year and a half that I have an opportunity to speak to an audience about a topic that’s so close to my heart.

At this event I am going to share some of the lessons we at Virgin Media have learned about customer experience delivery and service excellence over the past 17 months since we rebranded from ntl:Telewest.  There is plenty to talk about, as you might imagine.

Our Virgin brand sets so many expectations amongst our customer that we have to continually strive to improve the way that we operate.  Changing our corporate culture to become more customer-centric has been one of our biggest challenges.  So many businesses are product-centric “inside-out” organizations.  Whereas today, it is increasingly important that companies understand the value of their customers and do everything they can to look at everything they do from the customer’s perspective (outside-in).

Virgin Media is one of a growing number of firms that use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to focus the company on what customers value.  This is done by measuring customers’ advocacy levels and capturing verbatim feedback comments to pinpoint where things are going well as well as areas that need attention.

Of course, I could go on, but I risk giving away too much of what I’m going to talk about, so I’ll save something for a later blog.

Have you adopted NPS already?  Are you thinking about it?  What lessons have you learned so far?  Do share your thoughts…