-By Maggie Bayless

Several columns ago, I mentioned that Zingerman’s has been working with a new (to us, at least) way of measuring how customers experience our organization. It’s based upon an approach that we learned about by reading Fred Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question. The book, which I highly recommend, explains how to use a customer loyalty measure called “Net Promoter Score” or NPS for short. Here at ZingTrain, as well as in the other Zingerman’s businesses, we have been surprised -- and excited -- by the new perspective on customer relationships that we’ve gotten from using NPS and the insights we’ve gotten into how we can enhance our customer service training.


The Cheerleaders: Your Customers
First of all, a bit of background. A company’s NPS is derived by asking the “ultimate” question, which is some variation of “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Responses are on a zero-to-ten scale, where 10 is “extremely likely” to recommend and zero is “not at all likely.” Customers who answer nine or 10 are considered “promoters.” Those who answer seven or eight are “passives.” Anyone who answers six or below is considered a “detractor.” The percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors equals a company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).

One of the most powerful aspects of this approach is that categorizing customers into promoters, passives and detractors is consistent with the way many of us unconsciously think about our customers already. I don’t mean to say that our gut instincts are just as accurate as using this methodology to measure customer loyalty. But every retailer I’ve talked to about NPS -- owners and staff alike -- relates to the idea of working to increase how many people actively promote our business and to decrease the number of people (customers or otherwise) who may be spreading negative word-of-mouth about our organization.

Not being an expert on statistics (that was the one business school class that almost did me in), I’ll send you to Reichheld’s book for the methodology and research that supports the “Ultimate Question” approach; but suffice it to say that organizations much more well-known than Zingerman’s are using it, including Intuit, FedEx, Dell, Harley-Davidson and others. What I’d like to share with you are some insights we’ve gotten over the past couple of years that have helped us take our internal customer service training to the next level.


Zingerman’s Experience Indicator
Since we’re big believers in not just adopting new ideas outright, but rather finding ways to adapt them to fit our organizational culture, we’ve renamed NPS to sound a bit more “zingy.” We call it ZXI (Zingerman’s Experience Indicator). Our Mission Statement defines “the Zingerman’s experience” as our primary product, so how likely someone is to recommend us to a friend or colleague is actually a pretty good indication of whether we’ve delivered a great experience.

We collect ZXI data in a variety of ways: by doing mystery shopping, through e-mailed customer surveys, from post-training evaluations, with customer callbacks, etc. But we’ve also realized that there is an opportunity for each of us, as service providers, to gauge how a customer’s experience is going -- midway through their transaction -- and then, if we’re feeling the experience is less than a nine or a 10, take measures to improve that specific experience. We call this measurement an “internal ZXI” or i-ZXI for short. Here’s how we teach it.

During the role-plays that have always been part of our internal service class, we start out the same way: one staff person takes the role of the customer, another the role of service provider. While the “service provider” is out of the room, we agree on a scenario (first-time guest, someone looking for a gift, a chocolate lover who’s interested in sampling everything, etc.). After we’ve set the scene, the “customer” arrives and the role-play begins. In the past, we would let the action play out until the end and then the group would debrief on what the service provider did well and alternatives that could be tried next time.

Now, however, the trainer calls a halt midway through the action and asks everyone to evaluate how the experience is going so far. What score do they think the “customer” would give to the experience if it ended right then? If the consensus is that the score would be something less than a nine or 10 (promoter), then the group discusses techniques/strategies that the service provider can use to improve the guest’s experience. If the score is already a nine or a 10, we talk about what the “service provider” has done to help it get there. Then the role-play recommences. Feedback from staff on why they like this approach includes:

• “It keeps me conscious of the customer’s experience.”
• “I realize that going the extra mile can come at the beginning of the interaction.”
• “It encourages me to ask for help and gives us a common language.”
• “We can all own the guest experience -- communicating it along the way.”

Of course, we don’t just use this i-ZXI technique in role-plays. We also expect staff to use it when interacting with real customers during their day-to-day work. We’ve found that using a mental “break in the action” to evaluate each interaction from the guest’s perspective allows staff to take a situation that is going well, but isn’t anything special, and turn it into something that is truly memorable for the guest. On the floor, managers can help staff members keep this i-ZXI technique in mind by asking, for example, “Where do you think table 102 is in terms of their ZXI score right now? Anything I can do to help?” Working with a catering customer, staff may estimate the client’s ZXI a dozen times over the weeks and months leading up to a big event -- taking action and communicating with each other as needed.

The biggest belated glimpse of the obvious is that while we typically take customer satisfaction measures at the end of a service experience, the real opportunity to make a difference is while the guest is there with us -- either on the phone, in person or on e-mail. Making it a habit to evaluate the quality of the guest’s experience midstream is something that is incredibly “obvious” once it’s pointed out but that many service providers don’t do automatically. And training is the perfect tool for spreading that message.

Maggie Bayless is the managing partner of ZingTrain, which is the consulting arm of Zingerman’s, the specialty food retailer in Ann Arbor, Mich. If you have specific topics you would like to see addressed, please send your suggestions to Maggie at mbayless@zingermans.com.