On Loyalty
Rob Markey, Senior Partner at Bain & Company, describes the evolution of his customer-centric mission while breaking down the past, present, and future of the Net Promoter System he co-created.
Episode Notes
Rob Markey is the co-creator of the now-ubiquitous Net Promoter System—borrowing from Churchill, he refers to it as “the worst customer loyalty metric, except for all the others that have been tried.” But because of his accountability to clients and colleagues, Rob has higher expectations than many: Through 30+ years at Bain he’s passionately championed the sometimes-unfulfilled mission behind the system—to put the customer at the center of business decisions and operations, at scale.
In his conversation with Jesse, you'll hear about how Rob found his way to consulting; what he thinks makes him an effective client advisor and leader; how he helps senior executives find their voices and have those voices heard; how he gets leadership teams to make and stick to tough decisions; the structural barriers that keep companies from achieving true customer centricity; and the innovations in technology and operating models that are helping bring down those barriers. Along the way, he tells the “in the room where it happened” origin story of NPS, and presents his hypothesis on why NPS has had such staying power over the past two decades.
(2:31) Rob’s first impressions of consulting, and the circumstances and realizations that brought him into the field
(6:48) Rob describes his strengths and his approach to helping executives embrace customer centricity
(10:28) How staying focused on a larger mission has guided his long tenure at Bain
(14:15) The barriers to being customer-focused at scale, and how to overcome them
(20:20) Co-creating NPS, the “acid test of loyalty”
(23:50) What really makes someone a promoter, passive, or detractor?
(29:24) Why NPS is still at the center of CX efforts today
(35:42) Lightning Round: most memorable marathon and a brand that’s delighted him without fail
Guest Bio
Rob Markey is a Senior Partner at Bain & Company, where he has helped lead dozens of successful customer-centric transformations at large global companies over 30+ years at the firm. Rob leads the NPS Loyalty Forum, a group of approximately 35 senior executives from loyalty-leading companies around the world, such as The Vanguard Group, American Express, JetBlue, Telstra, TD Bank, LEGO, Progressive Insurance, PwC and Intuit.
Additionally, Rob is the creator of Bain’s approach to customer-centricity, the co-inventor of the Net Promoter System, and co-author of The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.
Helpful Links
Rob writes for HBR: Are You Undervaluing Your Customers?
Qualtrics Blog: Your Ultimate Guide to Net Promoter Score
+ Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Rob Markey: It's hard to be a customer-focused leader in today's business environment. So many other things dominate your agenda. The mission that I'm on is to make it easier for CEOs and C-level leaders to stay focused on delivering value to customers and measuring their success by the success that their customers have in getting their needs fulfilled.
[00:00:42] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences.
Hi, builders. My guest today is Rob Markey. Rob is a partner with Bain and Company, and he's the co-builder of something y'all will recognize as a legit breakthrough and a gift that keeps on giving to many of your companies: the Net Promoter System and Net Promoter Score, or NPS. It's a way of measuring how well organizations treat people and how effective their products and experiences are at generating loyalty and customer value. In addition to being a maven on customer loyalty, a great advisor who's been a part of dozens of customer-centric business transformations, and a renowned author and speaker, Rob is a fantastic human being.
In our conversation, you'll hear about how Rob found his way to consulting, what he thinks makes him an effective client advisor and leader within Bain, how he helps senior executives find their voices and have those voices heard, how he gets leadership teams to make and stick to tough decisions, the structural barriers that keep companies from achieving true customer centricity, and the innovations in technology and operating models that are helping bring down those barriers. The real in-the-room, where it happened, origin story of NPS, and why NPS has had such incredible staying power over the past two decades, and how Bain earned Rob's loyalty and established a forever emotional connection with him by meeting his needs as a whole person. Without further ado, I give you Rob Markey.
[00:02:23] Rob Markey: I had a very funny introduction to consultant... I wouldn't say funny. I had an unfortunate introduction to consultants. My first job out of college was in Dayton, Ohio, and I was working for a company called Lexus Nexus, and we used consultants and I was in the strategy group. It was good people, they were nice people, but it just felt like a bunch of smart people came with the brand of a consulting firm and they took a bunch of stuff from us and repackaged it into fancy-looking... At the time, they didn't have PowerPoint, it was acetate slides, and a big fat, thick binder of data and recommendations that basically said the stuff we internally had been saying. And the company did exactly the same thing with what they were recommending as what we had been recommending, but they spent a lot of money doing it.
And I thought, "That is the worst profession in the world." A bunch of people get paid a lot of money to come in, say a bunch of stuff, do a bunch of work, and then nobody listens to them. Why would I want to do that? And I thought they were also, on the margin, pretty arrogant. And so when I went to business school a couple years later, I was exposed to people who had been in consulting firms, and they also were know-it-alls. And they were smart, they were many of them nice people, but it's like there's no way I'm going to go be a consultant. I want to make something. I want to do something. I want to be running a company.
It wasn't until I had rejected any opportunity, like I did not interview for summer jobs at consulting firms. And I was in my summer job in a chemical company and one of my colleagues, classmate of mine in business school, turned to me midway through the summer and said, "You, Rob, are an idiot." And I was like, "Okay, tell me something I don't know. Why? Why this time?" And she said, "Because you say you don't want to be a consultant, but you are a Bainy. Belong at Bain and Company. And you have to come and meet some people from Bain and interview because I think you belong there." And I owe that classmate my career, because if it weren't for her, I would never have even given the time of day to consulting. And here I am 32 years later, loving it.
[00:04:31] Jesse Purewal: What was behind that? What did she see in you and what do you think you ultimately came to see in yourself?
[00:04:37] Rob Markey: Well, I think... She knew me reasonably well. We were section mates, so we had been in class all year together. But I think the specific event that made her say that was that we had had a Midsummer update with the CEO of this company, a fairly large company, and they had a particular hypothesis about what the answer would be and what the recommendation should be. And I had gathered a bunch of facts and done a bunch of analysis and concluded that hypothesis wasn't right. And when the CEO challenged me, I stood my ground and I said, "With all due respect, these are the facts. You can draw whatever conclusion you want and make whatever decision you want, but this is what I see here."
And I think that what she was saying was that willingness to stand up and say something uncomfortable to the person in power, that willingness to rely on the facts, the rigorous logic that was behind what I was saying, was a hallmark of a Bain employee. And it turns out, I think she was right.
[00:05:40] Jesse Purewal: If you read the Malcolm Gladwell book, The Tipping Point?
[00:05:43] Rob Markey: Yes. Yeah.
[00:05:44] Jesse Purewal: As you know, he talks about those three kinds of archetypes. You've got connectors, mavens, and salespeople. My reflection from the time I spent in consulting is that actually some alchemy of those three things are present in pretty much everybody who's even a little bit good at the job, and that there's usually some spike that the very best people have into one of those zones. And I always felt very comfortable with the connector zone being at the nucleus. I know lots of people. I like knowing things about people. I like connecting them to one another. I like seeing them succeed because of those connections. And I wonder if you have a similar reflection where, whether it's that alchemy or a different one you've discovered, that you think is something that if somebody's listening and wanting to consider or looking to a career in consulting, they might do an X-ray of themselves and ask themselves, "Do I have that kind of combination in play in myself?"
[00:06:35] Rob Markey: I would say that I am firmly in the maven camp if you wanted to think about that framework. I'm a terrible connector. I wish I were better, but I'm terrible, and I'm a terrible salesperson. Again, wish I were better.
I think that the things that have made me successful in my career, the characteristics that I think have been most helpful, have to do with my ability to see connections and analogies and make comparisons between things that are not on their face similar but actually share a lot of characteristics. So when I'm working in a credit card company and I see the parallels between a certain characteristic of that credit card company and the medical device company I've worked in, or when I see a comparison between the credit card company and I'm now later at a company that makes HVAC equipment and I understand that certain market dynamics that are similar, and I can take those observations and turn them into something that is useful to my clients. I think that's been probably the most useful skill or characteristic.
I'd say the other thing that I do reasonably well is when an executive team is getting together and they're debating an issue, I'm, for whatever reason I can't quite put my finger on, good at drawing out of people why they hold a certain position and making sure that they're being heard and that the other people in the discussion really, truly understand their point of view. And when you're trying to get an executive team to take a difficult action, you're trying to get them to... They wouldn't hire you, they shouldn't have hired you, if whatever issue it is that you're dealing with was easy.
When you're trying to get them to do something that they're not inclined to do or that feels risky or that feels like it is unnatural, you need to dig in and understand where the resistance is coming from. And you need them to have an opportunity to voice that and to understand it. And there's a lot of logic and facts and analytics that go into coming up with the right answer, but there's a lot of understanding human nature that comes with getting them to pull the trigger on the tough decision or adhere to it later on when the inevitable bump in the road makes them question their choice.
[00:08:50] Jesse Purewal: Well, and you have to, I think, also have a deep empathy for people in the situation they're in in order to do what you're just describing. It would be one thing for you to come out of a meeting and reflect on, "Boy, wasn't it obvious where the challenge was and where the resistance was coming from? And if only person X had said to person Y like, 'We need to go do this,' oh, we would've had the breakthrough." But to artfully and respectfully do it in the context of what might be a 90-minute zoom meeting, what might be a 45-minute in-person sitting around a table, there's a real element of empathy and strategic calculus you have to bring to that kind of a dialogue. And listening long enough to really understand and picking your spots. And I'm guessing, as you went through your career in consulting, maybe something you added to that Bain toolkit was a deep empathy for an individual and a team.
[00:09:40] Rob Markey: Well, there are definitely times in my career, earlier especially, where that empathy didn't always come through effectively. And I think that I... Trial and error, I think you learn more from your failures, honestly, than you do from your successes. And I've had plenty of failures along the way to help me learn.
[00:09:57] Jesse Purewal: And how have you been intentional, Rob, about persistently evolving or even reinventing the experience that you've had within Bain over these 30 plus years that you've been there, and kind of refactoring your role both within the company and now to the marketplace so that even as you carry the same business card, as it were, year after year, you're actually opening yourself up to a kaleidoscope of different things that have happened in your career and this array of stuff that has just been really cool to get exposed to?
[00:10:26] Rob Markey: Well, part of it is the nature of the work. I have had the good fortune to have a series of very long term client relationships. And maybe that's just appropriate for the kind of guy who focuses on loyalty. But through the evolution of those relationships have had to play different roles, learn about different industries, solve different kinds of problems. And so that's a natural progression and evolution of your role.
I think more significant for me has been, as a leader in the firm for a couple of decades now, figuring out how to evolve from being the hands-on decision making leader to developing the next generation of people to do that and to be more of a coach than a decision maker, more of a mentor. And I'm still learning that. That evolution continues and probably will until the day I retire.
[00:11:22] Jesse Purewal: What have you had to do, either in terms of dialing up vulnerability, or going to different peers to ask for help, or igniting reverse mentoring, or what kinds of tips and tricks, if there's somebody maybe listening who's in a more senior role and wanting to go like, "Okay, it's reinvention time," or "it's growth time," what could they unlock from some of the experiences you've had around that?
[00:11:41] Rob Markey: One of the things that motivates me, one of the things that gets me up in the morning, is knowing that the people that I've touched, the people I've worked with, are getting fulfilled in their own roles. That they're actually able to do more and feel good about the things that they're doing. And that's true for clients, it's always been true for clients. It's also true for colleagues. And I think that it's just the case that as you get to a more senior role, you get later in your career, that satisfaction in other people's success becomes a bigger and bigger and bigger part of what makes you feel good about your role and about your contributions. I don't know if everybody gets that, but I know that it's common in my firm that people who are later in their careers really do get a big kick out of seeing the people that they've developed be leaders and be successful in their own right.
I think what gets me up out of bed in the morning really though, is a bigger mission that I'm on. I really personally believe that it's hard to be a customer-focused leader in today's business environment. When you've got a small business, I don't know, it's pretty easy I think. You deal with your customers yourself all the time, or at least you're close enough to them. When you're in a bigger company, more complex company, it becomes harder and harder. When you're a public company, so many other things dominate your agenda. And so the mission that I'm on is to make it easier for CEOs, and C-level leaders, and the people who report to them, and the people who report to them to stay focused on delivering value to customers and measuring their success by the success that their customers have in getting their needs fulfilled.
That has a parallel with that career evolution. It's finding ways to make it rewarding and fulfilling for leaders to serve their customers better even in moments when, in the short run, that might deliver a little lower revenue growth, or a little less profit, or I might not make my cost budget. Knowing that you're actually laying the groundwork for future growth, for future profitability, for future functional team performance.
[00:13:50] Jesse Purewal: Let's talk about that mission. Why do you think, or what have you observed about why it is, that customer centricity is so hard to get right in a world where customers are literally the source of revenue and growth for enterprises across every industry? So what turned out to be the barriers that you have to work with leaders to surmount?
[00:14:10] Rob Markey: I think there are a lot of barriers that get in the way. A number one is that the way we do accounting and financial reporting inside of companies is organized largely the same way that it was in the 17th century. We do cost-based accounting, we do asset-based accounting, we do responsibility budgets, we do P and L statements. All of that stuff is great, except that none of it actually is built around a customer. It's all built around products, functions, organizational groups. So when you optimize, you maximize the things in the accounting statements, the management reporting. You're looking at slices that are transverse to the customers. Optimizing each of those pieces sub-optimizes the outcomes for customers.
Second thing is that the organizational structures that we developed in the early part of the 20th century when GM, for example, was becoming a model of the modern corporation, they really built around expertise and functional excellence, process excellence. Very important, very good, perfect for the moment in time when they were developed.
Customers are transverse to all of that. They just aren't part of that equation. And so when you only have a tiny little part of the organization that's truly focused on the customers in any long-term way, you've got an organization that is just almost entirely set up to undermine customer relationships. Somewhere along the way. It's not because leaders don't really mean it when they say that they want to focus on customers, they want to be customer-centric. It's not because managers and people in the organization are trying to undermine something. It's every single person in the organization is part of a system. That system works the way we designed it. Unfortunately, it's not ideal.
[00:16:05] Jesse Purewal: What structural moves do you see happening that give you confidence that leaders are taking heed to these kinds of words and taking action? I don't mean things like declaring that you're customer-inspired or focused in your values, but I mean really, really structurally. Do you look at things like subscription models and go, "Customers could turn us off at any moment. We better be a little more customer-driven. You look at the advent of CX programs that say, "Boy, feedback is now working its way into the product development cycle. Oh, with there's structural things happening."
[00:16:39] Rob Markey: You're asking two different questions that are related to each other, I think, Jesse. One is, what are the technological and capability developments that have happened over the last several years that make it possible to stay focused on customers? And then the second question is, what are the business practices, operating model changes, techniques that have developed to make companies more customer-centric? Because it's not about intent, it's about capability, I think.
So the big developments that have made it easier, one is the cost of computing has gone down. The cost of data storage has come down. Our ability to do analytics on large data sets has gone way up. It's really about the cost of computing and data access. It has allowed us to look at the business through the lens of longitudinal analytics on customer relationships. When I started my career 32 years ago, it was insanely painful to put together... In a bank. In a bank where every transaction has to be tracked to an individual customer, to put together an accurate picture of all the products that Jesse owns and all the transactions, all of the interactions, that Jesse has done with the organization.
And even when you did that, the maximum amount of data you would be able to get your hands on at any given point in time was about 24 months. And so if you wanted to create an accurate, for example, customer lifetime value model, you had to basically construct artificial pictures of customers longitudinally by taking all the Jesses who were acquired two years ago and the ones who acquired four years ago and eight years ago, and take the 24-month window that you had, the last 24 months, and basically construct a artificial customer. So it didn't happen. It just didn't happen. It was way too much work.
Today, hundreds and hundreds of companies have 5, 6, 7 years worth of data down to the micro-transaction level. They know what page on the website you were looking at before you did the next thing. In some ways, it's overwhelming. But the ability to take all the data elements and then reconstruct them around a customer today is something that just didn't exist. That's crucial.
Second thing is that we've developed new ways of working, agile and customer journey focused. So USAA, Nat West group, they've reorganized their operations around fulfilling customer needs, or what some people would call journeys, where they've created alignment of accountability and authority, and of expertise in analytics, around a customer's need from end-to-end. And then they can measure the impact that they have on the value of the customer relationship using the analytics and data I just talked about and the picture of the customer that comes out of understanding their interactions with the business, not as individual calls, or website visits, or whatever, but as steps that a customer's going through to fulfill a human life need that they're going through.
[00:19:55] Jesse Purewal: Well, I want to go to maybe one of the innovations in this regard that you are a huge part of. As many will know, you are the co-developer of something called Net Promoter System. And something that even more people have heard about is the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. This is a metric that was created and exists in a trademark fashion under the umbrella of Bain and Company. So talk to me about its origins as you remember them, and even when it was whiteboard days, or Lotus Notes days, or however you were forming the initial thoughts.
[00:20:27] Rob Markey: Back when we were using a deck VAX, to do our data analytics if anybody old enough to remember the digital equipment. I've worked with Fred Reichheld for my whole career at Bain. Back in the 90s, Fred developed a perspective. He said, "I think that we need to have," what he would call, "an acid test of loyalty." What we did is we developed a model of what questions you could ask customers that would give you a good indication of their future behavior that would create lifetime value so they would stay longer, buy more, tell their friends, cost less to serve, willingness to pay higher pricing, and so on. And we developed pretty rigorous questionnaires that were quite accurate in terms of your ability to predict that a customer would stay longer and buy more and so on.
The problem was that they were so complex and they involved so many different questions that customers hated answering them. And management teams would argue, "Well, what... Wait. But what are the questions in the index? And what if this question is going up and that question is going down?" And it became a waste of time. So the big epiphany that led to NPS came when Fred was visiting with Enterprise Rent-A-Car and discovered what they called the enterprise service quality index, which was essentially one question that they asked people who had rented a car about their satisfaction with the experience. And it was rated on a, I think, 1-to-5 scale. And the feedback that they got from every single person who responded went straight to the manager of the location from which the car had been rented. And in the event that a customer indicated that they were upset about something or they had something unresolved, somebody at that branch would contact the customer, learn more, make things right, and then they would try to figure out, how can we make sure that that doesn't happen again or that we do more of that if it was really good? Or whatever it is.
And Fred was fascinated by this. It was like, whoa. They ask just one question, and then why? And then they talk to their customers and they actually engage in a dialogue and people take it seriously and they learn from it and they improve, and the branches compete to see who can get the most improvement. That's amazing. We should figure out how to do that for other companies at scale. That led to setting out to say, "Well, if you were going to just ask one question, would it be satisfaction? Would it be this business deserves my loyalty? Would it be I intend to buy again from this company?" What would the question be? And we had 12 or 15 different questions that we tried out, and it just turned out that in most of the industries we looked at, likelihood to recommend was the question that was the best predictor that a customer would stay longer, buy more, tell their friends.
[00:23:24] Jesse Purewal: In the early days of the analytics, what were some of the mechanics that you played with around defining the promoter's, passives and detractors, for instance? Right now, we know the metric to consist of your promoters minus your detractors, and you leave the passives out of it.
[00:23:39] Rob Markey: Yeah.
[00:23:40] Jesse Purewal: But are there variance of that that he said, "Oh, well, let's look at top three box versus top two," or, "look at bottom five versus four"? Did you run those kinds of analyses?
[00:23:49] Rob Markey: Yeah. To be clear, we started out just looking at the average. We looked at the average likelihood to recommend. And there are two reasons we ended up going to a net score and defining promoters and passives and detractors like that that emerged from the data. The first thing is when you looked at the lifetime value... Imagine a graph, imagine the Y axis is customer lifetime value, and the Z axis is 0-to-10 likelihood to recommend, and you're doing an analysis across huge population of customers. If you were to look at the shape of that curve, what you would find is that there are two different points in the curve where the slope of the curve really changes. The most important place that it changes pretty dramatically is somewhere around eight and nine, where it gets much steeper. And that's why we said, "Oh, that's a different population." Those are promoters. They're much more valuable than the passives and detractors.
And then the other place the slope changes pretty dramatically is somewhere between five and seven. We drew it at six. It's actually a more gradual change, but it was pretty clear that there was a different population there. And then we went and interviewed a bunch of people who had given different scores and we did some qualitative assessment. That's what led to this idea that there were three different populations. There were the promoters who are really actively like you and are willing, by and large... The question is likelihood to recommend, it's actually not designed to predict exact recommendations. Doesn't matter how many recommendations exactly you get, but those are the people who are more likely to more often convince their friends to come try out your business.
The passives, it turns out, passively satisfied. They were perfectly satisfied. And when we did a satisfaction version of the question, what we found was they and the promoters looked alike because they're happy. They can't come up with anything that you want you to do differently. The difference between them and the promoters is they're not going to stick their neck out for you. They're not going to try hard to convince somebody who is reluctant to try your product.
And then the detractors, it turns out there's actually... Really deep in the analysis, there's two different types of detractors. One type of detractors has basically given up on you and they want nothing to do with your business. The other type of detractors is a promoter wannabe. They love you or wanted to love you, but you did something that lost their trust or that betrayed them or upset them deeply, so they're at least temporarily upset and they want you to recover. They want you to do something to make it right. And depending on the business, that can be a sable portion of the detractors base, or it can be a tiny little portion. But there's a lot of subtlety underneath that and the bottom line was there were these three groups, and they did have distinctly different future value.
Now, the net score didn't come in until we were trying to look at large populations against each other. We're looking at company-level scores and trying to say, "Does having more promoters and fewer detractors actually mean anything from a growth perspective?" And again, originally we looked at average likelihood to recommend of one company versus another. And we were able to explain a significant portion of the differential growth rates of two companies in the same industry. But it was only when we subtracted the detractors from the promoters that we were able to explain a lot more of that variation. It was just a statistical observation and empirical analysis that led us to that net score.
[00:27:25] Jesse Purewal: I want to observe, first of all, that I think one of the attributes of net promoter score being defined on a basis of likelihood to recommend is given some staying power because it taps into a human truth, which is that we like to share feelings and opinions and thoughts with each other as human beings. When you talk about, "Well, I'm likely to consider," or, "I'm likely to purchase," it's a thought you're having with yourself versus when you're going, "Would I really tell my mother, my neighbor, my friend to go for this thing?" That's a reckoning that we go through.
[00:27:59] Rob Markey: I think that's right. I think that that's part of what it's appeal was, is that it's pretty intuitive. And it's an experience we all have that we can relate to that.
[00:28:07] Jesse Purewal: So let's talk about spirit versus letter, then, of NPS, if we can for a moment. When I think about what you and the team have achieved with the net promoter system, and even the score, it's up in the territory of undisputed category leadership. Not in terms of a product or a service, but leadership of a point of view. Which is really hard to achieve, let alone sustain, for any meaningful amount of time, let alone for two decades plus.
I was thinking about this conversation and reflecting on it will be almost as if a musical genre or a fashion trend pervaded the entire world for more than 20 years without people saying, "Is this still in style?" They might interpret bell bottoms in the way that they weren't meant to be interpreted, or they might sing Dua Lipa in a way that she didn't intend for it to be sung. But the point would be, "Oh, yeah, it's derived from that energy." But maybe let's talk about both sides of that. How do you explain the staying power? Even though we've gone through this revolution in data and analytics and other things that have fundamentally shifted some of the calculus of business decision making. Yet here's NPS still, not just surviving, but thriving. Yet at the same time, maybe it's NPS and some of its cousins.
[00:29:22] Rob Markey: Well, I think the spirit, the net promoter spirit, has grown. And when I say net promoter spirit, the idea that it's a really valuable thing to deliver so much value to your customers that they become more valuable. The idea that you can turn your customers into promoters, that you can earn their advocacy and their loyalty. And the idea that you can measure your progress at doing that and learn how to do it better. All of that, I think, has endured quite well. And I think that's what caught the imagination of a lot of leadership teams.
I think that the radical simplicity of the net promoter score is its best characteristic and its worst. So I think that it's the kind of thing, anything that gets really popular in the business world is going to get misused, abused, sort of turned around sideways. Every kind of movement in business that I've seen in my career, there are good implementations to those things and there are terrible implementations to those things. There are things that are done in the name of agile that are not agile. Just not. And, similarly, there are things that are done in the name of NPS that are not in the net promoter spirit. They may be technically based on a likelihood-to-recommend question and a calculation that is a subtraction of detractors from promoters. That used to bother me deeply, like make me very upset. I've become more comfortable with it because I recognize that it's just a natural evolution of an idea. And truthfully, some of the most important developments in our capabilities around net promoter have come because of experimentation and what I might have originally thought of as misuse that turned out to be really good.
I can't tell you how many articles I've read over the last 15 years, all through the life of NPS, that have declared NPS dead. I wish that the bad implementations of NPS were dead and that the good implementations were alive and well. I think the bad implementations will die out because they do. The companies abandon things that don't work and they stick with things that do. And I think that's another piece of this is we have clients, we have members of the NPS Loyalty Forum, we have companies that we admire and know about that have been using NPS for 18 or 20 years. Why do they keep using it? Because, it's like the Winston Churchill quote, "Democracy is the worst form of government ever invented except for all the others that have been tried." NPS is the worst customer loyalty metric except for all the others that have been tried
[00:32:05] Jesse Purewal: Beyond the implementations of programs, talk to me about if NPS is the stone dropping in the water here, and we're talking about ripple effects, many ripples out. To the degree to which NPS is a force for good in moving experiences forward, moving products forward, putting stuff out into the world that people think is delightful and useful. What's, at its highest and best, NPS enabling and informing and helping companies do? With not just their loyalty programs, but actually at the core of the innovation that they're driving, whether that's with products or services or experiences.
[00:32:40] Rob Markey: I think the best companies, the best companies are the ones where they have a purpose and mission around making their customers' lives better. In order to achieve that, they need some way to gauge the extent to which they are making their customers' lives better. And NPS has proven to be a, not the only, but a very good way to do that. They also need a way, a mechanism, a set of processes that enable them to learn how to deliver even more value to their customers in the future. And the net promoter system has proven to be an exceptionally effective way for organizations to learn how to serve customers better, experiment with new ways of meeting their needs, and connect their employees to customers so that their employees develop a sense of empathy and understanding of customers and their needs in ways that enable them to perform better at delivering value.
I'd say the final thing is that by having a touchstone, a way of measuring progress, you give employees something that they can get their hands around to say, "You know what? That's good. What we did there is good." And when you give them the benefit of customers verbatim responses where you put them on the phone with customers who are just absolutely thrilled, but also have some suggestions for improvement, you put those employees in a position where they can feel that visceral sense of satisfaction from knowing that they've done something really valuable for somebody else. And that's super rewarding that that makes it a good place to work.
[00:34:20] Jesse Purewal: Well, I want to close by kind of coming full circle here and asking you about loyalty. You've spent 32 plus years at Bain. There's firm loyalty there, there's team loyalty, there's undoubtedly client loyalty there. And in your career, obviously you've focused on how to build and sustain customer loyalty. So maybe reflect for me, if you would, about the way in which you see loyalty as a through line in your career and in your life.
[00:34:48] Rob Markey: Bain has earned my loyalty. I wouldn't still be at Bain if I hadn't had the opportunity to make a real difference for my clients and for my colleagues if I hadn't been able to learn and enjoy mastering new skills all the time. And I wouldn't be at ban if I didn't like and trust my clients and my colleagues. My emotional connection to the firm and to my career is largely because I have been able to do the things that meet my needs as a human, as a person, as a member of society by being part of Bain. And to me, that's the kind of place that I think everybody would probably aspire to be. I'm in a place that happened to be really good for me, and that earned the spot.
[00:35:41] Jesse Purewal: Well, Rob, I'd love to close by doing a little lightning round here. First reaction to a couple of quick questions.
[00:35:49] Rob Markey: You're doing this to a slow talker. I'm in trouble. Lightning and Rob Markey don't go together.
[00:35:55] Jesse Purewal: What's the most memorable of the marathons that you have run?
[00:35:59] Rob Markey: I would say the first marathon I ran, which was Boston, was exceptionally memorable because I didn't know what the heck I was doing when I was training. Now anybody knows, the Boston Marathon knows that the Newton Hills are the rough part of the marathon. They come between miles 17 and 20, and at mile 13 in Wellesley where I was living at the time, I was feeling good and I was running fast, and I was all happy. And Mile 15, I was like, Oh, this is good. I'm only 11 miles away. I can do this. Mile 18, my legs turned into cement. I could not lift them. They just froze. And I still had six or eight miles to go. I finished, but man, it was ugly. And I learned a big lesson. I learned a lesson in training. I learned that in a marathon, you have to go out a lot slower than you think. Even when you're feeling good, you have to reserve some energy for later. That was a very tough and memorable lesson, and it actually applies in a lot of other parts of life.
[00:37:08] Jesse Purewal: Absolutely, it does. I'm glad you shared that one, Rob. What's a brand that you can't imagine living without in your life?
[00:37:15] Rob Markey: If I come at it from the perspective of what's a brand that kind of delights me every time and makes me feel good, it's a surprising one. It's a group of hotels that go under a kind of association called Relay and Chateau. And I stumbled across it because a friend of mine brought me to a Relay and Chateau years and years ago, and we had a really upstanding experience. And then when I was looking back on a bunch of vacations I had taken and places I had stayed, I realized, huh, the ones I like the most, they all share this one thing. And so more recently, I've basically been planning vacations as much as I can around the ability to stay in a property that is part of that association. And I have not yet been disappointed every time I've been, been very happy.
[00:38:04] Jesse Purewal: How would you summarize your secret sauce, that mix of things that helps you do you?
[00:38:09] Rob Markey: I think that maybe my secret power is my ability to figure out why it's hard for somebody to take a decision that I think is obvious or to take an action that seems like it's the right thing to do on its face. I kind of have a laser like focus on why if I were in that guy's shoes, why would I not accept this advice? That seems so obvious.
[00:38:37] Jesse Purewal: Rob Markey, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for your time and for joining me and our audience today. Wish you the best for the rest of the year and be well.
[00:38:46] Rob Markey: Thank you, Jesse.
[00:38:47] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review and tell a friend.
Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studio's original, hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, and our head of social media, Chelsea Hunersen. From Studio Pod Media in San Francisco, our show coordinator is Nicole Genova. Editing and music are by producer, Sterling Shore, and executive producer, Katie Sunku-Wood, with Sound Engineering by Ryan Crowther. At Vayner Talent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hannah Park, and Ivana Lynn provide publicity in promotional support. The show's designers are Barron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Our website is by Gregory Heydon. Photography by Christy Hemm-Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.