Building a Customer Focus

Over the past five years, GE has focused on becoming a more customer-centric and market-facing organization. To achieve this shift, we have developed new tools, processes and programs to engage our customers in the product development cycle, including:

• “Dreaming Sessions,” which help us look into future customers’ needs.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric GE has adopted to track customer perceptions of performance strengths and weaknesses.
• Customer summits hosted by GE’s diverse employee Affinity Networks (such as the African American Forum and GE Women’s Network) at Crotonville.
• “Leading & Learning,” one of GE’s signature programs that brings together women leaders from inside and outside the Company with female GE customers to discuss important issues of the day.
• The GE Marketing Toolkit, which has been organized around the Company’s framework for promoting growth: Calibrate-Explore-Create-Organize-and-Realize (CECOR). The tools in the kit stem from many different sources, such as the Crotonville marketing classes, different GE businesses, leading consulting and marketing textbooks and Six Sigma.

CECOR incorporates customer feedback at various points in the process, including asking:

• What do our customers need/want/prefer?
• Are we collaborating with customers?
• How will we measure customer and GE impact?

Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score is based on asking customers one simple question: Would they recommend GE or do business with GE again? They are asked to respond on a scale from zero to 10. Customer ratings of a nine or 10 are considered promoters, and those with a zero to six are considered detractors. The rest are considered neutral or passively satisfied. Subtracting the detractors from the promoters produces the Net Promoter Score, a baseline of customer loyalty. What is critical is not the actual score, but our ability to improve the score over time.