AIESEC on Customer Experience: Using Net Promoter

AIESEC Case study

AIESEC International:

Shaping Young Leaders on a Global Scale Case Study: AIESEC

stated BHAG (defined in Wikipedia as a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”) is to “Engage and develop every young person in the world.”

How a leading Not-for-Profit youth organisation is

Net Promoter in a non-profit context

using Net Promoter® System to create positive social change on a global level, with the CustomerGauge survey, workflow and reporting tools.

Background and challenge AIESEC is the world’s most prominent international platform for young people to explore and develop their leadership potential and have a positive impact on society.

Headquartered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the organisation has 124 national offices and 800 offices in total around the world. These work together to place young people in international internships through its Global Internship Program. It also has a number of other products that are designed to develop and enhance young people on a global level, including Volunteering and Leadership Programs.

As an organisation dedicated to driving social good, AIESEC’s motivation is not financial, but to change lives and have a positive social impact at a global level. This makes it different to the for-profit sector that usually adopts Net Promoter in order to increase profits.

AIESEC’s Net Promoter program by the numbers: - 100,000 members - 124 national offices, over 800 offices altogether - 30,000 emails a month - 1,000 have access to the CustomerGauge dashboard in over 100 countries

According to president Florent Meiyi, “We provide leadership development experiences, and by living through these experiences, we help young people around the world become a better version of themselves.”

But as a concept, Net Promoter is as applicable to driving social good as it is to driving profits. As noted by Fred Reichheld, creator of the Net Promoter system, “Reputation is earned through the simple, age-old concept of the Golden Rule: Treat others as you yourself would want to be treated.”

Furthermore, although the Net Promoter System is often thought about in terms of an organisation’s “Net Promoter Score,” its real value lies in the feedback that is collected from follow-up questions.

Said Meiyi, “The only way for us to know if our leadership experiences are actually having a positive impact on people’s lives is to have a way to understand it from their perspective. With their feedback we can really learn how to build better experiences in the future.”

With approximately 100,000 members, AIESEC is already the biggest youth-run organisation in the world. But the organisation has bigger goals in sight. In fact, AIESEC’s

© CustomerGauge / Directness 2013

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AIESEC Case Study

Partnering with CustomerGauge

These are:

Net Promoter Score: This is to measure how overall In order to test the concept, AIESEC originally rolled out a advocacy evolves over time. The nature of the AIESEC’s small DIY pilot survey. But with 100,000 members across programs means that two national more than 100 countries, it was organisations often collaborate on certain crucial to have a centralised system products, so tracking the scores of two “Hearing what people are in place that could automatically organisations as they collaborate can give saying about their send surveys and deliver insights. a useful insight into spotting potential And to maximise the potential experiences has had an issues. The organisation tracks this metric benefits of rolling out a global incredible impact on our with the CustomerGauge system’s Net customer survey, all offices would culture, and people inside Promoter Score Report and NPS need to have access to feedback the organisation are much Evolution Report. and reporting features. Based on more passionate about these considerations, the Speed and quantity of customer issue what we do.” association decided to partner with resolution: AIESEC wants customer Juan Carlos Peña Puertas CustomerGauge for its feedback Director of Operations and Strategy issues to be closed quickly, but the solution. association is also interested in seeing the volume of issues opened, so it tracks both Prior to global rollout, the the quantity and speed of resolution over a CustomerGauge system was weekly or monthly basis. This indicator is tracked with the configured so that 1,000 people across 800 offices could CustomerGauge system’s Firefighting feature – a tool that have access to select Dashboard features. To ensure that enables customers who give feedback to select the areas offices on a local level would be able to focus on their own that they would like to have follow-up by the organisation, feedback and reporting, the system was configured so that and opens cases in the relevant offices’ Dashboard. at a national level, people are able to access only countryspecific feedback and reporting, with only the global office able to access all data across all countries.

To ensure that each country would have the greatest opportunity possible to improve the customer experience within its own borders, AIESEC created a policy that the responsible point of contact in each office should read through each and every single comment – which they can do directly from the Twitter-like feed on the CustomerGauge Dashboard.

In order to build as complete an understanding of the customer journey as possible, AIESEC decided to send Transactional Surveys to customers across three touchpoints: • • •

Survey response rates: Feedback quantity is important to AIESEC because more data gives it better insights into which programs and products are working and how they can be improved. Likewise, it is also useful to know which programs attract a higher survey response rate. This indicator is tracked with the CustomerGauge system’s Response Report.

Percentage of Promoters: Because the organisation wants to know how many people are having a great experience, it decided this would be a useful metric to track.

AIESEC uses this to identify which products are really working, as well as those that need to be changed. AIESEC tracks the percentage of Promoters through the Net Promoter Score Report.

When the customer is initially matched to a placement.

When the customer arrives in a new country.

After the customer completes his or her placement.

Aligning Key Indicators with CustomerGauge features AIESEC developed four key indicators against which it can benchmark progress from a national and global level. Each of these indicators is tracked with one of the CustomerGauge system’s features. © CustomerGauge / Directness 2013

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AIESEC Case study

Results AIESEC’s Net Promoter program works across global and national levels, so it is useful to consider the results in these contexts.

Global According to Juan Carlos Peña Puertas, Director of Operations and Strategy, AIESEC International, the global organisation has seen benefits in two key areas – operations and culture.

“A very recent development that has come from the Net Promoter program is a strong focus on what the customer journey looks like for each of our products,” he said. “The program is helping us move from being a product-centric organisation to being customer-centric one.”

The global organisation has implemented an incentive and awards scheme to encourage national organisations to really act on their feedback and drive their customer experience forward – an initiative that will ensure incorporating feedback into process and product improvement stays embedded within organisations across the world.

Operations: In terms of operations, AIESEC has shifted away from developing products based on internal evaluations, and instead developed a process to involve feedback into product development with the goal to increase Promoters.

“We see that the changes we are making are the actual changes that needed to be made,” said Peña Puertas. “And beyond capturing feedback, having the CustomerGauge system in place has helped us transform information into action.”

Culture: While the organisation has always been focused on driving what it believes are the best initiatives to change young lives, the injection of customer feedback into the organisation on a daily basis has sparked a new level of excitement among staff. “AIESEC has always been aware of the impact of the experiences we provide, but never so much as we are now,” said Peña Puertas. “Hearing what people are saying about their experiences has had an incredible impact on our culture, and people inside the organisation are much more passionate about what we do.”

National Because each office has access to a country-specific Dashboard, survey feedback and new ideas are now being injected directly into 800 offices on a daily basis – a point from which 100,000 members will ultimately benefit.

India was one of the first national associations to be involved in AIESEC’s Net Promoter program. According to Anubhav Razdan, President of AIESEC India, in that country it has given the organisation a much more direct route to providing youth with the leadership opportunities they are looking for.

© CustomerGauge / Directness 2013

The future With feedback now embedded into its internal processes and product development, AIESEC is seeing the benefits of having the voice of customer within its organisation on a daily basis. The association has recently rolled out Relational Net Promoter surveys on a global level to better understand the needs of the volunteers that make the organisation function on a daily basis. And in the near future, it will also begin to survey its partners – the multinationals, NGOs, and other organisations that give global youth these incredible opportunities.

“In the end, what matters to us it changing lives, and understanding what people want is crucial to help us change those lives. By continuing on this journey, we see a bright future ahead for the association,” said Peña Puertas.

Acknowledgments: Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.

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