Telstra is Australia’s largest telecommunications company, but it has suffered from poor customer service and a shortage of customer advocacy.

On 1 July 2012, Telstra implemented the Net Promoter System (NPS) and a change management program to shift employees' focus from simply leaving customers satisfied to creating advocates.

The change management goal was to communicate the introduction of NPS to employees – to improve the customer experience and create customer advocacy.

That meant we couldn't simply explain and train employees in NPS; we needed to help them re-orient their behaviour through both internal communications and operational changes. To do so, we created The Buzz, an internal communications platform that would create the immediate impact needed to launch the new system, as well as embed lasting change.

Our approach accounted for the daily work practices of every individual, function and department through a range of activities, behaviours and communications. From the outset, we aimed to create a unique identity for The Buzz to connect employees with NPS and inspire them to make it their own.

Since launching only 9 months ago, The Buzz has handled 8.7 million customer surveys; 6,400 people leaders have been trained in The Buzz; and, on average, 800 visits to performance dashboards are made each weekday by employees.

Most importantly, The Buzz has driven increases in NPS scores, leading to historic highs in brand consideration (20% higher than Optus, their largest competitor) and net growth of 607,000 domestic mobile customers (in the first 6 months).

The goal was to communicate the introduction of NPS to employees – to improve the customer experience and create customer advocacy.

We couldn’t simply explain and train employees in NPS, we needed to help them re-orient their behaviour through both internal communications and operational changes. We created The Buzz, an internal communications platform that would create the immediate impact needed to launch the new system, as well as embed lasting change.

The Buzz aimed to communicate and engage employees, enabling them to take ownership of the system, connecting its results to their daily role, and improving Telstra’s brand consideration scores.

The Buzz is the sound of millions of customers talking about us, and employees can now 'hear customers at a volume louder than ever before'.

The program helped employees make the leap beyond the methodology to the objective at the core of NPS, customer advocacy. By providing tools and training for all employees to make it part of their everyday, we ensured they took ownership and control over The Buzz immediately.

Since launching only 9 months ago, The Buzz has handled 8.7M customer surveys; 6,400 leaders have been trained in The Buzz (95% of all leaders); and, on average 800 visits to performance dashboards are made each weekday by employees.

Most importantly, The Buzz has driven increases in NPS scores, leading to historic highs in brand consideration (20% higher than Optus, their largest competitor) and net growth of 607,000 domestic mobile customers (in the first 6 months).

We used everyday language to create The Buzz as a distinctive internal communications platform that makes NPS simpler to understand and gets employees talking in meaningful ways.

We created the name to reflect the nature of advocacy and added the language of emoticons to turn NPS classifications into real people.

We activated internal communications by creating a segmentation and messaging framework for each audience, while engaging senior executives through work sessions and focus groups to seed the idea and generate support. We developed the launch and activation plan, designed applications to establish awareness, and produced emoticon badges to get employees talking – to one another, family and friends.

We also wrote and produced a series of videos using real customer verbatims to help employees make an immediate connection to NPS classifications, created EDMs for leaders to have conversations around the change, and consulted on how to integrate The Buzz into training.

Telstra is Australia’s largest telecommunications company. It touches every Australian, however it has historically suffered from poor customer service and a shortage of brand advocacy.

On 7/1/2012, Telstra implemented the Net Promoter System (NPS) and a change management program to shift every employee’s focus from simply leaving customers satisfied at each interaction to creating long term advocates for Telstra.

This shift from Customer Satisfaction to NPS represented a whole new way of thinking for employees – and a very confronting one, given that each employee needed to take responsibility to ensure it delivered more customers through improved customer experiences.

For NPS to succeed at Telstra, our objective required that we embed it in the daily work practices of every individual, function and department.

This wasn’t easy given that the NPS is a complex system, rooted in data. It requires explanation to interpret the scores, especially when working across a multi-dimensional workforce of 43,000 people. To make things harder, Telstra’s early scores were expected to feature in negative, not positive numbers – before we could make improvements.

We knew we could not stop at communications or simply explaining and training employees in the NPS methodology. Employees needed to understand and internalize the shift to NPS, its results and implications, so we focused on unlocking ways to change behaviour at every level of the organization. We helped employees re-orient their behaviour when listening, interpreting and acting upon customer feedback, and then using what they learned to improve the customer experience.