Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

Gillian Smith explains how the nonprofit uses the Net Promoter System to gauge its impact on schools it serves (10:04) and employee engagement (17:20). She also shares what she wishes she knew before she started using NPS (30:56).

Why would a world-class sports academy invest in a student center, rather than more coaches, fancy equipment, or dorms?

IMG Academy, a Florida boarding school, turns out some of the most successful college and professional athletes around. Its president, Tim Pernetti, led a massive cultural shift toward customer loyalty.

Tim says IMG Academy used to be highly focused on coaching and sports operations. To be clear, that emphasis on athletic excellence helped produce a large number of highly successful athletes. But Tim and the leadership team saw the potential to add something on top of this: a focus on serving a more comprehensive set of student-athlete needs. Today, IMG Academy leverages student-athlete input to refine its program and operations. New initiatives range from enhancing dining experiences to introducing flexible communal spaces.

Tim shares how an emphasis on employee recognition combines regular student and parent feedback to instill deep, enduring culture change.

Guest: Tim Pernetti, President, IMG Academy

Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company

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Time-stamped list of topics covered:

• [00:09:17] Global influence and expansion
• [00:14:25] Culture shift toward experience
• [00:19:57] Response to student feedback
• [00:25:32] Investment in campus experience
• [00:30:01] Recognition's impact on staff
• [00:35:23] Challenges in universal buy-in
• [00:37:09] Commitment to improving IMG Academy

Time-stamped list of notable quotes:

• [00:04:43] “Really, [our early] focus was on intense physical training, like total immersion in tennis. And the result was ten world number ones [were trained here].”
• [00:07:23] “This is an environment where you're bringing people in from all over the world. You want to have good people in the environment. We put a lot of weight into that, like getting to know kids, and getting to know their parents.”
• [00:23:17] “We went into meetings with data and said, ‘Here’s what the customer is saying.’”
• [00:29:16] “[At] a place like IMG Academy, we have everything from coaches, people that serve food every day, and our transportation drivers, [and people] who cut the grass at five o'clock in the morning. And I've shadowed all of them."
• [00:30:12] “We [recognized a tram driver] with a financial bonus and a gift card to take his wife out to dinner. This guy now is known as the friendliest, nicest, most outgoing person on campus.”
• [00:30:35] "The biggest tool you have in your toolkit right now is your personal and other leaders' acknowledgment and recognition when people do the right things.”

Guest and Host Bio Links:

• Tim Pernetti's LinkedIn Profile
• Rob Markey LinkedIn Profile

Steve Jobs. Charles Schwab. Howard Schultz. They all spotted an unmet customer need and made it their mission to meet it. They also founded iconic companies that started out as disruptors only to struggle as bureaucracy and distraction set in. In each case, it took the founder’s return to get the company back on track.

It’s a story that will be played out again and again in business. But it doesn’t have to.

According to Bain Partner Chris Zook, these companies have battled the predictable crises of growth. In The Founder’s Mentality, a new book Chris cowrote with Bain's James Allen, Chris talks about how companies can hold on to the spirit of their founders as they grow. No surprise: It requires companies to focus on their customers. He recently joined me on the podcast.

Stanley McChrystal, CEO of McChrystal Group, knows how to lead a dispersed team in a crisis. A retired four-star general, he commanded US and International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan and was the former commander of the nation's premier military counterterrorism force, the Joint Special Operations Command. He joined the podcast during the Covid-19 crisis to talk about three ways to lead through a crisis: trust, empowered execution and inspiring leadership—all underpinned by connection.

Whether we’ve been deeply, personally affected by this pandemic or are simply trying to get ourselves and our loved ones through it, we’re all sharing a version of the same experience. For customer experience professionals, that’s been a new challenge. My colleague Maureen Burns and I have seen some companies fumble it badly. But many others have tuned into the experience with empathy. They’re creating experiences and offering innovative solutions that are building a deep reservoir of trust and loyalty with customers and employees that will last long after this pandemic is a bad memory. In this episode, Maureen joined me to talk about what it is that customers and employees really need right now, and how the answer varies by company. And I also asked Maureen for her answers to some of the practical questions that Net Promoter practitioners are asking about soliciting customer feedback at a time like this.