An Inside Look at Palladium Energy’s Customer Satisfaction Efforts
We sat down with Palladium Energy’s vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, Anson Martin, to bring you an inside-look at our company’s customer satisfaction philosophy and scoring process.
What is Palladium Energy’s customer satisfaction philosophy?
We’ve used different customer satisfaction philosophies and survey techniques before—but we now use Net Promoter System—based on the book The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld. Used by the world’s largest brands (including some of our customers), this simplistic methodology uses only two questions, keeping the burden on our customer low.
- On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend Palladium Energy to a friend or colleague?
- One follow-up question is then asked based on scale of response.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a single number that can be tracked from week to week and month to month, just like net profit.
How long has this been implemented at Palladium?
We started to implement surveys, analyze the data and NPS in July 2010. It is now becoming ingrained in our organization—and is becoming part of a system rather than just a score.
What’s your end goal?
We don’t want to merely satisfy our lithium battery pack customers. We want EVERY customer to be delighted.
- Delighted with our service.
- Delighted with our capabilities cradle to grave throughout our operations.
- Delighted with our end products—lithium battery packs we produce globally and power supplies and other modules we manufacture in Brazil.
What’s a good NPS score?
The average NPS score for North American companies is 5 to 10% range—which is considered a terrible score. Most efficient growth engines notorious for delighting customers—Amazon, Harley-Davidson, Vanguard and Dell—operate at 50 to 80% NPS (according to the book The Ultimate Question). We are committed to operate at the 50-80% NPS level by taking immediate action on customer feedback, closing the feedback loop internally and externally and working with our global talent to ensure engagement.
What do Palladium’s customers value?
Since the inception of our NPS program in 2010, our customers consistently value these four aspects of our business:
- Communications/Responsiveness
- Technology & Engineering Expertise
- Product Quality
- Logistics support
What needs to be improved?
As with any business, there is always room for improvement. Below are some processes we’re implementing to improve the way we do business with our customers:
- Streamlined account management and New Product Introduction (NPI) processes and procedures—to enhance communications and set better expectations on all key deliverables, from cradle to grave
- Investing in systems to help more effectively and efficiently communicate and deliver products to our customers
- Becoming more flexible by innovating strategic sourcing programs to reduce time to market and overall lead times for our customers’ products
How are you gauging success?
We’re gauging success in several ways:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Tracking our global score, constantly analyzing feedback and putting strategies in place to improve customer satisfaction. We’re in field 2 times per year—Q1 and Q4.
- Internal engagement: A lot of effort is being made to educate our global talent in China, Brazil, Taiwan, Korea, India, Europe and the United States. We are creating an environment that will foster a cultural transformation. Our people are key to making customer satisfaction a success—and on the flip side, making sure they are delighted working at Palladium as well.
- Accountability: As a result of these efforts, all NPS goals and objectives are tied to performance management—globally. Meaning everyone is accountable throughout the entire organization around this effort.
Any parting comments?
As a leading battery pack manufacturer, we are 100% committed to customer satisfactions efforts in order to delight our customers—and have fun while doing so. We have the intelligence gathering/analysis, people and strategies in place to make this happen for our global business—In the US, China, Brazil, Taiwan, India, Korea and Europe.
A Palladium Energy Perspective 
Anson, this was a fantastic book, and an incredibly valuable tool. It seems that Palladium is a B2B business, so I’m wondering how you measure your NPS score, through your OEM’s or the ultimate users as well? Also, how often do you measure, and how do you do it?
Thanks!
Hi Tom. Sorry for the tardy response. We measure our NPS through OEMs, contract manufacturers and technology partners globally–since they are all channels for us. We do not survey thier end customers. We measure 2x/year right now–Q2 and Q4 and we use email and phone. If we do not get a repsonse via email (the preferred way of contact for our customers) we call. Hope this helps–please let me know if you have any other questions.