Have you ever found it hard to tell an employee that his work simply wasn't cutting it? Maybe you were afraid of hurting the employee's feelings or creating tension, so you decided not to say anything. Kim Scott, an executive coach and former Google executive, considers these situations missed opportunities for growth. She argues that honest criticism that's shared with sincere concern can empower employees at every level of a company. In this episode, Kim discusses her Radical Candor framework and the power of saying what you think.

It's a scenario that we routinely face: a company starts off using the Net Promoter System with great enthusiasm, gets a number of quick wins and then hits a wall. They inevitably ask themselves: "What are we doing wrong?" My colleague Aaron Cheris, one of the chief architects of Bain's Net Promoter System, gets this question a lot. So he helped craft an assessment tool that allows companies to measure their efforts in a straightforward and quantitative fashion. His premise was simple: find out what Net Promoter leaders are doing and work backward to understand why their results are so stellar. In this episode, Aaron discusses how companies use the assessment tool and what Net Promoter leaders do differently.

Maurice FitzGerald, the recently retired vice president of customer experience for the software business at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, has been happily married for more than 25 years. But one Valentine’s Day, he had an epiphany about why some couples stay together for the long haul and others don’t—and why that knowledge is so critical to improving an organization’s customer experience. Maurice shares those insights and others from his Net Promoter experience at HP Enterprise in this episode.

Under Jack Brennan's leadership, Vanguard became an early adopter of the Net Promoter System. With it, customer loyalty became core to how the investment company operated. Jack pushed employees to ask "Are we doing the best thing for the client?" until the question became second nature to them. The goal was always to keep clients for life and to never take on a client they couldn't keep that long. In this episode of the Net Promoter System Podcast, Jack shares some of the practical lessons he learned from his experience at Vanguard.

VimpelCom is one of the largest telecom companies in the world, but a few years ago the company started facing more competition from a new crop of Internet-based rivals. The company decided to become more serious about its mission to focus on customers, adopting the Net Promoter System to guide its efforts. To gauge its progress, VimpelCom used Bain's Net Promoter System assessment tool to identify weak spots. In this episode, Rob Markey talks to VimpelCom executives Anton Telegin and Natalia Macpherson about what it took for the company to make this cultural shift.

The Net Promoter System is about creating a culture in which companies make better decisions on behalf of their customers. The only way to do that is to get reliable feedback from customers, says Rob Markey in this Net Promoter System Podcast short.

Customers can explain what's bothering them or what they like about a company. But they don't always know the full story behind their own feelings. Rob Markey discusses the importance of digging deeper into customer feedback in this Net Promoter System Podcast short.

Customer feedback has traditionally been used to evaluate performance, not necessarily improve it. The Net Promoter System, however, seeks to empower employees by teaching them the skills they need to generate loyalty and enthusiasm among customers. Rob Markey explains how in this Net Promoter System Podcast short.

Fifty years ago, few people could have guessed some of today's most common habits. Habits like having a mobile phone within arm's reach at all times; checking Facebook or email multiple times an hour, or calling an Uber instead of a cab. All companies dream of inspiring such new and compelling habits in their customers, but few manage to achieve it. Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, shares his theories on what sets these products apart.