AIESEC Case study

© CustomerGauge / Directness 2013 6/6/13

Case Study: AIESEC

How a leading Not-for-Profit youth organisation is 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.

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.”

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

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

Net Promoter in a non-profit context

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.

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.”

AIESEC International:

Shaping Young Leaders on a Global Scale

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

AIESEC Case Study

© CustomerGauge / Directness 2013 6/613

Partnering with CustomerGauge

In order to test the concept, AIESEC originally rolled out a small DIY pilot survey. But with 100,000 members across more than 100 countries, it was crucial to have a centralised system in place that could automatically send surveys and deliver insights. And to maximise the potential benefits of rolling out a global customer survey, all offices would need to have access to feedback and reporting features. Based on these considerations, the association decided to partner with CustomerGauge for its feedback solution.

Prior to global rollout, the CustomerGauge system was configured so that 1,000 people across 800 offices could have access to select Dashboard features. To ensure that offices on a local level would be able to focus on their own feedback and reporting, the system was configured so that at a national level, people are able to access only country-specific 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:

• 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.

These are:

Net Promoter Score: This is to measure how overall advocacy evolves over time. The nature of the AIESEC’s

programs means that two national organisations often collaborate on certain products, so tracking the scores of two organisations as they collaborate can give a useful insight into spotting potential issues. The organisation tracks this metric with the CustomerGauge system’s Net Promoter Score Report and NPS Evolution Report. Speed and quantity of customer issue resolution: AIESEC wants customer issues to be closed quickly, but the association is also interested in seeing the volume of issues opened, so it tracks both the quantity and speed of resolution over a

weekly or monthly basis. This indicator is tracked with the CustomerGauge system’s Firefighting feature – a tool that enables customers who give feedback to select the areas that they would like to have follow-up by the organisation, and opens cases in the relevant offices’ Dashboard.

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.

“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.”

Juan Carlos Peña Puertas Director of Operations and Strategy

AIESEC Case study

© CustomerGauge / Directness 2013 6/6/13

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.

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.

“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.

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.