Beyond his current role, Jeremy has held leadership positions at big corporates like Bupa, Crown Worldwide, and NatWest, as well as fintechs like LendInvest and Travelex, where he’s driven marketing transformations, brand positioning, and customer experience strategies.

He’s also the founder of Rocket Jam, advising businesses on marketing capability, brand architecture, and growth strategies.

Today we’ll explore how customer experience, Net Promoter Score, and advocacy drive sustainable growth; why marketing should be at the heart of customer experience; and how businesses can balance brand building with commercial impact.

Jeremy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us today.

Jeremy, you’ve had a fascinating career. You’ve worked in large organisations, big corporate businesses, and family-run startups. Can you give us a bit of an overview of how you started? What led to your interest in marketing?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, David. It’s great to be here.

So it started for me at Nationwide Building Society, where I joined as a young graduate many moons ago. That gave me great exposure to the business. From there, I realised marketing was where my heart lay, so I devoted the rest of my time there to really getting my head around marketing.

They were running a very classic product marketing structure. So there was a lot of product management, but also classic marketing disciplines like advertising and direct marketing.

It was a big business, so it had lots of marketing needs. It had sponsorship, a big branch network that needed merchandising, and it was running campaigns on TV. So it really gave me a good schooling in everything to do with marketing.

That’s a fabulous entry point into marketing.

It was brilliant, but I gave it up because I got married.

Right.

My wife had a dream of living in London. So I left Nationwide to join RBS NatWest, which was a great opportunity. We moved to London, and in the very early years of RBS it was the world’s biggest bank. So it was an even bigger beast, with many more brands underneath that portfolio to work with.

It really helped me understand how big marketing functions operate. Typically, they like people to specialise in certain areas rather than generalise. So I had a good opportunity to work in some very specific roles, one of which was proposition development.

Right.

While I was there, I helped take to market a credit card brand called Mint, which no one remembers these days.

I don’t remember.

You remember? Okay, good.

I also helped take a very innovative credit card and current account proposition to market as well. But during my time there, the global financial crisis happened, which obviously had a big impact on the business.

I used that opportunity to go and join Bupa, the healthcare company.

They wanted that proposition development skill, which had made me well known at RBS, to help them build propositions within their business.

Bupa is a global business with operations across the world, so it also gave me an opportunity to travel and work internationally. I did a year in Spain, actually, which was amazing.

They’re a really great business, and they were very focused on their purpose and on delivering the best possible customer experience.

Transferable skills from marketing in financial services into healthcare?

Well, a large part of Bupa’s business is insurance, of course. But they also operate hospitals, care homes, and opticians.

I do believe — and people have said I’m a bit of a poster boy for this — that you don’t need to get pigeonholed by the sector or category you work in. Marketing is a transferable discipline.

It creates systems, processes, and approaches that can be applied to whatever the challenge is. The outcome might be different, but the methodology is the same.

That’s why Bupa were happy for me to join them. And working internationally, we realised that I was looking after a growth programme focused on marketing and sales opportunities to help drive better outcomes for the business.

We realised that delivering a better customer experience and driving loyalty was going to unlock a lot of future value — even to the point where we wanted customers to love the brand.

Love is a difficult term for people to get their head around, but we actually defined it as loyalty beyond reason.

Okay.

You’re wanting people who are so loyal that they’ll stay with you even if you don’t get it right every single time.

Exactly. So there was a real customer-experience focus within that business.

That’s something I then took to my next opportunity, which was a logistics company called Crown Worldwide, headquartered in Hong Kong.

Their challenge was that they had a very fragmented marketing department that they wanted to unify under a strong global hub that I would lead.

Again, customer experience and installing NPS as a metric — which I know we’re going to talk about today — was a big part of that role.

I loved the international aspect of the job, although while I was there COVID happened, which had some impact for a short time. But it was great to see the business bounce back afterwards.

My heart, though, was yearning for some more financial services action. So I left to join a fintech called LendInvest, where I led the marketing communications function and helped them through a stage of growth after listing on AIM on the London Stock Exchange.

That was a great opportunity to take everything I’d learned in my career — running campaigns, building propositions, enhancing customer experience, and transforming brands — and apply it to a very agile, technology-focused business.

It was a really exciting business.

That then led me to my first CMO role at Enness Global, who are a high-net-worth finance brokerage based in London but with offices across the world, including Dubai.

Again, it’s a founder-led business looking to scale and grow, and looking to marketing to unlock where those pockets of growth could come from.

Jeremy, you mentioned customer experience. Where did that first really take hold?

During my time at Bupa.

I was leading a global programme of initiatives designed to grow the business.

Many of them were focused on cost reduction or acquisition. But actually, there was a big opportunity to improve customer experience and drive retention and loyalty.

Understanding that opportunity was opened up by NPS.

Someone around the table mentioned that other big companies — like Apple and eBay — were having success using that metric to embed a continuous improvement culture around improving the entire experience wherever effort was required in the journey.

So I took it upon myself to really get my head around what NPS was.

Even today, when I meet people, it’s not widely known.

But just for clarity for listeners: NPS — Net Promoter Score.

Yes.

When you first got your head around it, give us an overview of what it is.

In many ways, the beauty of NPS is its simplicity.

It’s a two-question process designed to understand the advocacy of a customer following an experience or interaction with your brand.

Many companies use customer satisfaction surveys to ask customers to evaluate their experience. Typically, these surveys are very long. They go very deep, and often they’re never completed because they take too long.

They tend to serve a department looking for huge amounts of data, but often those surveys only unlock two or three useful insights.

If no one completes them, you might not get any insight at all.

NPS is designed to be completed quickly and to identify — through the second question — what is driving the response.

It centres on a single question asking the respondent to rate their likelihood to recommend the company to a colleague, friend, or family member on a scale of zero to ten.

Right.

People receive these surveys all the time.

After giving the score, the follow-up question is simply: “Tell us why you chose that score.”

The principle is that the respondent will choose the single most important factor in their mind when giving that score.

When you collect that feedback across lots of responses, you start to get powerful data that helps you understand what’s driving exceptional experiences and what’s causing bad ones.

Is there a volume of data you need for it to be credible?

That’s a really good question.

In smaller businesses it can be difficult to get scale, but the statistical principle is similar to any research.

The more responses you have, the better.

But credibility is also important internally. If the dataset is very small, people may not trust the findings.

Statistically, I’d hope for at least fifty responses to start getting useful insights, although it depends on the scale of the business. In B2B businesses, hitting big numbers can be more difficult.

But what you then want to do is mine the comments and feedback to identify opportunities to amplify what’s going well and fix what isn’t.

The brilliant principle of NPS is that it produces a number — the Net Promoter Score — that you can track over time.

You can evaluate progress month-on-month or quarter-on-quarter. And if response volumes are small, you can extend the survey period.

So it’s very dependent on the business.

One of the reasons we looked at it was because there are doubts about how commercially correlated customer satisfaction is with revenue and growth.

There are lots of cases where someone might say they’re highly satisfied after an experience, but it doesn’t change their behaviour or likelihood to recommend.

A good industry example is hotels.

When people are travelling and staying somewhere new, they often look for social proof — reading online reviews to see what other people say.

That social proof can influence a purchase decision, but from the company’s perspective it doesn’t always link directly back to revenue.

With NPS, however, the founder Fred Reichheld worked with Bain & Company to develop the framework.

They found that companies with high NPS scores consistently outperform those with lower scores.

So there’s a commercial correlation.

The idea is to identify promoters — customers who rate their experience nine or ten.

So it’s not five and above.

The bar is very high.

Exactly.

These customers have had an amazing experience and are likely to recommend the brand to others.

They may go on to write reviews that influence future purchases.

The opposite group are detractors — customers who score between zero and six.

Zero to six?

Yes.

If someone has a bad experience, they’re more likely to talk about it.

For example, if you stayed in a terrible hotel and someone asks how your weekend was, you’ll probably complain about the experience.

That makes it very unlikely that the person you’re speaking to would choose that hotel.

The people in the middle — scoring seven or eight — are called passives.

They’re ambivalent.

They’re unlikely to complain, but they’re also unlikely to actively recommend the brand.

At Bupa, when you first introduced it, how were you using it within the business?

Initially we used it as a brand metric.

It measures a customer’s propensity to recommend — or advocacy for — the brand.

Advocacy is essentially a proxy for trust, which is a valuable brand metric.

So we were measuring that and comparing it with other brands.

There can be challenges comparing across markets or industries, but it does give you a benchmark.

However, when evaluating a typical customer experience, using NPS only at the very end can be limiting.

You might be asking the question months after the experience took place.

So recall may not be accurate.

Exactly.

What we wanted to do was drill deeper and break the experience into stages.

We called them episodes.

Each episode contributes to the overall experience.

If the first few episodes don’t go well, the customer may drop out of the process. Even if they complete it, they may not feel satisfied.

Some businesses find that when customers complete a purchase, there’s a moment of self-validation — almost a “wow” moment — where they reassure themselves they made the right decision.

Sometimes, within that first year of a relationship, a customer can walk away — and that’s obviously very expensive for a company. Ensuring that what happens afterward completely aligns with the first couple of episodes is really important.

Going a bit deeper, one of the experiences I was looking at had a sales episode where customers spoke to a sales agent about everything they were going to receive and benefit from. However, once that call ended, the customer care team delivered something slightly different. It didn’t match expectations, creating a bit of uncertainty that went undetected in the brand measure. But because we put in an NPS question after that onboarding call, we were able to understand how that episode went. Based on the feedback, we could make changes to improve year-one retention, which had a big impact on the bottom line for the business.

It’s fascinating. I’ve got a neighbor who’s going through the process of switching his car. He had a mid-range car and was upgrading to a luxury brand. He went to a dealership, had a really poor experience, and then he told me, “I’m so disappointed — I was expecting a real lift, and this is just terrible.” That’s exactly the case the brand probably had no idea of.

Exactly. But if you had NPS in place, you would catch that moment. I don’t know how that impacts an individual client, but at least the business would know.

Yeah. People really value what their friends, colleagues, or people they trust tell them about their experiences with brands.

Exactly. And they even trust reading online reviews — it’s something written by someone who’s had an experience they’re looking to benefit from themselves. It’s super powerful. And in many ways, it’s obvious.

Yes, but it’s often overlooked. The likelihood for someone to recommend a company is commercially extremely valuable because they’re effectively promoting and advertising your company in a way that’s based on trust rather than a paid advert.

How did you describe it? It’s a proxy for trust?

Yes. Advocacy is a proxy for trust.

In financial services — which is very much where growth engines focus — the sector has consistently been at the bottom of the Edelman Trust Barometer for as long as I can remember, which is probably fifteen years. Last year, it moved slightly off the bottom; we’re now second-bottom.

Clearly, trust is something the industry needs to get better at measuring and improving in customer relationships.

In your experience, you learned about it at Bupa. How have you applied that in other businesses — both financial services and outside the sector?

What’s great about NPS is that it’s a strategic tool. It counters the almost extreme short-term focus you sometimes see in smaller growth-focused businesses — this idea of “deliver today, not tomorrow.” In marketing, not everyone is ready when you want them to be, but they may be in the future. NPS helps you install the right framework for your brand.

When I left Bupa and worked at other companies, auditing the brand often revealed there was no way of measuring the customer experience. We didn’t know what people were saying after interacting with us. Therefore, we didn’t know if they were saying the right or wrong things. In businesses with long sales cycles, you might not know the impact for two or three years — when suddenly, people aren’t coming back because those you hadn’t asked the question about were talking negatively online.

Exactly. People can leave reviews on Google or Trustpilot, and often, the most motivated to post are the ones who’ve had a terrible experience.

Absolutely. Getting ahead of that by asking proactively can help. It also gives you an opportunity to humanize the experience and reward individual employees for delivering great service. Installing NPS at the brand level is where I would always start. It’s relatively simple and can be automated with any decent CRM, like HubSpot, which can email a survey and collate responses.

There are also off-the-shelf tools, like Delighted, which can plug into your CRM ecosystem to manage feedback. We used it at LendInvest, integrated with Slack, so every NPS response posted in a channel immediately. That immediacy was exciting and addictive.

Yes, it can become addictive if the responses are good.

Exactly. Every business I’ve worked for in the last ten years has wanted to bring the customer to the center. Amplifying their voice within the business is crucial, and NPS is a powerful way to do that. Often, the “C-word” — the customer — isn’t mentioned enough, creating distance between employees and the reality of customer experience.

I’m interested in how you talked about Bupa and the customer journey being broken into episodes. Businesses often focus heavily on acquisition but forget retention, which is critical for growth. When setting up NPS at the brand level, do you measure every stage from the outset?

You have to remember there’s a risk of survey wear-out if you ask at every stage. I typically advise companies to focus on the moments that matter most — the “moments of truth” in the experience. It differs based on the business and the customer lifecycle.

For example, a mortgage renewal automation is a great place to start. A fixed-rate mortgage might last two years, and ensuring that the renewal experience goes smoothly is key to improving retention. You must ensure foundations aren’t unwieldy for the customer. NPS relies on people being willing to respond authentically, even if it only takes a few minutes. You have to make them care enough to give useful feedback.

Let’s cut to the chase. What we really want is more nines and tens in the data — more promoters. How do you use NPS to secure that and encourage referrals?

First, I focus on detractors. You can’t turn a detractor into a promoter if you don’t understand the dissatisfaction driving that score. Fix those issues and shift them into the passive group. Then look at what drives scores overall and correlate that with other parts of the experience to find what will move the needle next.

At Crown, for example, we found that people moving home had uncertainty when the removal company first arrived — would they respect my home and possessions? A small micro-action, like asking to put covers on shoes or remove them, immediately communicated respect and built trust. Small actions can have a big impact when doubt is highest.

I love stories like that. It resonates. When I’ve moved, noticing a small thoughtful gesture immediately changes your mindset for the rest of the day.

Exactly. There’s a discipline behind NPS called NPS economics, which explains the correlation to growth and revenue. Customers are more forgiving, less likely to complain, and more likely to recommend. In financial services, this drives repeat purchases and enhances lifetime value. Delivering a great experience in one area opens the door for other opportunities.

A simple example: in branch-based businesses, queueing is a common pain point. Fixing it entirely can be costly, but managing expectations — telling people the expected wait time — alleviates frustration even if the issue isn’t fully solved. It’s about balancing customer experience and commercial viability.

Exactly. It’s like when Uber shows your car approaching in real-time. You’re more likely to stick with it because you see progress. Rory Sutherland talks about this in behavioral economics — managing expectations in real time.

MPS can also fuel ideas. It shows teams where improvements are needed and what’s creating delight, so marketing can incorporate those insights into propositions and campaigns. For example, we learned that people perceived applying for a mortgage as more difficult than earning a university degree. Communicating that the process isn’t as bad provided strong marketing material.

You once told me a story about United Airlines and a musician?

Yes. Dave Carroll was traveling with his guitar, which arrived broken after a flight. United Airlines didn’t respond appropriately, so he composed a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” which went viral on YouTube with over twenty million views. The PR impact was huge, and in the post-event review, United’s stock price fell by almost $200 million.

Oh my god.

So suddenly, what looks like a single instance of an experience breakdown can turn into a major stock market event for a company.

Exactly. That’s why I talk about focusing on detractors. When someone has a truly terrible experience, it feels very personal. It’s a grievance, and I’m sure every business has encountered instances like this. Especially with social media these days — people often skip the formal complaint and go straight to sharing it publicly. It can spiral out of control, which can have a multimillion-dollar impact on a company’s value. That certainly got people caring about NPS when I’ve been in-store.

Do you use that United Airlines story when you go into a company to illustrate this?

Yes, absolutely. I’ve even used the video because it’s fun and brings the point to life. There are numerous write-ups online about the impact. What it demonstrates is that no company is going to get it right every time.

Exactly. And often, it’s how companies react and respond in those moments that is the “secret sauce.”

Presumably, it could have gone the other way. If Dave Carroll had just thought, “They broke my guitar but treated it well, I’ll write a song,” it probably wouldn’t have had the same impact. But when something genuinely goes wrong, how a firm responds can turn a passive customer into a promoter.

Yes. We call those “wow moments.” How can you turn an unsatisfactory experience into a wow moment for the customer? And it has to be authentic — not just because you hope they’ll talk about it, but because it’s genuinely the right thing to do.

Best practice for a detractor is to respond within 48 hours if they score you between zero and six. You can either try to make things better or at least acknowledge that you didn’t meet their expectations. Often, that acknowledgment itself becomes a wow moment because people aren’t expecting it.

Exactly. It shows, “I filled out the survey, and they actually responded!”

And as someone in the industry, it’s frustrating when you spend time on a survey and never hear back. That’s an immediate opportunity to act when things don’t go well.

So that’s why you route scores through Slack — so you can respond quickly?

Absolutely.

Do you do that in all organizations, regardless of size? For example, Bupa versus a startup?

It depends on the culture and the architecture in place. But anything that elevates customer feedback is critical. The customer is the most important person in the company because they can take their business elsewhere. Everyone should be at most one step away from the customer experience.

Jeremy, you’ve recently been working with high-net-worth individuals. Many listeners in wealth and asset management will be interested. How does customer experience and NPS work in that context?

It’s a similar approach, but expectations are often higher. High-net-worth clients may expect a more personalized experience — a dedicated account manager or even access to the CEO. It’s about prescribing what you promise and then evaluating whether the experience delivers.

White-glove experiences for clients with net wealth of $1–5 million — and even more so for ultra-high-net-worth clients — require precise understanding of their expectations. MPS helps evaluate whether you’re meeting those expectations.

Another learning is that if NPS surveys appear randomly at the end, response rates drop. It’s better to build trust: “At the end, you’ll have a chance to give feedback so we can improve.” This is especially important for time-poor high-net-worth clients.

You also mentioned a relationship between customer experience and employee advocacy.

Yes. NPS can also evaluate the employee experience — called eNPS. Employees are asked whether they’d recommend the company as a workplace. Someone who genuinely believes in the brand delivers a more authentic experience to customers. Conversely, disengaged employees can unintentionally affect customer experience.

You can also ask about recommending products or services. NPS evolves from a score into a net promoter system — a systematic approach to issuing surveys, gathering feedback, and using it for continuous improvement. The goal is to embed this feedback loop into company culture: listen, learn, act.

It’s about improving the system, not chasing a perfect experience. You never truly find perfection, but everyone in the company should have a duty of care to act on the feedback.

This aligns with the philosophy of The Growth Engine: marketing supporting business growth. Seeing NPS as a system, not just a score, allows companies to unlock opportunities, test improvements, and create growth.

For example, in logistics, we created a “Net Simple Score” to measure how simple an experience was on a 0–10 scale. This metric correlated strongly with NPS and helped us pinpoint small improvements that had a big impact.

To summarize, if a company wants to implement NPS or the net promoter system, where should they start?

Start small. Research what NPS is, understand how it works, and apply it to a known problem in the business — a point where customers drop out or walk away. Begin by asking simple questions and collecting feedback. It can be done cheaply using CRMs, apps, or survey tools like SurveyMonkey.

Always start with a team to manage the process and ensure there’s intent to act on the feedback. Listen, learn, act. If a customer hasn’t had a great experience, ensure there’s a resource and desire to reach out. Start small, make adjustments, and build internal awareness. Case studies from big companies, like Apple, show it works.

And finally, any recommended resources for learning more?

The original Net Promoter book by Fred Reichheld is excellent. It explains the discipline, commercial correlation, and case studies. Bain & Company’s website also has extensive resources on NPS. Most CRM and survey tools include NPS capabilities. Next time you see a survey asking for a 0–10 rating, you’ll know why it matters.

Exactly. And that’s why it’s important to fill them out — feedback drives change.

Yes, and I’d be disappointed if I rated below a six and didn’t get a call within 48 hours!

Jeremy, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a fascinating discussion, and I’ve learned a lot.

Thank you, David. I’ve really enjoyed it.

To our listeners: thank you for tuning in to The Growth Engine. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on LinkedIn or at hubagency.co.uk. See you next time.