Rob Markey (born 1964) is an American author, speaker, and business

strategist A strategist is a person with responsibility for the formulation and implementation of a strategy. Strategy generally involves setting goals, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions. A strategy ...

. Often referred to as the

Vince Lombardi Vincent Thomas Lombardi ( ; June 11, 1913 – September 3, 1970) was an American professional football coach and executive in the National Football League (NFL). Lombardi is considered by many to be among the greatest coaches and leaders in Ame ...

Customer Loyalty In marketing and consumer behaviour, brand loyalty describes a consumer's persistent positive feelings towards a familiar brand and their dedication to purchasing the brand's products and/or services repeatedly regardless of deficiencies, a co ...

, he is perhaps best known for his research and writing on

customer experience Customer experience, sometimes abbreviated to CX, is the totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral responses of a customer during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase st ...

and

loyalty marketing Loyalty marketing is a marketing strategy in which a company focuses on growing and retaining existing customers through incentives. Branding, product marketing, and loyalty marketing all form part of the customer proposition – the subjecti ...

. Markey is also the co-creator of the Net Promoter System of management (NPS), along with fellow

Bain & Company Bain & Company is an American management consulting company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm provides advice to public, private, and nonprofit organizations. One of the Big Three (management consultancies), Big Three management co ...

consultant

Fred Reichheld Frederick F. Reichheld (born 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American ''New York Times'' best-selling author, speaker and business strategist. He is best known for his research and writing on the loyalty business model and loyalty marketing. He i ...

Early life

Markey was born and grew up in

Cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...

, Ohio. He graduated with a B.A. from

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

(1986) where he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Critical Review. Markey received his MBA from

Harvard Business School Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate school, graduate business school of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university. Located in Allston, Massachusetts, HBS owns Harvard Business Publishing, which p ...

(1990). Markey was named a Strnad Fellow at his alma mater,

University School University School, commonly referred to as US, is an all-boys, private, Junior Kindergarten–12 school with two campus locations in the Greater Cleveland area of Ohio. The campus located in Shaker Heights serves junior kindergarten through ...

in 198

Writing

His published articles have appeared in business publications, including two magazine articles and 19 digital articles for the ''

Harvard Business Review ''Harvard Business Review'' (''HBR'') is a general management magazine published by Harvard Business Publishing, a not-for-profit, independent corporation that is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. ''HBR'' is published six times a year ...

''. He speaks on loyalty and other business topics at management conferences and similar events. His work on loyalty and customer experience has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Fortune, Business Week and The Economist. His most recent article, "Are You Undervaluing Your Customers?" argues for measuring and managing the value of a company's customer base, and for creating accounting standards for reporting customer metrics. His most recent book, ''The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World'', was a New York Times Bestseller and co-authored by long-time collaborator,

of Bain & Company. The book focuses on

Net Promoter Score Net promoter score (NPS) is a market research metric that is based on a single survey question asking respondents to rate the likelihood that they would recommend a company, product, or a service to a friend or colleague. The NPS was developed by ...

(NPS), a concept Reichheld developed based on his research in measuring

customer satisfaction Customer satisfaction is a term frequently used in marketing to evaluate customer experience. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number ...

customer retention Customer retention refers to the ability of a company or product to retain its customers over some specified period. High customer retention means customers of the product or business tend to return to, continue to buy or in some other way not defe ...

and its link to revenue growth and

profitability In economics, profit is the difference between revenue that an economic entity has received from its outputs and total costs of its inputs, also known as surplus value. It is equal to total revenue minus total cost, including both Explicit co ...

. This metric serves as an indicator of the loyalty and advocacy customers show for a company. In this book, Markey and Reichheld elaborate what they term the "Net Promoter System" which builds on the metric and incorporates business processes used by the companies they write about to improve customer experience for their customers.

Professional

Markey is a partner in the management consultancy

, where he has worked since 1990. He founded the firm's customer strategy and marketing practice, and led it from 2000 through 2018. Markey is also a professor at

, where he teaches an MBA course in managing service operations. He is the host of the Customer Confidential Podcast. He serves on the board of directors for AI-based customer support technology company Forethought.

References

American business theorists Writers from Cleveland 1964 births Brown University alumni Harvard Business School alumni Living people University School alumni {{US-business-bio-1960s-stub