The second is we saw some really soft spots and poor performance in terms of our customer service, both in terms of the upfront sales process, but more importantly, the support and the follow-through. The Change Program has invested heavily against that, and we’re starting to see the results in improved NPS, but it’s early days. And the third is, as you say, cross-selling. It’s not something we do particularly well across the board as a company, or not consistently so across our different segments. And this is where the shift to an operating company is really important, because it ensures that we take best practices and spread them across the entire company. We have an effort that started in Corporates around next-generation customer success that is focused squarely at improving our cross-selling.
We’ll extend that to our other franchises this year and next. And what I would say, though, is that we’re still in the early days in terms of seeing the benefits of that.
Operator: Our next question comes from from CIBC.
Scott Fletcher: This is actually Scott Fletcher. I wanted to ask a question on M&A valuations. I’m just wondering if we should look to SurePrep at — the price you paid for SurePrep, is it a benchmark for what you might be willing to pay for future deals? I mean, obviously, there’s more to the price — the valuation that you pay when it comes to price. But just looking to get a sense of what the amount of acquired revenue might be, given the capital plans you laid out.
Stephen Hasker: Yes, Scott, that’s a good question. I wish I could sort of predict. I mean, we’re in the marketplace in pretty active discussions on a bunch of different targets, as you’d expect us to be. We are — and Mike and his team are particularly rigorous in terms of the financial hurdles we set. But we’re equally, I hope, thoughtful as it pertains to making sure that the proposition that we might acquire is beneficial to our customers. And our segment presidents, and Brian Peccarelli play a very important role in informing that. We want to make sure that the sort of products and technologies there are pristine. We’re not interested in acquiring tech debt, having to fix things. And that’s where David Wong, John Malhotra and Jason Escaravage, Kirsty Roth really weigh in.
So — and then last but not least, culture. We’re always looking to improve ourselves and our culture. And so we’re certainly not oblivious to the idea of benefiting, having the entire TR benefit from injection of new talent coming through an acquisition, but Mary-Alice Vuicic keeps us all honest in terms of making sure we can put businesses together in thoughtful ways. And so those are the criteria. Valuations, they have definitely come down. I’m hopeful that they will stay at reasonable levels through this year and next as we deploy the — a portion of the $11 billion in capital on M&A. But in a sense, I think the sort of the playbook that I described in my remarks of taking existing products and using our distribution does afford us the ability to pay a full price and still extract very significant value for our shareholders.
And that’s really where we’re focused rather than sort of trying to find the best and cheapest deal and have to do a turnaround of an acquisition target.
Operator: The following question comes from Andrew Steinerman from JPMorgan.
