NPS™:New measure, same problems.

I know that it is almost considered blasphemy to say anything contrary to the simple teachings of Fredrick Reichheld when it comes to NPS™. The pace at which this latest offering from Fred Reichheld has been adopted by corporate america and beyond is staggering. Corporations are getting on board across the globe and customer satisfaction measures are becoming very "yesterday" when it comes to the army of customer experience managers, directors and VP's that have been hired over the past couple of years. For those of you living under a corporate rock for the past couple of years I should explain that NPS™ is a percentage derived by asking customers to answer, " would you refer the company to a friend/family?" on an 0-10 scale, the NPS™ score is derived by subtracting the % promotors(9 &10's) from the % detractors (0-6's).

Now don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against NPS™, as long as you remember it is only a measure and that's all. My problem is when companies get so focused on the measure or the percentage and forget about the customers and the experiences that make up the this new measure that has got the exec's all excited. The problem I see is that just because NPS™ is a simple measure doesn't make it any easier to improve your customer experience. It is just as hard to improve Customer experience in today's world of NPS™ measures as it was when you were measuring customer sat. last year. Companies need to get focused on improvement rather than just measurement. Improvement can only be achieved when your chosen measure, NPS™, C Sat or advocacy mean something to every employee, every day. that is when things don't seem as simple as some of the NPS™ practitioners would have you believe.

The following is a piece I wrote last year talking to this issue. Hope it gets you thinking.
Beyond NPS™ to Advocacy Improvement

ps. To keep the lawyers from sending me more nasty letters I must inform you that NPS™ is a registered trademark of Bain & Company, Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Comments

[Bruce Temkin]

I couldn't agree more. I work with a lot of companies that use NPS. The successful ones use it in conjunction with several other measurements. There's nothing magical about NPS, what's more important is how you use it. I often say that firms need to "LIRM," which stands for Listen, Interpret, Respond, and Monitor. NPS, on its own, only coveres a piece of the "L" part of the equation.