![]() Reichheld spent two years testing questions for his simple metric. Customers hated them, and managers needed an 80-slide deck to explain them to colleagues. The customer surveys of the day were massive, sometimes 100 questions long. “So leaders needed a simple metric to find out, ‘Are we winning or losing with our customers?’ ”Ī simple metric was unorthodox at the time, even blasphemous. “I realized it was a leadership thing and then realized that these things take a long time to play out,” he recalls. ![]() In 1996 he wrote The Loyalty Effect, a business bestseller that’s still in print, and kept working with clients who wanted their customers to be more loyal. He found that “companies that focus on earning the loyalty of customers are taking over the world.” They make higher profits, pay employees more, keep employees longer, reward investors better-a virtuous circle. For years Reichheld had been “focused on loyalty and treating people right,” he says. The metric was introduced to the world in a 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review by Fred Reichheld, a Bain consultant. To understand what makes NPS so compelling, it’s necessary to know where it came from. And the wisdom on how to use it best is not always what one might expect. The results a company gets from NPS depend on how well it’s used. Others are misusing it and getting nothing or, worse, are deluding themselves and potentially their investors. Some organizations are using NPS skillfully and achieving significant competitive advantage. The simpler the tool, the more skill it requires given a chisel, you can carve David or you can ruin a block of marble. Talk to experienced users in a wide range of industries, and one message comes through loudly: NPS is a tool, very simple and very powerful. While the questions may be simple, the art of getting value from them is not. The results are so straightforward that they’re often expressed as emoticons-from green smiley faces to red angry faces.Īsking customers for a quick piece of feedback is just the beginning, of course. ![]() Some companies add another question or two, and some alter the language slightly, but those two short questions are the essence of the system that inspires so much rampant enthusiasm. That’s because you have received an email or a phone call asking the one simple question at the foundation of the NPS empire: “On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend to a friend or colleague?” You were probably asked a second question also: “Why did you give the answer you gave?”Īnd that, believe it or not, is pretty much it. If you are somehow unfamiliar with the Net Promoter Score, you have nonetheless been touched by it-guaranteed. As organizations everywhere obsess over the customer experience, NPS’s advance across industries and countries is, if anything, accelerating. It’s pored over in all types of organizations, not just businesses in Britain, the National Health Service uses it. ![]() It is now used in every developed economy and many emerging ones. Skeptics and enemies have largely been vanquished. Quietly, steadily, without anyone much noticing, NPS has moved into the C-suites of most big companies and the owners’ offices of thousands of small ones-extending its reach deeply and broadly through the global economy. At least two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 use the Net Promoter Score, including most or all of the financial service companies, airlines, telecom companies, retailers, and others. All this devotion for a particular measure of customer sentiment? It may seem bizarre, but the phenomenon is real and growing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |