We Know Our Net Promoter Score: Now What?

In 25 years of working with leaders and business to focus on customers... what I've often noticed is that the score is the end game. First it was garnering a great "satisfaction" score, then one for "loyalty," followed by "experience," and now Net Promoter.

The name of the game should be giving customers a memory and experience so great... that they'll want to repeat it. Yet, corporations in their quest to drive customer focus have attempted to improve customer experiences by attaching things people want to the attainment of a good score. It's the score that's tied to people's compensation and it's the score that determines if people get that bonus to pay for braces or that trip to Disneyland or college tuition. Pavlov himself couldn't have set up a better behavior modification system.

The sad news is that the behavior modified is how to get the customer to give a better score, not taking the data to heart to change the company.

Net Promoter can break through and drive the change... But ONLY if you break the cycle of what is classically done with the information you receive.

Any time business asks a customer how they're doing it should be for the purpose of doing something with that information. But that's just not happening today. Heck, companies are so exhausted and numbed from customer survey collection that just getting the report out is considered a great feat.

And that's where it lands—in a brick—that big 4-inch report of survey data lands at the feet of the people who are supposed to read the data, analyze it and understand how it relates to them, weep about it a bit and then go fix things for customers. But beyond the rigor of running surveys, there is not much rigor around doing anything with what's learned.

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