For those of you that follow Net Promoter, you are probably aware of the debate created and fueled by hard core market researchers that question it’s merits.  When I first joined Satmetrix this debate was loud in the blogs and over the past 18 months I’ve seen the tide change to many more Promoters of Net Promoter then Detractors. 

In a series of interviews with several executives from one of our clients they all stated one of the key benefits of Net Promoter was having a common metric across functional departments.  Prior to Net Promoter, marketing had it’s measures, support had theirs, and product had yet another.  While many of these metrics still exist to manage their area of the business, they found tremendous value in having a common metric they could align around and measure their total success with customers. 

The VP of Products shared with me the story of their intial adoption of NPS and how his engineers brought to him all the reasons why this was a statistically inaccurate measure.  He didn’t care.  He explained that this was a measure of their success and they had to get on the bus.  He saw it as an objective measure of the strength of their brand in the market and the success of their product in exceeding customer expectations.  His commitment paid off.  They have doubled NPS over a 3 year period and significantly changed from negative product reviews to 95% positive. 

NPS is not about statistics, it’s about organizational focus on customers.  It’s a measure of the quality of your customer experience and the opportunity to grow through increased retention and positive word of mouth.  DUH!

We’ve been working with Tom Fishburne

on a series of cartoons that poke fun at this debate.  Here’s one of my favorites.  More to come in the following weeks.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 7:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.