In reviewing today’s google alerts I saw 3 organizations report their Net Promoter score in public view.  I thought it would be helpful to highlight a few key issues when evaluating your Net Promoter score.  All Net Promoter scores are not created equal.  You may be kidding yourself if your NPS is 93% if you measuring without trustworthy data.

1. What is your sample?  Do you have a strong response rate?  > 30% in B2C and > 50% in B2B would be considered reasonable.  More importantly does the segment represent your most important customers?  In B2B this means that you need to have feedback from Decision Makers, End Users and Influencers.  In B2C this means a sample that reflects your segmentation and revenue distribution.

2. When are you collecting the score?  Is it after a transaction? Or are you asking about the end to end customer experience?  Transactional scores are likely to be a leading indicator of relationship scores.  However, you don’t always measure NPS in transactions, it depends on whether the transaction is a “moment of truth” and whether it represents the key customer segments.

3.  Data collection technique will yield different results.  You are more likely to get a biased response in a phone interview than a web based survey as people are generally more likely to be honest when not faced with a human interviewer.

In our most recent 2008 Net Promoter benchmarks the highest NPS was 84% for USAA and 77% for Apple.  So when I see NPS above 90% I’m suspicious of the methodology for collection and calculation.  You can believe what you want about your score but be sure you are not fooling yourself.

In any case, the important of NPS is not your absolute score, it’s a continuous improvement process to move the needle.  Don’t get hung up on these public displays of NPS as you consider your own, focus on finding ways you can continue to improve the customer experience and create more Promoters.  Then be sure to mobilize those Promoters to help you acquire new customers through word of mouth.  That’s when the game is truly won.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 14th, 2009 at 7:21 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.