Telstra started paying its resellers partly based on Net Promoter Score — a smart-looking lever, until you remember what happens to scores once incentives are attached. Front-line staff and reseller managers actively manipulate them, more than most companies expect. Here's what the anti-gaming strategy needs to look like, with worked examples of how gaming actually plays out.
Bain's Rob Markey turned up on a BBC radio show about the NHS Friends and Family Test and dropped five short observations that apply to almost any customer feedback program. Clarity over complexity. Accuracy as a false god. Here's the five, with the context that makes each one useful in your own program.
American Airlines was getting three times more on-hold Twitter complaints than its nearest competitor, even after adjusting for passenger miles. Could public crowd data predict NPS without running a survey? The numbers say yes, and that has interesting implications for benchmarking, brand monitoring, and how loudly hold times leak into customer loyalty.
I've spent years telling people to ignore external NPS benchmarks. So when Bain's Rob Markey, the guy who literally wrote the book, pushed back, I expected an argument. We ended up in violent agreement. Here's the narrow set of cases where benchmarks actually do help.
Transactional NPS is just two questions, but the way you collect the responses changes the response rate by 5x. Outbound phone, inbound IVR, email, web; each has its case and its trap. Here's the comparison across the main collection channels, and the criteria (timely, frequent, low-touch) that pick the winner for your touchpoint.
Every couple of years someone proposes a new metric that's about to make NPS obsolete. Net Revenue Score, pitched in the Wall Street Journal, was the latest. It misunderstands what NPS actually measures, and the response is worth reading even if you don't care about the metric.
