NPS has pros and cons - is it right for you?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has transformed the world of customer satisfaction measurement and for good reason it is widely adopted.

Nonetheless NPS has its frustrations and people are asking where to from here?

• PRO: everybody knows about NPS
  It's well established and it’s on the radar of the C-level. To have the customer voice so recognised is one of the great achievements of NPS.
• CON: there’s more to the world than willingness to recommend
  There’s no denying the power of word of mouth as a driver of growth in many businesses, but users are too rigid in their use of the willingness to recommend question. There’s overwhelming evidence that it’s not the universal factor that people think it is. Why not give up willingness to recommend and measure what is strategically important to your company - is it your experience, your responsiveness, your reliability?
• PRO: very few questions is good
  NPS pioneered the idea that very few questions are required and you don’t see nearly so many batteries of questions these days.
• CON: everyone’s doing annoying post-encounter questioning pulsing
  It's hard to interact with any company today without being asked how it went and that’s getting positively annoying.  There’s also a big assumption underlying encounter measurement - that improving encounters improves business. We know for sure that poor encounters often don’t have a big impact on ongoing relationships.  Next level NPS needs to focus more on the critical incidents and all companies should be following relationships as well as encounters - be they brand relationships, or business relationships.
• PRO: KPI-ing NPS gets employees interested, however this is a double edged sword 
  The trouble is, it can encourage unexpected behaviours that defeat the purpose of the programme in the first place - to do a better job for customers.
• CON: NPS scores can go up and down for know apparent reason.
  It’s hard to know what’s changing and why - and it's a common complaint from companies using NPS that their net promoter score goes up and down for no apparent reason. The single shot pulsing approach of NPS gets in the way of providing proper explanation. That’s not going to change unless you go to the next step, which is to complement your NPS programme by following relationships over time. Then you can see how scores change from one time to another and see the reasons the customer gives.
  
  

MirrorWave takes your NPS to the next level.  Keen to find out more?

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