The Grave Delusion Brands Are Operating Under
If you’re like me you may have heard of the Net Promoter Score, or NPS, and you may know that it has something to do with a single question. Something to do with a customer’s likelihood to recommend a company to someone else.
Thousands of companies and brands from around the world use this single question to track their customer satisfaction levels which in turn helps them guide decisions.
The idea that one question is that powerful is extremely alluring. To be able to put a simple question on a website and in a short amount of time have a metric which you can track over time and compare to others in your industry! Why wouldn’t you do that?
The Error of the Eager
A recent study was conducted by a usability testing SaaS company, Loop11, who looked at businesses who had recently conducted an NPS study. What they found was pretty interesting. It turns out that close to half the companies doing the NPS test were straying from the question template. Most of them probably did this unwittingly or at least figured the changes they were making were no big deal.
What the study showed was that these little changes were actually a HUGE deal! So much so that some of the companies who strayed the furthest from the NPS template were getting results which more than likely in no way represented their clients’ actual levels of satisfaction.