Score!

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." -- Albert Einstein

We have all heard of NPS, the Net Promoter Score. It is supposed to be the holly grail of loyalty, and a great alternative to your regular old tired Satisfaction Score. Maybe.

I guess it is time to share my experience and call it as I have seen it.

Numero uno - the absolute NPS score. I worked in a couple of consumer industries in marketing analytics, retail and telecommunications. If you pulled any research done... ever, you will see that retail, generally, has high satisfaction scores, and telecom - not so much. In fact, retail often gets over 60% in top two (on 10-point) or top box (on 5-point scale) . Now, if you ever look at cross shopping patterns in retail, you will see how fickle the customers are. I worked for a retail company where around 90% of its best customers cross-shopped with competitors. Yet, it had an NPS of well over 50%. I have worked for a telecom company that had an NPS way down at the bottom of the scale. I should admit that it has not always treated customers perfectly, however, customers were surprisingly loyal to their services. So, yes, it's all relative.

Numero dos - NPS and other scores. As a part of my former job I was in charge of the company's satisfaction survey. I hated the things I had to do to maintain it, but I loved the results, especially the given sample size that was well into the hundreds of thousands. Obviously, at some point it came to the NPS measurement, and as a sucker for general understanding of the nature of things, I did test that NPS against the overall satisfaction (top box on 5-point scale). Does not matter how you cut it, by weeks, by months, by stores, by regions... the NPS was 97% correlated to the Top Box. I do not know how much of the groundbreaking insight was packed in the remaining 3% of the information (OK, it's more like 6% in terms of variable variation), but I highly doubt it is going to change my view of what's going on with the customers.

So, my conclusion, basically, is that NPS is the same as good ole Satisfaction Score, freshly repackaged, and obviously, more expensive.

P.S. Next time let's talk about "drivers" of satisfaction.