CX

March 2, 2020

The main customer experience measurement and improvement systems – Part 4 – The Net Promoter System®

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog / CX, Net Promoter System, NPS /

Fred Reichheld wrote his landmark article The One Number You Need to Grow and published it in the Harvard Business Review in December 2003. He had spent two years investigating customer loyalty research. What he found was surprising and counterintuitive, at least at the time. Answers to a single question predicted customer loyalty and therefore revenue trends in most industries. A further finding was that “Our research indicates that satisfaction lacks a consistently demonstrable connection to actual customer behavior and growth.” He pointed out that the American Consumer Satisfaction Index for Kmart, for example, continued to improve as it slid into bankruptcy.

Fred and his team studied 4,000 customers across 14 industries, using the 20 questions on the Loyalty Acid Test questionnaire he had designed with his Bain colleagues. The study was about the actual behavior of people; whether they actually bought more and whether they actually recommended a product or service to someone they knew. In 11 of the 14 industries, a single question had the greatest statistical correlation: “How likely are you to recommend X to a colleague or friend?” In two of the remaining three industries, the recommendation question was just behind the top question. This surprised Fred, who had expected asking customers to what extent they agreed that “This company has earned my loyalty” to be the top-performing question.

Rating scale and behaviors

Even in the HBR paper mentioned earlier, Fred was able to do at least two further things. The first was to design a rating scale that was unambiguous. The second was to observe and categorize the behaviors of people who gave different ratings on his zero-to-ten scale. He found that people who give a 9 or 10 tended to buy more and to actively promote the product, service or brand. Those who gave a 7 or 8 were “passively satisfied” and tended not to say much. The remainder tended to speak and behave negatively, and he called this group Detractors. The Net Promoter Score became the percentage of Promoters, less the percentage of Detractors. Fred initially expressed this ‘Net Promoter Score’ as a percentage, and later dropped the percentage sign.

Partnership with Satmetrix

Fred worked with Satmetrix who began tracking 10 to 15 thousand recommendation responses from about 400 different companies in early 2001. In the airline industry, for example, the Net Promoter Score correlated directly and unambiguously with growth from 2000 to 2002. There were industries without such a correlation, mainly effective monopolies, such as cable television companies.

Evolution to a system

The HBR article evolved into the Net Promoter System, a Service Mark owned by Fred Reichheld, Bain and Satmetrix. Nice-Satmetrix also provides software and training courses that lead to certification as an NPS professional. The current version of the training course is called the Net Promoter Masterclass, and it is the only authorized NPS training course. The entire Net Promoter System was initially described in The Ultimate Question, now in version 2.0 and co-authored by Fred and Rob Markey, also of Bain. There have been a number of evolutions since the latest book was published and these have been described in some episodes of the excellent Net Promoter System Podcast. You can find the podcasts and many other resources at www.netpromtersystem.com. The diagram at the top of this article illustrates the overall system.

Current state of the Net Promoter System

Reichheld and Markey have made extensive updates to the system that have not yet been documented in a book. The first and most important addition is a second open text question. The result is a standard survey format for most purposes that looks like the illustration below.

Episode / Transaction feedback

For surveys about an interaction that has just taken place, Reichheld and Markey have added an additional rating question, “To what extent has your latest interaction changed your willingness to recommend?” just after the first recommendation question. This is measured using a text-based five-point scale, ‘Increased a lot’, ‘Increased a little’, ‘Not change’, ‘Decreased a little’, ‘Decreased a lot’. Rob Markey refers to this as “The Bain four-question progression for episode feedback.”

The concept of an ‘episode’ is an important one. Customers interact with companies to get certain things done, for example to get make a claim on their property insurance after a flood. For the customer, that is an ‘episode’ in the overall ‘TV series’ of their relationship with the insurance company. The insurance company breaks a claim process down into a number of transactions, such as a call to a service center. In this example, Bain recommends getting customer feedback only about the overall insurance claim process, and not about any individual component, such as the call to the service center.

Main features

Other than the metric, the main features of the system as described in the book and in practice are:

It is by far the most common customer experience measurement and improvement system. About two-thirds of medium to large companies use it, at least as a measurement and reporting system. Implementing all elements of the full system takes a lot of time and effort, and few companies have a complete implementation.
When implemented properly, there are only a few questions, so response rates are higher than in other systems with more questions.
The Inner and Outer Loops for improving things for your customers and internally are described well and are easy to follow.
There are a number of sources of double-blind competitive benchmarks, making it reasonably easy to understand how you compare to others in your industry.
Because it is easy to communicate, it is relatively easy to implement the basic measurement and reporting systems.
If you need automation, there are loads of vendors who can help.
The credibility of the system depends on your ability to establish the relationship between metric trends and market share trends. This is difficult to do, particularly if you have no measurement history. People have to trust you until there is enough data. That can take a couple of years, and you could lose sponsorship by then. Of course this would be the same with any other measurement system that claims to predict revenue.
The main challenge is the analysis of the verbatim responses. Text analysis software should be used for initial screening and categorization to avoid human bias.
Finally, because the system is simple, it is also quite easy to manipulate.

Personal opinions

I have worked extensively on the implementation of the Net Promoter System at HP and have provided coaching to others since then. If I had to pick a single thing as its most positive aspect, I would pick communication. It is far easier to communicate how the scoring and system works than with any other system I know. My second observation is that who you ask matters. If you do not ask the correct people, the results will not predict your revenue correctly. Like all customer measurement and improvement systems, it takes a lot more than scorecard production to drive growth and improved financial results. More on how I see the evolution of NPS soon.

Conclusion

Lots has been written about the Net Promoter System and tens of thousands of companies have implemented at least the score. When I say lots of people have written about it, I have to include the book I wrote and which my brother illustrated: Net Promoter – Implement the System. As always, your views are welcome below.

Next time in part 5 of the sub-series: The Wallet Allocation Rule.

November 27, 2019

CX Strategy (4) – The dangers of ‘What you see is all there is’

Maurice FitzGerald / Behavioral economics, Blog, Customer experience, Customer Satisfaction, Strategy / B2B, Customer Experience, CX, strategy /

Welcome to the fourth article in my series on how to develop and implement a customer experience strategy. You can find the previous articles in the series here.

Before going into each step of the strategy development process, here is a special word about the data you use as a basis for your decisions. You must not assume that everything you have is everything you need to have

The danger of WYSIATI

Nobel-winner Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of What you see is all there is (WYSIATI) in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The concept is that we tend to make our decisions based on woefully incomplete evidence, believing that what we currently know is all there is to know. To use a Food Babe-type example (www.foodbabe.com), “The number of cancer diagnoses has multiplied by 20 in the last hundred years. Our diet has changed totally in that time. To cure cancer, we just need to change our diet back to what it used to be.” Just so you don’t think I am picking on Food Babe (I am really), the following is equally illogical, “Life expectancy has increased by more than 20 years over the last hundred years. Our diet has changed totally in that time. Our diet is entirely responsible for the increase in longevity.”

In the world of customer experience, the symptoms are easy to recognize, once you understand the concept. A senior executive who has never met a customer finally speaks to one. He / she returns to the office and behaves as though that one customer is representative of all customers. “The customer kept going on about the color of the timer buttons on our new microwave oven. It is really a serious problem. Send two people over to the customer right away to understand the issue better. This is our top priority. Cancel whatever your people are working on until this is resolved.”

Another common WYSIATI statement you will come across is “Everyone knows that employee happiness is the most important factor in customer happiness.” In a later article, you will see that employee happiness does not have much impact on customer satisfaction in most businesses.

I receive a lot of emails that include advice on various customer experience topics. I remember one from Boomerang that provided 7 tips for getting more responses to your emails (with data) . While the tips are good, it would be a mistake to believe that these are the only seven things that matter. The study was limited in scope and did not cover things like personalization of the emails and the subject lines, for example.

Updating the elephant metaphor

You may have seen another way of representing WYSIATI. It uses the metaphor of a group of blindfolded people who try to identify what they are looking at by touching just one part of an elephant. The metaphor is helpful, but does not go as far as WYSIATI in terms of explaining the consequences of such limited beliefs. The drawing at the top of this article uses more modern Virtual Reality technology and may help you to visualize how dramatic the effect can be. If you believe that what you see is all there is, you are not living in the real world, even when the zombie apocalypse is actually happening.

Next time

The next article will be a lengthy one on a critical strategy development topic: Understanding your current situation.

As is often the case, the above is an edited version of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Customer Experience Strategy – Design and Implementation.All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide, and from your better book retailers.

November 11, 2019

CX Strategy (3) – You need a strategy

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer experience, Customer Satisfaction, Strategy / B2B, Customer Experience, CX, strategy /

Welcome to the third article in my series on how to develop and implement a customer experience strategy. You can find the previous articles in the series here.

Why bother with strategy?

The reason you need a strategy is simple: you do not have unlimited resources and never will. The word comes from the Greek strategos and means ‘generalship’. Its origin is in how to deploy your scarce troops, equipment and diplomatic resources to win battles and wars. It is all about defeating the enemy. No general ever won a battle by saying, “I don’t care where the enemy is, or what they are doing. I am going to line up my army three deep all across this open battlefield. I don’t care what weapons my army has nor how they compare to those of the enemy. I don’t care about the weather today or tomorrow. I don’t care what my allies are doing. I have given my troops their top 20 priorities. We will just walk slowly forwards and I am sure we will win.” Sounds ridiculous? It should. Unfortunately, this is what most companies’ customer experience strategies look like.

Your enemies are outside your company

In business, your enemies are your competitors. The purpose of any customer experience strategy should be to do things differently or better than your competitors so you can win. The strategy should be articulated in terms of three to five priorities or initiatives that are easy to remember and make the biggest difference. The number of priorities is important. George A. Miller of Harvard published The Magic Number is 7, plus or minus 2 way back in 1955, suggesting that most people find it reasonably easy to remember about seven things. I find that teams in modern businesses cannot spontaneously remember more than five priorities. Think about this in terms of being able to list your priorities on the fingers of one hand.

Quick start

If you are just starting and don’t have a strategy, here is how to go about generating one quickly. What follows is adapted from Willie Pietersen’s book Reinventing Strategy and his lectures that I attended at Columbia Business School. I have used and improved the methodology for many years.

There are five steps and the following chapters cover them in detail:

Situation analysis: understand what is going on and what will change.
Make your strategic choices.
Secure the necessary sponsorship and investments.
Implement and experiment.
Start again.

What follows below are some things I have learned about the nature of strategy.

Resource limitations

As Pietersen explains, chess would not be an interesting game if you had unlimited resources. “Ah, you took my queen? Never mind, I have plenty more queens.” The whole process is about using your resources as efficiently as you possibly can. Translating this to customer experience, statements like “We need to exceed customer expectations in every interaction they have with us” are both wasteful and unachievable. You don’t have unlimited resources. You should not bother trying to exceed expectations on things that don’t matter. Most customer touchpoints don’t matter. It takes work to find out which ones do, and which ones can give you a competitive advantage. What matters for you will differ from what matters for your competitors. There are no universal answers.

The concept of hygiene factors

There are plenty of areas of customer interaction that are what I call ‘hygiene factors’. The old explanation is to think about them like taking a shower. Nobody will thank you for taking a shower but everyone will notice if you don’t do so for a long time. What this means is that there are things that just have to be ‘good enough’, but making them better will be a bad investment. Remedial phone support is an example. You need to be good enough at answering the phone and solving customer problems. Creating the capability to talk to them about past problems, or their birthdays and favorite sports teams does not add any relevant value. Similarly, delivering a product when a customer expects it is a hygiene factor. Delivering it early may be counterproductive and not worth the effort.

Just as standards of human cleanliness have changed over time, hygiene factors are evolving too. Yesterday’s ‘wow!’ factor, like being on Twitter, may be today’s basic requirement.

Never combine strategy and planning

A note of caution: never combine strategy and planning in a single exercise. ‘Strategy and planning manager’ is a common corporate job title. It has been my title in the past. When you combine strategy and planning into a single job, only planning gets done. When you start to do your strategy work just before the budget submission is due, your working team members will quickly start to say, “Forget this… just give me the spreadsheet to fill in.” Strategy is a creative divergent process. By its nature, it is about doing things you are not currently doing. Planning is a convergent process. It takes what you want to do and creates order about doing it. Divergent and convergent thinking are diametrically opposed and should never be combined. Make sure you work on strategy at a time of year when planning deadlines are not creating pressures that will prevent you doing anything other than making minor adjustments to your current strategy.

Tactics can change, strategy should not

Once you have established a customer experience strategy, you must give it time to work. Just as marketing produces its results in the mid-term, the same is true of customer experience. This can be a challenging dynamic in businesses that are driven to produce results each quarter. Maintaining sponsorship for your work is both difficult and critical. Sponsorship is the subject of a section of this book. If you are creating a strategy where none exists, you will be under pressure to demonstrate results. The pressure is as much self-imposed as it is from other parts of your organization. The section on sponsorship includes advice on how to ensure your work continues in times of cost pressure, as well as times of growth.

You know you have a strategy when the screaming starts

Deciding what you will not do is just as important as deciding what you will do. Ensuring you have the necessary resources will probably involve stopping existing work and transferring people and budgets to new work. It is inevitable that the people currently doing that work will be upset about the choices. Plan on this, and only be satisfied that your strategy is clear when the pushback actually starts to happen.

Next time

The next article will be the first covering a relevant behavioral economics topic: What you see is all there is.

November 6, 2019

CX Strategy (2) – What makes B2B different?

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer experience, Customer Satisfaction, Strategy / B2B, Customer Experience, CX, strategy /

Welcome to the second article in my series on how to develop and implement a customer experience strategy.

This series is about customer experience in business-to-business (B2B) situations. Most of what you read elsewhere about customer experience is in the context of business-to-consumer and is not directly relevant. The reasons are the following:

In B2B, a single person is never responsible for all the client organization’s interactions with your company.
The difference in the relative financial importance of your largest and smallest customers is much greater than for B2C.
The people who use your products or services are usually not the ones who make the purchase decisions.
Your relationship with your customer requires more constant attention because multiple sales and support engagements are likely to be happening at the same time.
Relationships with individual people in the customer organization matter as much as relationships with positions on organization charts.
It takes time to know whether you are improving things.
Your customers want and need you to be successful.
Angry customers stay with you.

There are businesses that look like B2C but are actually B2B. Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is an example, and so is General Motors. Most of their income comes from franchisees, not directly from consumers. Keeping franchise operators happy is more important to KFC than the views of the end customers. It is largely up to the franchise operators to keep the end customers happy.

No single person responsible for everything

When I shop at my local supermarket, I start by scanning my loyalty card and picking up my barcode scanner. I then scan each article as I put it into the caddy. I check out on my own and speak to nobody. The same happens when I buy something from Amazon. More commonly, my retail interactions involve a single person. If I buy a pair of shoes, it is possible that I won’t go back to that store for a year or two, no matter how happy I am with the shoes and the shopping experience. OK, if you want to be picky, a second person might have welcomed me to the store.

When a business buys from another business, things can be far more complex. Yes, a business can still buy Amazon Web Services and never interact with a human being. At the other extreme, a decision to no longer handle invoicing internally in a large company but to outsource it to another company can take two years. It can involve many different people, from the CFO to Procurement to labor unions at the customer end, from a sales person to an implementation project manager at the supplier end. And that is just to get to a decision. Implementation can be complex and involve a lot of different people. Management and organization changes can call the whole project into question and delay things significantly.

Differences in customer size matter

In most B2B situations, you have customers who matter more to you than others. There are two main reasons some may be special. The obvious one is revenue. A typical Pareto curve means that 20% of your customers may bring 80% of your revenue. The 20% need to be treated differently from the 80%. While you might like to think this is in the case in B2C, it has a different scale in B2B. There are very few B2C situations where a consumer is spending millions with one company. The second reason a customer may be special is that they are the pilot customer for a new product or service. You need them to be particularly happy with you, so they are willing to recommend the new product or service to others. (Of course, you should not expect a B2B customer to recommend your product to one of their competitors.) The Pareto chart below illustrates a typical B2B customer profile.

Users are not purchasers

Perhaps most importantly, the user of a product or service is rarely the one who signs the purchase order. If you are a catering company, you may bid to supply canteen / restaurant services to a large client. The people who eat the food are unlikely to be consulted in any way in the purchase decision. Unless your food is awful, they are also unlikely to be consulted at all about renewing the contract. Of course there are exceptions and end users can be decision-makers. A noteworthy example is software. Before the emergence of cloud computing, most decisions to purchase software required you to buy hardware. This meant that the central IT department could control everything. That has changed. An individual user can download a free trial version of some application and use it. It can spread to a department, if the department has a credit card, and then throughout a company, no matter what the CIO wants. That creates a specific customer experience dynamic which we will cover.

Constant attention required

The nature of large transactions and large projects means that some B2B customers require constant attention from your teams. The attention may be from different teams at different points in the implementation of a large project. Multiple sales, project and support engagements may be happening simultaneously.

Relationships with both positions and individuals matter

Large customer organizations are dynamic. Their structures can change, and people move from one position to another as they develop their careers. People you know at one customer can suddenly pop up at another. This has profound implications for research and improvement methods. For relationship surveys, it usually means that an overall score for a customer has no value. What matters is the state of each individual relationship, particularly with decision makers, decision influencers, and to an extent with the end users of your product or service. The same applies in the other direction. Customers need to be carefully prepared for a change in ‘their’ account manager, for example. This will be covered in detail in the section on relationship surveys. If your customer project takes a long time to implement, you can be reasonably certain they will change their organization and that this will have an impact on what you have to deliver. Plan on it.

It takes time to know whether you are improving things

If you run a supermarket and want to improve sales of something, you move the product to the head of an aisle. You learn about your success or failure right away. When selling to businesses, it takes much more time to know whether customer experience improvements are helping or hurting. For most types of B2B businesses, it will take 12 to 18 months before you know whether a change is giving you a competitive advantage. The reason is the typical purchase cycle. Customers will use a product or service for some time before needing to buy more. If you are working in a company that considers thinking two fiscal quarters ahead to be long-term planning, you may have difficulty retaining the funding for your efforts. A later article will cover methods for ensuring ongoing sponsorship for your work.

Your success matters to your customers

Most of your customers want you to be successful. Think about the procurement people, for example. In their ideal world, they want as many companies as possible – including yours – to compete to offer products and services at the lowest possible price. Others want to see as many different innovations as possible, believing that your innovation will be to their competitive advantage. If you have already sold them something, your continued financial survival is important to their belief you will be able to support and improve your product or service. While the same may be the case in consumer businesses, consumers are more likely to have short-term relationships with companies, not caring much if one goes out of business. The consumer’s livelihood is unlikely to depend on the survival of a company that does not employ them.

Angry customers may stay with you

Customer satisfaction is easy to understand in consumer businesses, less so when selling to companies. If the waiter in a restaurant treats you badly, most people (in the USA at least) still leave a tip and never go to the restaurant again. That is life in consumer land, apart from banks and cable TV companies that make it difficult for you to leave. Let’s suppose your company supplies restaurant services to corporations. Six months into a contract, a customer’s employee finds a worm in one of your salads. The customer gets angry. You devote large amounts of resources to fixing the issue so it never happens again.

One final thought – Sales differences are quite similar

Will Cannon has written an interesting article about the differences between B2B and B2C for sales teams in April 2020. He makes some points that are quite similar to those made here, and some new ones. As regular readers know, I consider the relationship with sales to be the most critical internal one a CX leader can have. Please have a look at Will’s article here.

Next time

The next article will be about why you need a strategy. Seems like a reasonable question.

November 4, 2019

CX Strategy (1) – First in a series about how to develop and implement a customer experience strategy

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer experience, Customer Satisfaction / Customer Experience, CX, strategy /

Welcome to the first article in my series on how to develop and implement a customer experience strategy.

This series is about building and implementing a customer experience strategy in a business-to-business environment and in what I call ‘the real world’. The real world is one where people behave like human beings, and not as traditional economists would have us believe. Human beings do not constantly try to optimize mid-term outcomes. We behave far less rationally, though still quite predictably. A great customer experience strategy combines scientific research, behavioral economics and the experience of others. In this series, I share mistakes I have made and things that I have found to be successful. Above all, I believe the series will save you a lot of time on your path to happier and more loyal customers.

What is customer experience?

In this context, customer experience is the overall impression your company creates with each of your clients. It is influenced by many factors, from the way your brand is perceived as socially and environmentally responsible, to what happens when someone complains about your product or service. From a practical perspective, it is about the ‘customer journey’. It starts with the way a customer becomes aware of your existence and continues through the cycle of comparison, purchase, implementation, use of the product or service, decision to renew or repurchase, and their decision to talk about you positively, negatively or not at all.

Main concepts

The main concepts that will be covered are:

A comprehensive methodology for developing, communicating and implementing a formal customer experience strategy. The system works well for medium to large enterprises and can be simplified for smaller businesses. At least some of it is applicable to entities that have non-paying customers, such as government departments. Some ideas on how to simplify the methodology for small companies are also covered.
A comparison of the main customer experience systems in use around the world, and a methodology for choosing between them. Each has been successful in its own way. There is no single correct answer that works for everyone.
A short article explores whether there is any evidence that employee happiness is a necessary condition for customer satisfaction. The research will surprise some readers.
Methods of ensuring you have the sponsorship required to succeed. Once you have a strategy, how can you be sure you will get and keep support for implementing it? What are the keys to keeping your management both interested and supportive of the ongoing investment?
Companies change constantly, from rebranding to mergers. How can they ensure customer loyalty through the inevitable transitions?
Since accurate customer feedback is critical to your efforts, there will be articles on the different types of customer research that can be used, how to design good surveys, and the most common mistakes people make when they implement their feedback systems.
The application of behavioral economics research to gain insights into customer behavior.
Examples of initiatives you may like to consider as you build your own strategy.

What is the scope of B2B?

For the purposes of this series, business-to-business refers to companies that sell products and services to other companies. Size does not matter much, though some techniques will probably not be appropriate for very small companies. My working assumption is that the client companies will be of all sizes, from small to very large. Strategy development will be faster for smaller companies with a small number of clients, though the methodology is independent of size.

What is strategy?

Strategy is about how you deploy your resources to win. You don’t have unlimited resources and can’t afford to do everything. This series will provide you with a system to determine what to do that will have the highest impact and how to implement it effectively.

A common but ineffective strategy is to “exceed customer expectations in all our interactions.” Nobody has the resources needed to do this despite the thousands of web and printed pages that say the opposite. The question is how you determine where doing the strict minimum is appropriate, and how you will gain market share by doing something exceptional. It is absolutely not random.

Difference between customer experience and quality

Quality also tends to be defined broadly. People use the term for a wide range of different purposes. An excellent sales team could be said to be of high quality. For the purposes of this series, ‘quality’ means product and service reliability; their ability to continue to function.

This is not about organization design

Organization design needs to be done after work design. While I will cover possible answers to the question of where a customer experience leader should report, it is not a major focus of this series. I do, however, cover innovative ideas about staffing and how to make customer experience work into an attractive people-development path in your organization.

Next time

The next article will be about what makes B2B different.

August 12, 2019

NPS (22) – How to almost do customer research (AppDynamics) – 22nd article in the series on NPS

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS / Chief Customer Officer, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, CX, Net Promoter System, NPS, strategy /

Welcome to the 22nd post in my extensive series on NPS and the Net Promoter System. In the last two articles I discussed the major mistakes made by British Airways, Audi and others. This time I cover a company that almost gets it right. Unfortunately their results seem to be a sort of ‘vanity metric’ without a robust source.

A company with industry-leading NPS performance and a customer-centric culture can ruin their message by exaggerating, providing misleading information, and ‘comparing apples with oranges’. When you are performing well, there is no need for such communication. What follows is an example of an over-enthusiastic marketing department using an internal NPS result to (presumably not intentionally) misinform customers. It provides a wonderful example of messaging that gets ahead of the actual facts.

The press release

AppDynamics is a company that provides software for managing computer systems. They have recently been acquired by Cisco. Unfortunately, they have become masters of misleading communication about NPS scores. They have repeatedly published silly press releases that discredit their excellent performance and have the potential to discredit the Net Promoter System. In an early example in September 2015, they led with this headline:

AppDynamics Continues With Category-Leading Net Promoter Score of 85 for the First Half of Fiscal Year 2016

More than 500 customers weigh in to confirm positive experience with Application Intelligence Platform

They go on to say:

AppDynamics, a leading application intelligence company, today announced that it achieved a Net Promoter Score, or NPS® Score, of 85 for the first six months of its fiscal year beginning February 1, 2015. AppDynamics has maintained an NPS score over 80 for each successive six month period over the last three fiscal years, demonstrating its leadership among enterprise software companies, which on average earn NPS scores of mid-twenties according to Satmetrix.

And follow that by:

According to a benchmark study from the Temkin Group, scores for the overall software category in 2014 range from the low teens to the mid-40s. Companies with NPS scores of 60+ are generally considered top performers; USAA (insurance and financial services) and JetBlue are on this elite list, as is Apple. Enterprise software companies have typically had average scores below 20.

So, what is wrong with this?

Here are the main defects:

They do not provide any information about the source of the score of 85, though it is implied that it comes from an internal initiative called the Customer 360 program. No other company appears to be covered by that program, so it is not a competitive benchmark.
They mention the respected Temkin benchmarks without mentioning that Temkin do not include AppDynamics in their data.
Strangely, they were already well above average for the software industry with scores in the low 40s at the time, according to a double-blind benchmark studies by IPSOS and Qualtrics that I used at HP. The same studies also show IBM, CA, HP and BMC between 40 and 50 for Business Service Management software. The average score for IT management software overall is 38, with 8,800 customer responses. 175 people responded for AppDynamics. VMware was leading at 59.
While software industry benchmark scores have improved markedly since September 2015, 85 was not a credible benchmark score at that time. No company on the planet had ever had a score of 85 in any double-blind benchmark survey in any industry by the end of 2015. I have personally validated the methodology Qualtrics uses with Bain and it corresponds to their views on how double-blind benchmarking should be done. I shared the benchmark scores with various competitors before I retired from HP in early 2016. We discussed the AppDynamics press releases too. Some competitors had commissioned their own benchmark surveys, and found similar results to what I mention for AppDynamics. Nobody found scores higher than 45 at the time.

The software industry has been improving, and here in 2019 it has become more credible that such high scores are possible. I have no doubt that the Customer 360 program is making a difference. My former colleagues tell me that AppDynamics has produced the highest benchmark scores seen so far. They and their competitors have all improved. It will be interesting to see how this trends.

Temkin benchmarks

For the sake of completeness, the illustration below shows the Temkin NPS technology industry benchmarks for 2016, the time of the press release shown above. 62 vendors are covered, almost all of them software vendors. Even without the intermediate points on the table, you will quickly see that the AppDynamics statement that “Enterprise software companies have typically had average scores below 20” is simply not true. Note that most Temkin reports are free of charge, ever since Qualtrics acquired Temkin Group in 2018. Of course the AppDynamics statement could be based on yet another unattributed source.

Conclusion

When they had great performance, the sort of press release, website content and sales material AppDynamics used in 2015 did it a disservice. Don’t publish scores from your own company surveys and represent them as objective benchmark comparisons. Your competitors know the numbers are wrong and many can easily provide your customers with correct data. The correction may call into question other claims you have made about your products or services. If an NPS number appears to be too good to be true, it is!

If you persuade your senior management that the comparison is fair and real, you also put your future work at risk. After all, your mission seems to have been accomplished. The work should now be put into business-as-usual mode and the investment scaled back. As it is, AppDynamics was on a path to market leadership, though perhaps not at quite the speed their communications people believed in late 2015. Perhaps this is why Cisco acquired them in early 2017. Finally, note that in the spirit of fairness, I wrote to the person whose name was on the press release to make these points, and he did not reply.

Next time

The next article will be the first of two on the heart of the Net Promoter System: the feedback, learning, and improvement processes. The process has three elements: the Inner Loop, the Outer Loop, and the Huddle.

As is often the case, the above is a slightly-edited version of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Net Promoter – Implement the System All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide, and from your better book retailers.

August 10, 2019

NPS (21) – How not to do customer research (Audi and a supermarket) – 21st article in the series on NPS

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS / Audi, Chief Customer Officer, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, CX, Net Promoter System, NPS, strategy /

Welcome to the 21st post in my extensive series on NPS and the Net Promoter System. Following the numerous reactions to what I posted about the British Airways research process last week, here are my views on the way car dealers survey customers in general and about Audi’s process in particular. I also cover a supermarket.

I suppose I should start by emphasizing that Audi is far from being the only car manufacturer doing what I am about to describe. It seems to be a standard practice for car brands.

Buying a car

Following her purchase of a new Audi, my daughter received a survey request from her salesperson. He provided the link, and added a covering note saying, “Please contact me if you cannot give me a 10.” I was surprised to see evidence of this horrible practice reaching European car dealers. It is the rule, rather than the exception in the USA. The General Motors head of customer experience explained it in a pubic seminar. Sales people typically need to average over 95% satisfaction in the GM dealer surveys to be able to participate in their bonus scheme. One low score can require ten perfect scores to even it out.

David Mingle, Executive Director, North American Customer Experience for GM said that he knows this and is not going to do anything about it. He said he personally pays no attention to the scores, only to the written comments. He says customers tend to be honest in their written comments. The sales people are only measured on the scores and don’t care what the customer writes about the experience. This is clear evidence of a research process that provides no value. If individual dealerships and sales people have no motivation to read and act on the comments, why should a customer answer the survey at all?

Consequences

While this may seem to be an interesting anecdote, though backed by facts, it has major consequences. These consequences are evident in the USA and will come to Europe too. In the USA, car prices are considered to be highly negotiable. There are plenty of websites that give advice about how much a General Motors franchisee has to pay for a particular car, providing the customer with the lowest possible price. I invite you to do your own searches. You will easily find suggestions to use the survey score as a price negotiation point. It is attractive in that the cost to the sales person of lowering the price is zero, while the benefit of a 10 may be high, and costs you nothing. If car companies internalized this, I believe they would change their bonus systems. Indeed, if you receive messages saying “If you can’t give me a 10…” during a negotiation process, you should probably negotiate a little more, no matter what it is you are buying.

Not the only defect in their survey

The Audi survey is somewhat strange. I feel they do not understand the difference between something that matters and something that makes a competitive difference. The illustration below shows the way their US dealer survey from a couple of years ago describes what a 10 means:

It is not appropriate to label intermediate numbers in rating questions, just the extremes. Personally, I find the difference between “Outstanding” and “Truly Exceptional” hard to understand, let alone worthy of a three-point difference. I also consider the appearance of the facility to be a hygiene factor. Once it is good enough, it has no impact on your purchase. I don’t see how it could be a motivator. The same applies to the “comfort of the area or office where you agreed to the price of your vehicle.” What is the added value in getting a score above a five, for example? Indeed, perhaps it should be uncomfortable so you want to negotiate quickly and leave.

Of course, many other companies do the same thing. According to employees at Walmart, Old Navy, Staples and Best Buy, they are measured on receiving 10s and interrogated about receiving anything less. The slip of paper shown below is what one US supermarket allegedly gave customers with their receipts:

Conclusion

There are many ways to cheat or bias your feedback system. This is just one. For a number to be credible, the people who are asking you to fill out the surveys must have no direct motivation to achieve a specific score. They should only be motivated by the desire to improve.

Next time

In the next article I will consider the case of AppDynamics; a company that almost gets its customer research right but seems to fail at the last hurdle.

August 6, 2019

NPS (20) – How not to do customer research – 20th article in the series on NPS

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS / British Airways, Chief Customer Officer, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, CX, Net Promoter System, NPS, strategy /

While I am sure it is not their intent, the way British Airways surveys both its general and special customers is the worst I have ever seen from any company, from a customer perspective. Perhaps paradoxically, it is one of the richest possible from an internal British Airways perspective. It provides them with a rich set of reports and metrics. While it includes part of the Net Promoter System, it has far too many screens and questions. They have never contacted me about my issues or improvement suggestions. What follows is a critique that includes screen captures from their September 2016 Executive Club survey. Please bear in mind that I am not entirely negative about it all. I just feel it works from an old paradigm, is internally focused, and designed primarily to fit customer experience strategy and reporting software supplied by KPMG Nunwood.

Summary

While the covering email from Nunwood says the survey will take 15 minutes, there are 134 screens to go through, and it is hard to see how it could be done in 15 minutes. The survey invitation is signed by James Hiller, with no job title. A Google search indicates he manages the Executive Club. Nothing is said about what they have improved based on past surveys.

As distinct from a pure survey about the Executive Club itself, competitors are also covered, as are BA and competing airlines. The huge amount of data collected probably fits a comprehensive internal reporting structure, and provides no particular value to customers. It violates the fundamental principle of customer research in that it fails to provide more value than it extracts. Here is how it starts:

Cher Monsieur Fitzgerald,

Given that you are an Executive Club Member, we would welcome your views on your experiences with British Airways and we would like to understand how they have influenced the way you feel about us.

Whether positive, neutral, or negative, your feedback is welcome and highly valued, as it will help us to shape our products and services in the future, and understand what our most valuable customers need from us.

The survey will take about 15 minutes to complete.

Will I be able to provide the input I want to provide?

Before starting to work through the many screens, I decided what I wanted to say. I wanted to make three points:

Transiting through Heathrow Terminal 5 for long-haul travel from Geneva is far more complex than transiting via Zurich, Munich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and even Paris. This is because passengers have to go through a pointless duplicate security check inbound from the USA / Canada, and a pointless duplicate outbound check when arriving from countries that use the same security standards as the UK. While I did not know this at the time I filled out the survey, the UK Civil Aviation Authority requires this second check and does not accept screening done anywhere else. I suppose this may date from an era when it was too difficult to separate the ‘clean’ and ‘not quite so clean’ transit passengers from each other. Whatever the reasoning, it seems pointless today. The layout of Terminal 5 could easily be modified to create this separation should the law change. BA should apply the necessary pressure, in my opinion.
It is next to impossible to use the Executive Club website to reserve some long-haul destinations using miles. Entire months have no availability. I am not talking about high-demand routes like Christmas in Australia. My latest experience with trying to reserve Australian flights in Business Class was for October, seven weeks in advance, and there were no flights on any date, either to Sydney or Melbourne. December and January show no availability either, which is less surprising. During a Christmas vacation, I looked at availability for South Africa the following Christmas. Nothing.
I wanted the opportunity not just to complain, but also to make improvement suggestions. Among the suggestions, I wanted to be able to mention that BA should tell us what they are doing with the input, and should contact people who make suggestions.

The short answer is that I was indeed able to provide the input. The more complete answer is that I was forced to bury this critical information inside many unimportant and irrelevant (to me) answers. I am sure the 100+ irrelevant answers correspond to the way some staff inside British Airways are measured.

The start

I expected BA to provide a choice of languages for the survey, and they do. I suppose it is a bit surprising that Spanish is not among the languages. It is the second-most common first language in the world with about 400 million speakers, after Chinese, with 1.2 billion.

NPS questions

The recommendation question is next as shown below. Oddly the ‘overall satisfaction’ question is asked as well. After a question about emotions, the NPS “Why?” question is asked.

Logically, the following question should be about what BA should improve. That question is never asked about British Airways, though it is asked about the Executive Club, close to the end of the survey. When you do not ask for improvement suggestions, you tend not to get any from Promoters. Remember that Promoters are the customers who admire you most, and want you to succeed. They tend to provide the most valuable improvement suggestions.

Lots more questions

Questions about my feelings about the airline follow. I suppose these provide overall statistics and somebody is measured on the trend. It is hard to see how someone would work directly on improvements from the answers, as there is no opportunity to explain the input. The questions all use rating scales and include:

How likely would you be to travel with British Airways in the future?
To what extent do you consider British Airways a convenient option when choosing an airline to fly with?
Taking everything into consideration, overall how satisfied are you with British Airways?
How satisfied are you with the value for money British Airways offers?
How would you say you feel about British Airways?

Information about competitors

A useful section follows as shown below. After asking what airlines I have used for long- and short-haul travel in the last 12 months, the survey goes on to ask which airlines are my top choices for such travel. It then asks why the first-choice airline is in first place. I consider this section to be the only thing that is potentially useful beyond the basic NPS questions.

Oddly, they sort of throw this away by asking you to choose from a list of possible responses for not flying with BA. None of the preselected reasons was my main one, so I filled in the Other box. I feel they should have asked this as an open text question.

Then you are asked again about your overall satisfaction with BA. You can’t see the answers to prior questions and my second answer to the same question was one category lower than the first. Maybe because the survey was making my opinion more negative. The wording of the question was not exactly the same as the first one, though I don’t recognize them as different questions.

Lots of rating questions

A seven-point scale is then used to gather answers on flying touchpoints, emotions associated with BA and opinions about their communication. Finally, the section on the Executive Club starts, at last. Remember that the email invitation came from the head of the Executive Club, not the head of British Airways. Overall satisfaction and recommendation questions are followed by another extensive batch of seven-point rating scales Each rating question is presented individually, and you can review your answers to each section, possibly making changes.

Finally finally

A breath of hope is provided by the question “And finally, thinking about your experiences of any frequent flyer programmes, how could British Airways Executive Club be improved?” I mistakenly thought this was the last question. Unfortunately, I was then asked seven questions about demographic information that BA should already have in my Executive Club profile. This is one of the disadvantages of subcontracting surveys. The confidentiality agreement you have with your customers probably forbids you passing their details to a third party. However, the way BA has handled this with Nunwood is not optimal. Since they already had my name, there would be no reason not to provide them with a unique code, that would then allow BA to match my name and demographic details with their own database. The name on its own might be a duplicate.

Speculation and conclusion

I recommend a visit to the KPMG Nunwood website at www.nunwood.com. Their offers include customer experience strategy, journey mapping, NPS support and other comprehensive approaches to improvement. One of the approaches, the ‘Six Pillars’ explains their satisfaction surveys. The excessive number of questions satisfies the needs of the Six Pillars model, and fully exploits their Fizz reporting software.

I speculate that the survey and software are part of a larger consulting engagement with British Airways that requires a ‘slice and dice’ approach to data for distribution to a variety of internal departments. I feel this is an internally-focused way of proceeding. I would love to know what their response rates are, and speculate that they are under 10% overall. I suppose that higher-status members will be more likely to give feedback, and their input is critical, since they generate the most revenue for the company. I believe an interesting opportunity would be lower-status members who have higher status on other airlines. My recommendation for BA is an A/B split test, asking just the basic few NPS questions as a ‘pulse’ survey in between the main ones. I believe they would get better response rates and clearer actions to prioritize. Of course, they would lose the ‘slice-and-dice’ metrics they probably use to measure people. And finally, I have of course lost all my status and privileges with BA since retiring, so don’t know whether they have changed the way they survey Executive Club members since then. Please feel free to reply below if you have new information.

July 31, 2019

NPS (19) – How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer – 19th article in the series on NPS

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS / Chief Customer Officer, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, CX, Net Promoter System, NPS, strategy /

While you can find many methods of doing the calculation on the web, there is only one correct answer. The value of a customer to your company is the total cash flow they generate for you over their entire lifetime. The single calculation method for this is Discounted Cash Flow; the Net Present Value of all cash flows out into the future. No other method is correct, though there are some acceptable approximations. The theory and experience of NPS practitioners is that the operating profit per customer is highest for Promoters and lowest for Detractors. Do not confuse revenue and operating profit. You can have customers that generate lots of revenue, but even more cost. They have negative lifetime cash flow, unless you can turn them around.

The main problem you will face

Unfortunately, most companies are not able to calculate profitability by customer. Financial reporting usually works by product line, not by customer. Asking your finance person to provide you an accurate cash flow from each of your top 100 customers individually will probably be a waste of time. Businesses that depend on large contracts are an exception, and you may well be able to calculate the cash flow from each contract.

Suggested method

In the absence of accurate standard reporting, a good starting point is to work with your finance person to calculate a ‘proxy P&L’ for each of your different customer categories. Unfortunately, there are accepted accounting standards for many things, but not for the precise methods used to calculate the lifetime value of a customer. Segmenting customers in a useful way is a critical step. The first distinction to be made is between customers who have an ongoing contractual relationship with your company, and those who buy things, but have no contractual relationship. The former category is easy to work with. Past contract renewal rates can be used to determine future expectations. Direct Marketing principles need to be applied to the latter category. Direct Marketers think in terms of ‘RFM’: Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value.

Other customer segmentations that are useful will depend on your business model. If you sell both direct and via resellers, lifetime value expectations will be different. They will also differ between very large customers who depend on your company to run their business, and others. If you have the data, NPS categories can be used to refine renewal rate expectations. Here are examples of what needs to be used in the calculation:

List prices.
Contra-revenue, meaning discounts you give from the list price. While large customers tend to attract higher ‘standard’ discounts, you will generally have easier discount negotiations with Promoters than with Detractors. Since contra-revenue is not part of any standard P&L, it is often forgotten.
Net revenue, meaning list price less contra-revenue.
Cost of Goods Sold. This includes costs of ‘free’ replacement items and additional merchandise that you may have to supply Detractors to help turn them around. If you have a dedicated escalations team, you can easily calculate the average cost per escalation and use that to assign a total escalation labor cost. While ‘Cost of Goods Sold’ sounds like it should include the cost of selling and marketing, it does not. Selling, General and Administrative costs are ‘below the line’, which means they are not counted in the Gross Margin calculation, but are considered when calculating operating profit.
Where Detractors or Passives leave you sooner than Promoters, you can assign a cost of attracting a new customer. Many sales teams are split into ‘Hunters’ who go after new customers and ‘Farmers’ who develop deeper relationships over time and are measured on retention and additional business for existing customers. Farmers generally cost about a quarter of the Hunter cost per revenue dollar. If you don’t split your sales teams this way, agree a reasonable rule of thumb with your finance partner while you try to measure it more accurately. Marketing costs can be split that way too.
If you happen to have any indication that you get some of your new customers by referrals from your happiest existing customers, it is worth agreeing a way of taking this into account. However, if you already have a strong enough differentiation between Promoters, Passives and Detractors for your purposes, I suggest this simply be listed as an additional factor that you have not yet quantified. Attaching a reliable number to it can be tricky.
Beware of the law of small numbers. If the most positive and negative numbers come from unusually small groups in your analysis, you should find a way of combining them with a larger group until you can validate the reality of what you have seen.

If you are not able to get to this level of detail, calculating expected lifetime revenue per customer is a lot better than doing nothing.

If you can only work on one thing for a contract business

If all this is too sophisticated for the time you have available, here is the single area you should focus on, if your business depends on annual contracts. Just agree the value of a one-percent improvement in contract renewal rates. It is easy to calculate, and you probably have the data on past renewal rates. If you work in a large company, you have de facto experiments in place. By this I mean you can simply observe different measurable business practices or levels of customer-centric performance that have happened by accident, rather than by design. Look at how they have affected renewal rates. If you seem to have nothing relevant, test new practices in part of your company and compare renewal rates. You can test multiple things simultaneously, provided you keep a control group, where nothing has changed. Improved renewal rates were how we justified Customer Success teams at HP Software. These teams worked with customers, free of charge, to make sure they were using software effectively and achieving the benefits they expected.

Summary

Compared to the others, Promoters stay with you longer, buy more products, escalate less, are less price sensitive and are less expensive to sell to and service. There are many businesses that have marginal overall profitability. If you have customers that have been generating negative margins for some time, you will have to decide whether you can turn them around or whether you should drop them as clients. Clarity is more important than always getting the answers you would most like to hear. Once you have agreed the lifetime values of the different NPS customer categories, you and your CFO (or delegate) should present it together to your leadership team for approval. Even if you are not able to do it right away, it should be part of your formal NPS implementation plan. Your credibility depends on it. Your company’s long-term commitment to NPS also depends on it.

Looking forward

The next article in the series will be a counter-example, meaning an example of what you should not do when conducting customer research. The first one will be from British Airways.

Learning check

Here are some true / false questions to check whether I have been successful in communicating my main messages in the last few blog posts. The answers are at the bottom of the page.

The cost of renewing an existing contract is typically one-tenth the cost of acquiring a new customer.
If your overall brand NPS trend is better than that of your competitors, it is safe to assume that all parts of your business will benefit in the same way.
Bain experience suggests that the average time lag between a relative NPS improvement and new product revenue improvement is 6 to 18 months.
Since contra-revenue is not in a standard P&L statement, it should not be considered when calculating the lifetime value of a customer.
To avoid bias, all customers should be considered equal in your research, no matter how much they spend with you or your competition.

Answers to the learning check questions:

True: Renewing a contract is mainly an administrative effort and costs far less than hunting for and acquiring a new customer.
False: You need to do the analysis for each part of your business for which you produce a P&L.
True: This is to do with the average purchase cycle. Even if they love you, people are relatively unlikely to buy the same thing again right away. This varies widely by type of product.
False: Promoters tend to get lower discounts than less happy customers and discounts from list prices are not in your P&L in most accounting systems.
False: You need to distinguish between customers who spend a lot and those who don’t spend much on your type of product or service when calculating lifetime value. Large spenders tend to be more demanding than small spenders, and therefore tend to give lower NPS scores.

Normal curve for NPS blog on statistical significance

July 8, 2019

NPS (14) – 14th in the series – Customer survey response rates and statistical significance

Maurice FitzGerald / Blog, Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter System, NPS, Strategic initiatives, Strategy / Customer Experience, customer surveys, CX, Net Promoter System, NPS, response rates, strategy /

Welcome to the 14th article in my series about NPS and the Net Promoter System. This time I cover response rates, sample sizes and statistical significance. Perhaps the most important points are about how to communicate such technical concepts. (Hint: Don’t!)

All survey types are sensitive to response rates. The lower your response rate, the less accurate your survey. Bain analysis shows that surveys with low response rates give over-optimistic results, as the people who like you tend to respond more easily than those who do not. Getting high response rates is primarily a function of the nature of the relationship you have with the people you are surveying. If you are using email to try to survey people you have never met, and with whom you have never done business, you should expect a response rate of 3% or less. At the other extreme, if you have a practice of formally interviewing ten executives from your largest client face-to-face every six months, have been doing so for the last five years, demonstrating that you provide the improvements they request, a 100% response rate is a reasonable expectation.

Perverse effect of high response rates

High response rates drive lower scores on a constant scale. In my experience with HP, this meant that our deep face-to-face relationship surveys with 80%+ response rates usually produced Net Promoter Scores that were considerably lower than the scores we saw in benchmark surveys or indeed in any other type of survey. Avoid the temptation to compare scores from different types of survey, or at least from surveys with very different response rates.

Here is what Reichheld and Markey say

My own experience is not an isolated case and others have found similar trends. Based on their many years of experience, Fred and Rob provide some numbers, and I believe the numbers should surprise most people. They show a far greater impact of low response rates than expected. I don’t believe the phenomenon is specific to NPS. The principles should apply to all rating systems. Let’s suppose you have carried out a survey and the results are as shown below.

The question is, what do the people on the right think? The diagram below is what is shown in The Ultimate Question 2.0. It represents what would have happened had 100% of the recipients responded to your survey.

The theory is that Promoters are the ones most likely to answer your surveys. They like you and want to help. Passives and Detractors are more likely to think you have already wasted enough of their time. Extreme Detractors will still tend to answer. In a conversation with Rob Markey I asked him how they had determined the numbers on the right. He said it was done by observing the actual behaviors of the non-respondents in a large number of studies in a variety of industries.

Surprise!

This surprises most people. It is a very difficult subject to study as you can’t simultaneously get different response rates for the same survey and same audience. What I have seen is that the results from people who take the survey when they receive a follow-up email tend to be lower than for the initial respondents, though I have also seen exceptions. My brother (and this book’s illustrator) has a doctorate in Cognitive Psychology and has not been able to design an experiment that would prove the theory. Nonetheless, the psychology suggested by Fred and Rob makes sense to me. (Feel free to accuse me of cognitive bias!)

Statistical significance

Analysis and determination of statistical significance of results can be challenging. The following statement may seem counter-intuitive: If you want people to trust your metrics, don’t include any information about statistical significance in your main communication vehicles. There are two main reasons for this:

There is no single way to explain significance across all feedback systems. Correctly explaining the significance for each type of survey is long and complex and will make people believe you are manipulating the numbers.
There are survey types where intuitive significance rules do not apply. For example, if you have 20 customers that represent 60% of your revenue and you have high-quality relationship survey results from 15 of them, you are in great shape. If you try to explain the statistical significance range correctly, some amateur statistician in your audience is bound to say, “There are less than 30 companies in your sample so it can’t possibly be significant.” If you don’t mention significance, there will be fewer opportunities for such people to embarrass themselves. If the question is asked, well, good luck, and be diplomatic.

Improving response rates

Next, let’s look at the key techniques for improving response rates:

Application of classical direct marketing practices.
Use of technology when email is used to send survey invitations.
Work on the quality of your contact list.

Looking forward

Next time I will cover the use of classical direct marketing techniques to improve response rates.

As is often the case, the above is a slightly-edited version of a chapter in one of our books; in this case Net Promoter – Implement the System All of our books are available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon stores worldwide, and from your better book retailers.

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