Leveraging Net Promoter Score in Your Business

For hundreds of years, businesses have been asking customers in various ways how they feel about their business or product to better improve customer loyalty. This initially consisted of simply asking in-person if everything was to their liking.

Fast-forward to the 1980s, when the proliferation of computer databases changed the way marketers collected customer feedback. As computers became more widely accessible and available, marketers realized they could collect a wider sample of customer feedback in order to calculate larger trends and customer sentiment.

Of course, this customer feedback was collected at the time via paper and telephone surveys, so it was likely that the information gathered could already be out of date by the time it was studied. While not ideal, this level of technology was more advanced than ever before. From there, customer surveys evolved very little until the arrival of the Internet, which – of course – changed everything.

Email Surveys

The arrival of email surveys in the 1990s and early 2000s was a huge turning point in customer feedback collection. Marketers could suddenly solicit customer feedback instantly; no waiting for snail mail surveys to be sent out and back. They could ask any question with the click of a button, and ask questions they did! Email surveys became so prevalent that 'survey fatigue' is now a widely accepted industry term. Survey fatigue is the disinterest people feel in filling out a survey because they have been overwhelmed with survey requests, or the survey takes too long to complete.

A better way?

Surveys can be long and arduous, even in a digital world. How can survey fatigue be reduced and customers encouraged to actually complete surveys? Enter Fred Reichheld and his idea for Net Promoter Score.

Reichheld noticed that businesses wanted to collect as much information as possible, yet customers did not want to fill out lengthy surveys. He had the idea to create the shortest, most effective survey possible, so he crafted a one question, catch-all survey.

In his seminal 2003 Harvard Business Review article, The One Number You Need to Grow, he says, "Companies spend lots of time and money on complex tools to assess customer satisfaction. But they're measuring the wrong thing. The best predictor of top-line growth can usually be captured in a single survey question:Would you recommend this company to a friend?"

With that simple thought, Reichheld changed the customer survey field forever by inventing Net Promoter Score.

"The best predictor of top-line growth can usually be captured in a single survey question: Would you recommend this company to a friend?"

Tune in next month for the next section from our latest whitepaper "Leveraging Net Promoter Score in Your Business".