NPS: The Ultimate Question?
I’ve been pondering the ultimate question for some time and felt a need to say something about it.
Most of us do not spend too much time grappling with “the ultimate question”. It is not something we do on a daily basis; most of us are just too busy living our lives to spend much time engaged in “a search for meaning”.
Or do we? It seems, many of us do encounter an “ultimate question”, if not “the”, as we interact or transact with organisations delivering us our goods and services. We’re always being thanked for our time and asked to answer “The Ultimate Question”.
“The Ultimate Question” being of course, some version of, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”
The Ultimate Question evolved from an article written by Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey , published in the Harvard Business Review in 2003. It struck a chord and became a book entitled “The Ultimate question”. In this book, the strength AND weaknesses of the question are explained. The book also reveals that, not only is it a great question; simply asked, but also that people’s answer to it can be readily measured using the Net Promoter Score® or System (NPS).
For some reason, the NPS always brings to my mind a scene from the comedy science fiction series created by Douglas Adams in the late 70’s: "The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy". Fans will recall that the “The Ultimate Question” is the actual inquiry behind the Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. The Ultimate Question was sought, after the supercomputer “Deep Thought” spent 7.5 million years calculating the answer; which was revealed to be “42”.
Now people were not too pleased with this answer, so “Deep Thought” explained that this was because they had not yet asked “The Ultimate Question”. A search for the ultimate question then ensued.
I suspect Fred Reichheld deliberately called the NPS question, “The Ultimate Question” as a warning to us: if you read more of his and others’ works on the subject the warning becomes clear. Why not dust off and re-read some these earlier works from the early 90’s and since, on customer trust, loyalty and the “Service Profit Chain” or “Value Chain?
They may well help you and your organisation to get closer to the all important question of what to do about your customer’s answers to “the ultimate question”: Why did your customers answer “the question” in that way? What are your customers trying to tell you? Have you lost their trust completely, or is there hope for forgiveness, redemption? Are they just ticked off with you today because of this or that event or is this an indicator of a deeply held resentment that has been growing, festering, over time?
One of the most important warnings given about “The Ultimate Question” is when to ask it: be careful not to make it a primarily transactional question. That’s a bit tricky, when else are we likely to get an answer to this question, if not when our customer is actually engaging with us on our website, in our store or on the telephone?
More warnings are given about how you use the information gained from “The Ultimate Question”: the Net Promoter Score®. A warning I haven’t seen a lot about relates to whether or not we should make this measure, this indicator, our NPS, a goal? Should we make it a performance measure, a KPI for all: organisation, department, team, individual?
Many organisations find themselves facing this question and answer yes. Their answer seems to come from the old management maxim that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” and the flawed logic that therefore, you have to manage everything you measure and the best way to manage performance to a measure is to make it a goal or KPI.
Be very careful with this one. If this measure is so subject to the vagaries of human responses to events, events which may be partially or completely outside the control of any one person or even organisation, then it probably isn’t going to be a very SMART goal. Who, as a shareholder, hasn’t seen our CEO explain a dip in NPS results in the context of some unforeseen or otherwise abnormal event?
Focus instead on the things that matter, the things that are within your control and the things that you can, could or should do really, really well, consistently over time. Focus on your promises to your employees, customers, shareholders and communities. Measure the extent to which you do those things well and concentrate on doing them better. Measure and manage and goal people to those things. Trust, that if you really do focus on keeping your promises, resolving your problems and fixing your failures, the NPS results will look after themselves.
By all means, keep using the NPS as an indicator, a measure to track your progress and which may well predict future growth and profitability; but be careful how you use it. Be careful that it doesn’t go the way of other opinion surveys, like the ones our politicians used to love, which have become so “gamed” by people trying to influence either the results or the behaviour triggered by the results, that they have become almost useless as a predictor of future intentions.
Don’t let your NPS measurement, and attempts to manage it divert you from what’s really important: doing the things that build and keep that most valuable of things ... customer trust.
Trust: that thing so freely given and yet, once lost, so expensive to regain.
References:
Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company.
Frederick F. Reichheld (born 1952) is an author, researcher and strategist who wrote: , The Loyalty Effect (1996), Loyalty Rules! (2001), and The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth (2006). Updated recently to The Ultimate Question 2.0.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy created by Douglas Adams. Originally a radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978, it was later adapted for Television by the BBC in 1981. It was also made into a film in 2005 directed by Garth Jennings.