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Know Your Customer

I run a program at work, where we identify ‘the best’ and then endeavour to do everything we can to take them on as clients. We consider ourselves, the best, we want to work with the best and help them continue to be the best. It’s a fantastic piece of mandated corporate elitism. Recently, a name was added to the list that made me snort with derision. Napoleon Perdis. “Best of what?”, I sneered, “shit make up?”. There was some rebuttal about their $100m turnover, and innovations or some vague financial stuff. I think I may have rolled my eyes in response. Two months later my comment was vindicated as the company announced their voluntary administration. The public (read: media) commentary has me all confused though. Headlines in the AFR bemoaned other, better, foreign(!) companies as the cause of Napoleon Perdis’ demise. As if people who write all day every day about the making and breaking of businesses have never heard about how consumers vote with their feet. Or the write
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On a scale of 1 to 10 how likely are you to recommend Net Promoter Score® to a friend or colleague?

For anyone in the business of customer service, Net Promoter Score is what you live and die by now. It’s the new made up metric, replacing other made up metrics like customer satisfaction, client service ratings and, my favourite, customer happiness. For those not in the know, it subtracts anyone who rates their likeliness to recommend you lower than a 6 from those who rate you a 9 or 10 to give you a ‘Net Promoter Score’. Or in other words the ratio of people who would recommend you to a friend or colleague. Like I said, it’s a made up number. The method was invented by Frederick Reichheld, and since its publication in Harvard Business Review in 2003 has slowly infiltrated businesses around the world to be the do or die method of tracking customer loyalty, and therefore profits.   The research is sound, and the method is great, but the application has become ridiculous and trivial, being used to track ‘advocacy’ for the most inane things, or just entirely missing the point.
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