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.

My story begins with a humble query to my company’s HR department. You see I couldn’t find the answer to a question, and it was pretty low value item not worthy of a phone call. I entered it into a system, lets call it HRChat, where you just fill in some boxes, and eventually someone emails you back with what you need. A few days later, I was emailed back. Case closed? Apparently not. A few hours later I was sent a follow-up survey relating to my query, there was one question. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are to recommend HRChat to a friend or colleague?”. Don’t get me wrong, I love that everyone in my company is now focused on customers, but measuring advocacy for a HR system? Really? It’s not like I can ring another companies HR department to ask my question. I didn’t get a choice in exercising loyalty, there was only one option. The point of measuring your advocacy is to compare it to your competitors, you want more brand loyalty so you gain more market share! I’ve seen a lot of creative ideas in my time in banking, HR systems creating market share is not one of them.

A few days later, I dropped off my car for a service at my local Holden dealer. On collecting it they handed me an invoice and told me in well-rehearsed fashion, “you’ll be receiving a survey from Holden on your service here today, anything below a 9 is considered a fail”. Then the consultant stamped it with a green 9-10 / red 0-8 stamp and handed it to me with a forced smile. I’ll say this, the service at Holden was 10/10, but the experience of being told how to answer a survey, immediately put me off. I have NPS as one of my own KPI’s, so I’m probably more likely to rate a 9 or 10 purely because I understand the mechanics of the system, but telling me what to do is a sure fire way to make me not do that thing. Don't even get me started on the fact that I have capped price servicing, so it's not like I'm going to take my care to the local Ford dealer for a service.

Engineering the system to get the result you want defeats the purpose of having the system in the first place. The first thing they teach you in statistics is bias and why it’s bad. We’re all guilty of this kind of bias though. As a sales leader I’ve helped people put auto signatures on their emails that say the colleague is always striving for 10/10 (implying you can’t rate them any less!). I’ve co-ordinated calling programs where bankers specifically asked their customers to respond to a survey AND to score higher than a 9 (but it doesn’t count as manipulating the output, the customer still could’ve scored us lower!). I’ve even asked customers why they didn’t give us a 9 or 10 (but don’t worry, the guilt I put on our relationship won’t influence their score in the next survey!). We tell ourselves, as Holden no doubt do, that we’re just educating the customer on how NPS works to make it fair. Fair for who though?

Finally, we come to the story that induced today’s rage post. I received an email from the Lane Cove Tunnel today, with a simple survey attached. That’s right folks, inanimate objects are now measuring their ability to create customer loyalty.

Q: “Based on your recent trip, how likely are you to recommend the Lane Cove Tunnel to friends or family members?”

A: 8

Q: “Why did you score the Lane Cove Tunnel this way?”

A: I understand the mechanics of NPS and figured I’m not an ‘advocate’ of a tunnel, but not a ‘detractor’ either, so an eight is representative of my passiveness towards the Lane Cove Tunnel. Also, it’s a fucking tunnel.

Q: “How can we continue to improve your experience of the Lane Cove Tunnel?”

A: I remember when the Lane Cove Tunnel was built. At one stage the tunnelling process went wrong and a bunch of ground collapsed, this lead to an apartment building being compromised and evacuated. A family that was evacuated accidentally abandoned their cockatiel when they left. Once news got out that the poor bird was still trapped inside the apartment, national panic broke out. Eventually, a fancy (well, fancy for earlier this century) bomb-disposal robot was sent in to rescue the bird. It made the national news for several days running. I think about this story a lot, particularly when driving on the Lane Cove Tunnel. I think the tunnel should have some kind of memorial to the bird and the robot that rescued it, and the moment that Sydney-siders united in passionate pleas for the rescue of a cockatiel.

I’m fairly sure all this madness boils down to one line at the end of ol’ Fred’s original text. “The process and the results need to be owned and accepted by all of the business functions”. So what started as ‘we all need to focus on customer advocacy’, has become ‘we all need to measure customer advocacy’. Even for people with no external customers. Even for tunnels whose ‘customers’ don’t really have much choice. So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would I be to recommend NPS to a friend or colleague? Fuck off, that's not how it works. 

For the curious: yes the bird trapped by the tunnel did happen https://www.smh.com.au/national/tweetys-free-as-a-bird-20051105-gdmdpm.html