Net Promoter Community

As we approach our 5th annual European conference in London, I’d like to extend a special welcome to the many delegates who have been working with NPS for a while now, and who may be coming back wondering, “What’s new about Net Promoter”?

The good news is that the core principles of Net Promoter, both the score and the key business processes we teach in our official certification, have not changed radically since the early publications that put NPS on the map in 2003 and 2006. Instead, we have seen more and more companies gravitate toward Net Promoter as a standard way for measuring customer loyalty, and developing processes to improve and differentiate.

That said, I do think there are some important new trends, milestones, and even controversies going on in the world of Net Promoter and customer experience. Here are a few that come to mind:

• More mid-sized businesses hearing about and implementing NPS because they learn about it from their business partners, or because talented NPS gurus move jobs and bring the concept with them to their new company.
• An increased focus on employee motivation, behaviors, and process improvement as companies with a longer NPS track record realize that small operational fixes can only get them so far.
• A greater focus on competitive benchmarking of NPS. If your organization is a mature user of NPS, you might be thinking: “We made changes, but didn’t see a substantial move in our NPS. Why is that?” It could be because your competitors are also improving, and you need to think about bigger game-changing competitive moves to make an impact with your customers. We expanded our Net Promoter benchmarks for Europe this year to cover even more consumer sectors in the UK, France, and Germany, and you will hear more about this at the conference.
• Controversy and “buzz” about new metrics being compared to the NPS standard. The two most common ones I have heard about are Customer Effort Score (which focuses on ease of use in customer interactions), and measures of “actual recommendations” versus likelihood to recommend (a focus in the marketing and social media sphere). The good news for NPS is that these new controversies only strengthen the centrality of NPS as a core measure. Get close to Customer Effort, and you will find a compatible set of ideas that underpin the core NPS measure when it comes to touchpoint interactions. Get closer to Word of Mouth analytics, and you fill find that the original NPS research encompassed linkage to both spending and actual recommendation behavior.
• On the horizon, Net Promoter watchers can look forward to a new book on Net Promoter coming in September. Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey will release The Ultimate Question 2.0, a major update to the original text that launched Net Promoter into mainstream business thinking. You’ll hear from both Fred and Rob at this year’s conference, and will get a flavor of the concepts and new learnings that will be part of this new book.

What else is new?

Every time we hold a conference, I learn something new about innovative ways that companies are using NPS to drive change and customer loyalty. So the presentations you will hear at this conference are truly “news” when it comes to Net Promoter. More and more companies are adding to the development of the Net Promoter knowledgebase, and you are part of that journey as a conference attendee or presenter.

So please accept my warm welcome, and a special thank you to our return delegates, clients, and friends. I hope some of you will reconnect with others you know, and I also hope you will share your knowledge of NPS with the many new participants that will join us in London.

See you there!

John Abraham

Satmetrix