Marketing Manager: “Net Promoter Score is the one number we need to grow!”
Customer Intelligence Manager: “Nonsense! ‘Satisfaction’ predicts customer loyalty better than ‘likelihood to recommend’ – it says so in the wonky business journals I read!”
Marketing Manager: “You don’t understand how business works!”
Customer Intelligence Manager: “You don’t understand how math works!”
The sad thing is that in a micro sense they’re both right, but in a macro sense they’re both wrong. The reason? They’re each taking an inside-out point of view based on their own specialties.
Where NPS Fits In A Customer Experience Measurement Framework
In our research into customer experience measurement, we see many organizations that use Net Promoter Score. Some use it poorly because – like the fictional marketing manager above – they don’t understand the limitations of what NPS can do.
Here’s how they should think of it: Customer experience is how customers perceive their interactions with a company along each step of a customer journey, from discovery, to purchase and use, to getting service. NPS measures what customers say they’ll do as a result of one or more of those interactions. It’s what Forrester calls an “outcome metric.”
But outcome metrics are just one out of three types of metrics captured by effective customer experience measurement programs. The best programs gather and analyze: