We know it is flawed but NPS is still useful for comparison as everybody else is using it. This has resulted in a cult of NPS, so we are all surrounded by people begging us to “rate our service” online or face-to-face.

The strongest selling points of NPS is its simplicity. It is easy for people to understand the goal of having more promoters. And given the obsession with the idea that ‘what gets measured get managed, and what gets managed gets done’, NPS gets pushed to the front of the class.

But there are flaws in this thinking, one of which is this: contrary to the
purveyors of ‘brand love’ and ‘brand purpose’, customers are not lying awake at night thinking about your brand. At a more practical level, NPS and CSAT scores do not measure whether your responder is a top customer, a one-off client or, worse still, a person who just likes to rate thing badly.

NPS and other measures are being asked to work too hard. It should be a starting point to prompt more insight but today, NPS is seen as the end point.

Nor are these scores consistent in the context. Should the question be asked early in a customer’s journey or later? You will get a different result depending on the context. There is really no one number that represents a customer’s experience

Also, NPS does not tell you why a score is bad, or why it might be improving. There is no diagnosis, which is the starting point of defining strategy, as Mark Ritson rightly points out.

Talking to a couple of fellow marketers about NPS really proved to me how deep its adoption is. One service brand’s senior management are bonused on the score, simply because it correlates with one of the company’s key business drivers.

I’m not so sure; this particular industry has so many moving parts that ascribing the voice of the customer to NPS is fallacious.

When I’ve used NPS, I’ve quickly realised the consumer view of the industry drove perception more than I would have liked. The notion of a consumer making up their mind about a brand or service interaction in a split-second based on an often poorly laid out and inconsistent style means our scores are unreliable. Improving the score becomes a bit of a game, as opposed to a tool to unlock a prediction about what a customer will do in the future.

The doyen of marketing measurement and author of Marketing and the Bottom Line, Tim Ambler, speaks to this point in a paper entitled ‘Assessing marketing performance: Don’t settle for a silver metric’ in the Journal of Marketing Management. He agrees marketing performance can and should be evaluated. However, he rails against the idea that there is a single number, financial or otherwise.

NPS and other measures are being asked to work too hard. It should be a starting point to prompt more insight but today, NPS is seen as the end point.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com