Could not agree more: the NPS approach is relevant regardless of your country.

I also agree that people in every country will give a 9 or 10 for exceptional service, even those in Australia, and they do. However, what some someone perceives as “exceptional service” is heavily influenced by their service level expectation. For example, the service I would give a 10 for at McDonalds is not even close to the service that a top restaurant would need to provide to receive a 10.

This is where I think the difference lies: not in cultural propensity to give a good score but in cultural expectations of what defines good service.

Of course we can discuss the reasons why there are differences but I think we are in strong agreement on the key point: focus on improving your own score and it will show dividends in revenue growth.

Forgive my simplistic approach here, but we have measured many different countries supposedly receiving the same service from a company using NPS. And you know what? The differences are more explainable by differences in service delivery than any cultural differences. The “country-X-people” never giving a 10? I beg to differ, and have the proof that customers worldwide will award a 9 or 10 to exceptional service.

And usually the people that matter in the company can recognise the issues, and work on the ones to improve. Which supports your point that benchmarking against peers, and improving your own score is the place to start.

*Fictional but typical of the hubris of some proprietary research companies.

Thank you!

Yes both sides have their points but I always come down on the side of managing customer expectations as the first step in managing satisfaction.

You are also completely correct that the customer experience is the responsibility of all employees BUT it is the job of management to help staff to understand what customers value. All the intent in the world is for naught if staff don’t know what customers actually want and how to deliver a good experience.

Thanks,
Adam

I think it also depends on what sector your company competes in as well as some sectors lie you mentioned (Finance/Banking) will already be loaded with past sins and even some wins.

Every interaction is a moment of truth with the customer, I think that the responsibility of customer experience is/should be the responsibility of all employees at any organisation.

Of course one of the best ways to measure this and to look to building benchmarks in any sector is with the net Promoter Score (NPS).

Cheers, Clinton.

I couldn’t agree more — with pretty much everything you have said. The last part is very important: qualitative information is critical for organisations in determining “what to do now”.

Deriving what a customer cares about from customer behaviour is another subject entirely. There are a great many complex statistical techniques that you can perform to do this if the have the right customer data. The major drawback of these approaches is that in general you can only work with customer attributes (age, number of transactions per month, number of accounts, size of deposits) not perceptions because that is all this type of computer system collects.

The approach in this blog is to understand what customers “care” about, what their perceptions are. For instance if your cloud based web application reporting says that it delivers every page within 3 seconds you could certainly drop that attribute into the above style of analysis.

However, that doesn’t capture what the perceptions of your customer are about “application responsiveness”. To get that you have to ask them at some point – which is where I would suggest the approaches in this post.

So in general you need to look at both approaches – each will provide a different part of the answer.

Adam