Understanding Your Customer is Not Just About Star Ratings

Long deemed the brand loyalty index, the Net Promoter Score (NPS), has provided marketers and customer experience leaders with one way to determine how customers feel about their products and services.  It was – however – never intended to lead to the instant star ratings and recommendations on-demand that our digital world has built.

This Bloomberg Businessweek article, The Inventor of Customer Satisfaction Surveys Is Sick of Them, Too is worth a read.  The founding father of NPS, Fred Reichheld, expresses his deep concern that we’ve gone too far.  With Uber drivers begging for a 5 star rating and companies asking about your experience every time you have a transaction… this is not only creating the wrong customer experience, it is measuring very little and likely not driving a lot of follow up action as companies can’t keep up with all the data they gather.

My favorite line in this article is when Reichheld says, “Do I really care if Pepto-Bismol has a Facebook page?” “Do I really want to follow my foot cream on Twitter?”

Building a deep understanding of the customer and where to take your customer experience is not about surveys – it is about really understanding your customer… that requires qualitative discussions not just star ratings.  Take a read to see what you think.