Does NPS Evolve in Organisations? My Virgin Media Experience

As I received my nice e mail from my friends at Virgin Media, post a service interaction I had with them, but more of that a little later, asking me to participate in a survey. This then got me thinking about if organisations can be segmented into groups according to how they look at loyalty or NPS measurement.

Stating the blindingly obvious, there are no commercial organisations (solvent ones) that when asked are customers important they give a big resounding “NO”. However, when one digs a bit deeper and tries to get under the skin of organisations a natural order of things quickly emerge.

Where is your Company on Here?

Firstly you have those companies that know about NPS but are just too busy to put it in their business, as its not high on their priorities – they are obviously focusing on “other strategies!”.

The next group have seemingly outsourced loyalty to the marketing team as “its customers...isn’t that the domain of marketing..far too unimportant to bother the CEO”.

The third group is interesting as they have things in place, tend to be pretty slick but are constantly analysing and re-segmenting for greater insight - To quote Nike “Just Do it”...just start to do things to effect traction.

The penultimate group again have everything in place, loyalty is central to the organisation – absolutely brilliant! However, get so focused on NPS, improving traction, monitoring improvement, which they forget to keep the customer informed about what is happening. All the great work is totally invisible to the customers. As far as they are concerned all they ever do is complete surveys and hear zip.

Finally the ideal state is all of the above but then the organisation actually closes the emotional loop and tells us simple customers what they are doing & the effect we have made on them. 

This gets me back to Virgin Media... I thought, “Here we go another survey that will be lost in the corporate cloud...what’s the point completing it? I have better things to do...” As a CX professional this is a tad grating but I am compelled to complete it as its what I tell our customers.

To my delight and surprise I was then directed to here. An absolutely fantastic experience where humble customers (yes we who pay the cheques or checks in the US) can see how and what our feedback is driving in simple, measurable, actionable and quantifiable manner. 

All the things we talk about at Blairgowrie and I was converted from a passive to a promoter that is prepared to write a blog about it. But it does make me ask the question of organisations where do they sit on my chart – all feedback welcome.


Ps. For the record Virgin Media are not a customer of ours!!

What NPS can learn from Popular Culture - Challenges with NPS Benchmarks

I was looking talking to a customer the other day about Net Promoter and the invariable conversation about how great it would be to benchmark all providers and have a league table for the great & the not so good. I did point out that Satmetrix have just published their “benchmarks” for industries. 

The challenge here is they are very US centric and of little use to many businesses as a true benchmark as most of the customers are massive multi-national blue chips.  The value of them is that they can provide some directional insight on the great and the good.

However, what’s the relevance of Apple Corporation current value $568Bn to a £150m support services business in the Midlands?  People tend to want benchmarks with people like them – the closer they reflect you the better.

This did get me thinking of novel ways to describe the issue of benchmarking and the impact of relativity in NPS measurement.  For those who really know me understand that I really try keep everything really simple and this is reflected in the Blairgowrie Associates Culture – simple, measurable, actionable and quantifiable.  So here goes my attempt to simplify the challenge as I see it...

The Syndrome Effect

It is great that all companies strive to get their customers to promote, provide the 10 NPS score we all crave, this creates a problem.  In a benchmark sense if everyone scores 10 and provides great service the problem was best summed up by Syndrome aka Buddy in the Management classic The Incredibles.  Whilst Brad Bird is no Charles Handy, the comment was just as profound. 

You see " if everyone is super...no one will be" - applying this to NPS if everyone is 10 or +60 in a benchmark one can see no difference.  This then leads on to the Brian effect...

The Brian Effect

Again I never thought I would be citing Monty Python but the piece makes the point for me better than any Micheal Porter tome on competitive differentiation. 

You see the challenge is if every company claims to have an NPS of X or talks about using NPS to improve customer service (again all great things), to the humble customer there is no difference. 

The importance of the message gets lost in the rest of the claims, sub claims and pronouncements.  In essence it is like the scene from Life of Brian where all the characters claim they are indeed Brian...and so's my wife.

Therefore next time you are at a conference and the Company presenting is extolling the virtues of their current customer experience initiative or framework, ask your self if this really differentiates them against their competition or better still are they simply Brian....

What is YOUR Personal NPS?

I got in today and thought I would have a look at LinkedIn, mainly as I could see I had 4 new messages, oh the excitement..  To my surprise (and I confess disappointment) they were all requests from former colleagues for an endorsement or recommendation for when I worked with them.  Not that I have any problem whatsoever doing this as I have done the same but it got me thinking....If NPS is a simple measure of loyalty then one could start applying it to one’s self in a business context; You might want to use it for your private life but if you do you really need to get out more. 

Therefore would you recommend another individual (score 9/10) or are you simply passive (score 7-8), there may be occasions where you may detract from a person but in my business experience I can only think of two people I have met who would fall into this category.  The usual follow up question of “why did you score this way” could lead to some real personal development opportunities – although one may find this a tad embarrassing.

With the prevalence of social media and mobile devices, one could score individuals anonymously and immediately.  Indeed if you have a look at the technology being offered by SurveySwipe where you can NPS things (and people) via a multitude of mobile devices (the image of the i phone is theirs).  No doubt one could have an immediate dashboard of people’s scores.  Indeed, I noticed the concept of NPS for individuals when I had a meeting with the guys at CustomerGauge, where in their follow up communication they included a link to rate them.  I have no idea if this is linked to performance management within their organisation but it would be a simple and effective measure?

As for Linked in endorsements it got me thinking if one could come up with a simple, measurable and reliable way of calculating Personal NPS.  So here is my starter for 10...

What is Your Personal NPS?



Therefore your NPS is calculated by taking the total requests that you have asked people for endorsements (You can see this by looking at Profile >>Recommendations>>Received Recommendations.  You then add on the pending requests to the recommendations and calculating the percentage of Endorsements you have received (You can see this by looking at Profile >>Recommendations>>Received Recommendations). 

Reciprocal endorsements are those ones where you have also provided an endorsement for someone and they have for you –the “I scratch your back...” approach.  The percentage here is expressed as a percentage of total endorsements you received.  Therefore to get to your personal NPS, simply deduct one from the other.

A Simple Worked Example

Fred has requested 38 former collegues via linked In for an endorsement (n=38), but hereceived back 21 endorsements from his former colleagues (55% of n).  However, Fred reciprocated endorsements for 7 of these people (33% of total endorsements). Using this example Freds Personal NPS is calculated 55% less 33%

Freds Personal NPS is 22%

Some Thoughts

So whilst this might seem like a bit of fun, imagine if recruiters started to use this as part of their selection process?  One could argue that they already do this when looking at linked in anyhow.  One could also use it as a basis for personal development and improvement.  I guess the real ouestion is what is Your personal NPS - you can tweet it to me on @davidjoconnor or hash tag it #personalnps.  I could plot the results....in the next blog

NPS - Statistics & Smiles

I was reading through some linked in posts on a few customer insights groups and it got me thinking  about times I have sat in meeting discussing a variety of customer measurement metrics or insights, only to be interrupted by some  amateur  statistician to ask me about the statistical significance of the results.  In my experience this tends to be asked when the results are, ahem, not terribly favorable for the individual or Company.*

Indeed in one business a senior manager was instructing his teams to call up customers to ask them to make the scores higher, therefore make him look better.  I guess the best way of describing this is a sort of corporate boiler room where operators were pushing their questionable service performance.

In some quarters there seems to be a need to try and legitimize NPS through statistics which is really sad as the measure is and was never set out to be statistically significant, only significant in closing down customer issues that impact loyalty. The closest it gets to statistical significance is asking one to state what N is (how many responses).  The mistake often is to question method and ignore what one will do to address the issue - Take a leaf from Apples book and call the customers to close & resolve the customers perceived issue that drives dis tractor behavior.

So next time you have someone focusing on method rather than outcome, just remember the cartoon above and smile....


*As I majored in statistics, it is pretty easy to confuse these folks, so keeping it simple is a must

You Have to be N Joking...NPS and a Utility provider

Today is the first day I thought I would give this blog writing a go after one of my colleagues suggested it would be good for SEO  and stuff.  It is ironic really as normally with these things it starts with a bang and ends in a whimper.  How many blogs have we all seen where the first 20 posts are long, weighty and insightful, to then see that the last post was 2 years ago.

I have therefore set myself a little task of trying to up date this minimum weekly with thoughts and insights on the customer experience landscape and the prevalence of tools and approaches that may or may not help organisations improve their customers plight.

Ironically today I was asked by a large utility company to provide them with a metre reading - so after crawling around a dark cupboard I wrote them down and went to this organisations website.  Really simple to put in the readings and that was it I thought...however, I was then directed to the omnipotent Net Promoter Survey asking me if, based on my experience today, would I recommend this business, then the follow up of why did you score us this way.

I duly completed this but really it was irrelevant because the reality is I sort of expect as a base service the ability to record metre reading - I couldn't help but think that there is some disconnect in this organisation between what NPS really is about and what it measures (Loyalty) and the use of it to score metre readings.

Whilst the metre reading experience I had may be the best in the world, do you think I would be running to friends and colleagues promoting the virtues of it and by this organisation in particular...er that's a no there then.

If one is going to use NPS, at least use it in the right context and in a way that it can really effect change & improvement.  By the way I scored them 7 which makes me a passive, with a comment for them to contact me to discuss further.  I am not a betting man but I suspect I will not get a "close the loop" folow up call...for some Companies NPS is more rhetoric than a guenuine business improvement approach..