CUSAT Scores - Are They Obsolete?

It concerned a study that C Space had conducted, examining the NPS (Net Promoter Score) method of measuring customer loyalty. The study examines the likelihood of customers to promote or discourage a brand after they have given a promoter (9 to 10) or detractor (0 to 6) score. You can read the full article here: https://hbr.org/2019/10/where-net-promoter-score-goes-wrong

Whilst the study only surveyed 2000 consumers, it’s conclusions are very interesting. It examines the nuances of customer’s behaviour after either promoting or detracting - there are no clear correlations that make NPS an accurate indicator of real intent on the part of customers. A high NPS, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that those customers will go on to actually promote the brand. Earned advocacy is probably a better score and takes more effort to measure than an easier method like NPS.

Yet many organisations still embrace NPS as the most important metric to gauge their customer’s loyalty to their brand. Many even embed it into their organisations. Incentives, promotions and bonuses can be tied to it.

Interestingly, NPS was introduced by the Harvard Business Review around 2003 and has been widely adopted since. Many other variations of this model are used to measure customer loyalty or often, customer satisfaction (CUSAT) scoring.

The problem with the scoring method, is that organisations are deciding and prescribing what driver of satisfaction, the customer should score them on (speed of service, first time fix etc.). But customers and their needs and wants are complex and multi-faceted. They may wish to say more than what they are prescribed to score the company against.

That’s not to say that organisations that have used scoring methods have been wrong. The capabilities of technologies in the past meant that it was not possible to survey large sample sizes and ask open ended questions. The sheer number of people required to conduct that kind of survey and analyse the verbatim results could not be budgeted for.

That is not the case anymore. Automation, AI and Sentiment Analysis have changed the ways in which we can listen to everything that customers want to tell us about their experiences. And we can do this without expending a lot of time, effort and resource.

The tools are there. Organisations need to adopt them and use them so they can really understand what drives a customer’s satisfaction and loyalty. They need to learn how to use those tools effectively.

These tools are only as good as what you teach them - take a look at our upcoming article “Analytics - Reap What You Sow” for more on this concept.

Customers (especially unhappy customers) want to tell us what they think, in their own words. We have the means to listen and understand them - we should change our mindset and do exactly that.