What lies beyond Net Promoter?

A more eye catching, link-bait style of headline might have been simply: is Net Promoter Score still relevant?

Martin Haering, Chief Marketing Officer at Finastra (one of our clients), will pose this question at the Summit on Customer Engagement, March 6-8, 2017 in Redwood Shores, California.

Martin is using the speaker platform at the Summit to share his experiences of deploying Finastra’ own approach to customer satisfaction and advocacy which brings together various activities united within a Customer Health Index (CHI).

If you are going along, expect a lively debate. We are a sponsor at the Summit, so hope to see you there.

I’ve been a fan of Net Promoter Score (NPS) since long before customer experience (CX) was ever A Thing. Now CX is everywhere and no self-respecting corporation is without a customer centric strategy designed to unify the customer experience across all its many touchpoints (as they say).

There’s always been a healthy discussion about the science underpinning the various measures of customer satisfaction. For me the simplicity of NPS was always its strength. By providing a single, simple to understand, rallying point for managers, employees and suppliers, NPS offered CEOs of large organizations a metric around which to pivot their corporate culture and drive it toward a greater customer focus.

But in today’s omni-channel landscape, where data driven insight into customer behaviour is readily available in real-time, is NPS still relevant?

The question is even more relevant, in the B2B sector, where the complexity of sales processes, and the depth and duration of relationships, make the mechanics of customer experience in B2B very different from its cousin, B2C.

Finastra is a client and we contribute to some of their customer experience activities. Of course, I’m not a customer of theirs, so can’t speak directly to the effectiveness of CHI. However, as an observer, I can confirm CHI and its related program of activities have achieved what I consider to be the first and most important objective: to provide a galvanizing effect on all the different, often siloed, managers and employees who are able to directly and immediately affect customer experience.

Martin has already sparked a lively debate on LinkedIn with an earlier post entitled simply: NPS is dead! It gathered over one hundred comments. Expect more interactivity along the same lines if you are going to the Summit.