When NPS makes sense
A friend of mine was ribbing me the other day about the Net Promoter System and how I’m a pretty ardent critic, or at least questioner of it…not least because I think there’s a better approach (hint: It has to do with the proper purpose of doing CX in the first place). […]
Getting CX Right: Schlage Locks
This is another in a series of articles I decided to start writing a while back calling out brands for doing the right thing when it comes to CX. There’s a lot of negativity out there, and I’m even a big fan of learning from our (and others’!) bad CX practices. You’ll notice I don’t name names when I write about poor CX, but here it’s the opposite and I endeavor to highlight those who get it right. […]
Is it loyalty?
I’ve been with a certain service provider for about 20 years now. It’s definitely the longest I’ve ever been with any brand that I can think of off the top of my head. Sometimes you stay because it’s the only game in town (you can likely consider your cable company for this example). Sometimes you stay out of a sense of laziness (are you a Coke person or a Pepsi person?). But I’m not sure if I’d say that I’m staying with them out of ‘loyalty’.
It’s kind of a weird thing to think about: loyalty to a brand. […]
Success! Now what?
What should you do when you’ve met your Brand Promise goal?
That’s a question that came up from a former client recently. We’d done some great work in the past and the CEO called just to check in and catch up. His was a pretty specific question, but the general applicability is something that I thought was valuable so I’ll share some broad-brush observations here.
The question centers mostly on prioritization. Some people want to set ‘the sky as the limit’ when it comes to delivering for their Customers, especially as pertains to their Brand Promise. And keep in mind, if you’re getting CX right, that Brand Alignment is at the heart of your efforts. But should you be shooting for 100 percent performance?
Probably not. […]
Is it an Agile thing?
I woke up the other day to find that my computer had restarted itself overnight. I knew it was coming, and frankly, it was my own fault; the desktop warning and request that I either pick a time or it’ll happen of its own accord “outside of active hours,” as if a self-employed consultant has such things. Nevertheless, I’ve been assimilated and do expect to fall prey to how The Borg chooses to run my electronic life.
Then again, if such a restart is so vital that it will happen when the computer wants, it seems a bit incongruous to even give me the option to wait at all. As a side note, when my Air Force computer wants to restart, it simply does…I’ve been in the middle of building lesson plans—and for that matter, in the middle of a class in front of a room of cadets—and it’s simply restarted itself. I know I have my own IT department to blame for that, though. At home, it’s all the OS.
I’ve searched in vain for a way to simply turn this “feature” off altogether: Make it so that it never restarts ‘on its own,’ no matter what it wants to do. (And for the techies, yes, I’ve tried to adjust active hours—you’re limited in what you can do, i.e., you can’t make all 24 of them ‘active’…and don’t get me started on gpedit.msc—it doesn’t work either.) This is a very straightforward case of a brand choosing explicitly not to address what its Customers want. And if there’s any doubt to that in your mind, peruse the online forums of people trying to turn this off…people are livid. […]
You need that amplification
I wrote a while back about questions raised concerning wide ranges in top-level NPS or C-SAT scores, even for Customers who may have had the same experience. The point I called out there was mostly an indictment of the use of NPS or C-SAT in the first place. These metrics allow for way too much variation in interpretation, even in how they’re asked in the first place (i.e., what’s ‘satisfaction’ mean to you as a Customer, and how likely are you to recommend anything to anybody, regardless of your experience?).
To recap, the concern was that (theoretically, although I’m sure it also happens in practice), a Customer may respond ‘0’ to either question—satisfaction or likelihood to recommend—based on the exact same experience that another Customer may rate as a ‘10’. My point at the time was that’s because both satisfaction and likelihood to recommend are in the eye of the beholder, irrespective of an experience. We all enter into any experience with our own prejudices and preferences…and if mine aren’t the same as yours, it’s unlikely we’ll see the experience (and interpret from it our satisfaction or likelihood to recommend) the same way. That’s because, since what you and I value are different, what will end up satisfying us is likely also to be different. Likewise, since you and I have different levels of proclivity to share our experiences with others by virtue of our different personalities, even if we do value the same things and have identical experiences, our likelihood to recommend will not necessarily be the same. […]
