Net Promoter News: SAP at 60, SkiButlers serve up 89, 50 for Oz iiNet, SA beats Germany in World Cup
(From News Team: We have a new format for enGaugement news – hope you like it…)
Enterprise softer SAP’s Senior Veep of Community Mark Yolton mentioned Net Promoter Score in interview recently. Commenting on the value that his 1.7 million community members gained he said: “We ask for feedback about quality – and that feedback says community members get extremely high quality answers. Our Net Promoter score is in the 60% range.” Rubbing it in for other community leader he rather mischievously added “A good score would be in 30-35% range.” Found on SocialMedia
Oz Telco Minnow at 50: Australia’s 3rd largest ISP iiNet (which recently launched Naked DSL) are NPS converts. Brisbane Times writes: “… it is an obsession with customer satisfaction that is iiNet’s most telling differentiator. The company’s executive team starts each day with a review of the latest customer feedback and Net Promoter Score data [...] (CEO) Malone has almost half his bonus riding on the Net Promoter Score. Recent company filings show the Net Promoter Score is somewhere between 40 and 50, putting iiNet in the same bracket as brands such as BMW and Apple”. Having half your bonus on customer satisfaction is a real (Naked) balls on the line approach… Source: BrisbaneTimes.
Ski Butlers get an 89: In-room Ski/Board renter Ski Butlers averaged a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 89% for the 2008-2009 ski season according to news site. “This score tells us two things,” said Bryn Carey, President and Founder of Ski Butlers. “One that we have consistent service throughout the 25 North American resorts we serve and two we have found a way to make ski and snowboard rentals convenient and hassle-free. This is not only good for Ski Butlers but also the industry as whole.” Source: VisitVail
Early World Cup Scoreline: SA 96, Germany 88
Brand advocacy egghead Dr Nikolaus Eberl delights South African business owners with latest brand advocacy survey conducted this year (reported by the optimistically named “ComeToCapeTown.com” site) – visitors to South Africa for the FIFA Confederations Cup, gave a score of 96*, while after the last World Cup in 2006 Germany scored an NPS of 88%. All this to promote early tourist bookings for the 2010 FIFA WorldCup. Let’s hope the stadia are finished in time. Sources: CometoCapeTown and eTurbo.
Net Promoter News Snippets…
Webjets announce NPS program, staff rewards ahoy… ONLINE retailer Webjet announces 15% increase in net profit this year. Key to success in a down travel market? According to TravelTrends, it could be due to “substantial investment in quality initiatives and customer guarantees including the development of a net promoter score system, with associated technology and incentive arrangements, where all staff are measured and rewarded according to a sophisticated quality index.” Source: TravelTrends
87 to Life… Self-puffer from Minnesota Life: Minnesota Life Insurance Co. top ten US group life insurers claims “Respondents to customer surveys are 100 percent satisfied with the service they receive from Minnesota Life group insurance, giving the company the exceptional Net Promoter(R) Score of 87 percent.” Source: Self-Puff.
CoinStar Stick At 80: As reported here back in Feb, money-to-DVD-vendingster CoinStar reported NPS at 80. Don’t get too excited, but in Q2 Earnings they report NPS again as 80. At least they are consistent – both with NPS and income growth. Source: Seeking Alpha:
Travel Sector arriving late at 5: eDigitalResearch published a benchmark of customer loyalty in the UK online travel sector. Using a “net promoter score” to find which sites are most likely to be recommended through word of mouth, the study found the online travel sector as a whole achieved score of +5. For comparison purposes retail scored +27,finance +18, car manufacturing +7. Editors note: Looks like this based only on website experience, not purchase or travel experience, so be careful in benchmarking. Source: eDigital Presentation.
Bridgeway say 70% score a 10, but mislead on score… Legal softer Bridgeway claim in a self-puffer that 70% of clients give them highest Net Promoter Rating. In the press release, they say “Bridgeway measures customer feedback rigorously using the Net Promoter benchmark”. The release gives impression that they have a world-class score of 70. All it’s saying is that 70% of clients scored a 10. It could also mean that it has NPS down to 40% (if 30% of clients scored 6 or less…). For a company in the legal space, you would expect some more diligence – we’d like to know the truth! Source: Self-puffer
Adam:
This blog is excellent.
I find myself wondering whether these self-reported Net Promoter Scores are really meaningful and wonder whether we should be encouraging the companies to be a little more open about reporting how they arrived at them.
For example, is a 60% NPS at SAP good, great or terrible? While they claim it’s really good versus the competition, how do we know? Did they survey customers broadly in the market using a double-blind research methodology and controlling the sample to be certain they had a good mix of decision-makers in key roles at these companies with adequate sample for all the competitors? Or did this 60% come from a survey of their own customers? Was the sample collected randomly? Or was it customers who had recently renewed a contract or had a service experience? Did it include attritors? We don’t know.
I am thrilled that more and more companies are using the Net Promoter approach to creating closed loop feedback to help drive culture change. But I am also concerned that many companies just calculate a score and hope that means something. A little rigor in both measurement and in continuous improvement processes would be good for the community of Net Promoter adherents. Otherwise, Bridgeway may not be the only company on this post that merits the moniker of “self-puffer.”
Rob
NPS or any variation of it really needs to be spelled out exactly how it was obtained and what specifically it refers to for any comparisons to make sense. From what I have seen and read, very few organizations reveal their NPS score unless it is awe inspiring to begin with and of those that do, no one seems to offer any details as to how it was obtained or more importantly calculated At my organization we have over 350 NPS scores in real-time on any given day sliced by any number of variables. So, what does it all mean? To the outside world, our NPS could mean nothing more than a hill of beans. To be quite honest, in many respects I could care less as to what some other organization’s NPS score is. It’s a number and that’s about all you can really say about it in isolation. We use it to gauge our service performance and track that performance over time and identify areas for attention and improvement within the organization. The NPS of one particular office location or one particular product line or one particular vertical market viewed over time provides us with reason to dig deeper for root cause and subsequent action planning. My revealing an NPS metric will tell you very little about my organization or how you might experience doing business with us from a customer perspective. The best advice I can give for NPS is to keep it internal and don’t try to compare it outside of your organization where it has very little relevance if any.