The Blog

There's a recurring critique that NPS doesn't actually measure anything real. It's a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a defensive one. Here's a pragmatic case for using a methodology that works, even when no one can fully explain why.

Customer feedback isn't a thermometer reading, it comes back tangled with halo effects, three-year-old memories and irrelevant tangents. That doesn't make it useless. Here's why messy data is still rich data, and how to stop "the data isn't clean enough" being used as a reason not to act.

Zappos pizza deliveries, Nordstrom snow chains, the customer-service folklore is great theatre, but it's terrible strategy for most businesses. Inflated expectations are expensive to meet and impossible to sustain. Here's why those legendary stories aren't actually aimed at you, and what to deliver instead.

Customer satisfaction surveys often show stable scores while churn quietly climbs, and most teams can't explain the gap. nib health funds' data, analysed properly, shows NPS is roughly three times more sensitive at predicting churn than CSAT, and Detractors are 1.5 times more likely to leave than Promoters. Here's the analysis.

Sharing live customer feedback openly inside the organisation triggers anxiety at every level, what if the comments are scathing, what if staff react badly. nib and MYOB do it anyway, and credit transparency as a key reason their NPS programs work. Here's how to roll out feedback transparency thoughtfully, and the unexpected benefits (self-correction, validated frontline insight) that follow.

Carlson Restaurants runs about 900 outlets including TGI Fridays, a saturated industry where loyalty is genuinely hard. Their CFO-level NPS lead sat down to walk through four hard-won insights from the rollout: the threshold below which the score doesn't matter, why consistency beats spikes, the grand unified theory, and the case for driving behaviour not the number.