Net Promoter Score Alternatives

Customer feedback is critical to the success of a business and although investing in a customer feedback program is the smart thing to do, figuring out which program to invest in can be tricky. Invest in the wrong one, and you could end up wasting a lot of time, money and resources.

There is no one answer for which one is the best customer feedback method. And coming from someone who caters to NPS® users, this is complete honesty. 

It’s definitely worth knowing a bit about what each of the customer feedback alternatives can achieve, as they each have their own strengths. Well most of them do, some of them don’t really have a great reputation for success. 

Before we dive into the alternatives to NPS, let’s properly define NPS so that the following alternatives can be easily compared. 

Net Promoter Score

This customer feedback score ranging from 0 to 10 asks customers how likely they are to recommend a company’s products or services to others. The resulting calculation is then used a s aproxy to gauge customer satisfaction and overall loyalty to the brand. This calculation also has been shown to correlate directly with business growth and revenue.

Customer Effort Score(CES)

A single number that measures how much effort a customer has to go through to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased or a question answered. According to a recent Harvard study that was based on empirical research in the US, Customer Effort Score is the worst performing Customer Feedback System. 

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This is probably the most popular metric used to measure how satisfied a customer was with a particular transaction or interaction. It’s measured on a scale of 1-3, 1-5 or 1-7 and can be used to track customer satisfaction throughout the customer journey at various touch points. It’s great because it allows a business to pinpoint where, when and why dissatisfaction occurred and therefore how to remedy it. 

Net Revenue Score 

This isn’t an official customer feedback scoring system, but was penned as something that should be of greater significance by John Greathouse, a start-up consultant from California. Although he writers about the importance of Net Revenue Score, there is as yet no validated calculation for net revenue sco