Your customer feedback program is humming along, reports going out, scores flat, nothing changing. That's almost always a root-cause-analysis gap, not a data gap. Here's how to run a 5 Whys session properly, with a worked example and the gotchas that quietly undermine the technique in practice.
Relationship NPS makes a great CEO presentation slide and a mediocre operational tool. Transactional NPS reverses both. Choose the wrong one for your situation and the program quietly fails to drive change. Here's the pros and cons of each approach, the timing and content differences, and the conditions that decide which one your business needs first.
Digital agency Volume scores +60 on NPS, ahead of most of their industry peers, in striking distance of Apple's 71 and Amazon's 76. In an industry where trusted client relationships decide everything, that score is doing work. Here's how a small UK agency uses NPS to actively seek out and fix flaws other firms paper over.
Academic critiques of NPS keep arriving, and a couple of them are worth taking seriously. Most aren't. Here's a walk through one widely-cited paper that gets the logic, and the methodology, backwards, and what it tells us about the wider debate.
Six things have to be true at the start of a Net Promoter rollout, or you'll end up adding a question to a survey and calling it done. Senior buy-in, treating NPS as a business process not a KPI, explicit business linkage, target timing, cross-functional expertise and budget. Here's what each one looks like in practice, and what fails when one is missing.
What separates Zappos, Amazon and Southwest from the unmemorable companies in the same industries isn't doctoral-level statistics, sophisticated survey questions or charismatic leadership. The actual difference is the boring one: they do something with the feedback. Here's what "do something" actually looks like, step by step, across innovation, immediate action, sales opportunity and service recovery.
