A few years ago I was presenting the results of a B2B customer survey. It provided surprising insight into how customers were using a service provided by my client. The survey was a great success, enabling us to refine campaign creative and messaging, build campaigns on the insight and compare self-reported usage to actual usage. What was the first question I was asked at the end of the presentation? What was the Net Promoter Score?
Frederick Reichheld wrote about the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in Harvard Business Review in 2003. It has spawned an industry complete with a website, certification courses, conferences and papers for and against the methodology. The basic idea behind NPS is that growth by an organization, brand, or product is correlated with the percentage of its customers who would recommend them.
Per the HBR article, it requires the following survey question to be asked: “How likely is it that you would recommend [brand or company X] to a friend or colleague?” The possible responses should range from zero to ten. Zero means not at all likely to recommend. Five is neutral. Ten means extremely likely to recommend.
This is where my friend’s survey question went wrong. As per my earlier post, both of the NPS questions used a scale from 1 to 10. With an even numbered scale (in this case 10 choices), there is no true midpoint. In addition, I noted affect of the words used to describe endpoints of the scale earlier.
While many marketers I know have heard of NPS, they are less familar with the research challenging the NPS methodology. If you are interested in learning more, here is a recent article from Quirk’s Marketing Research Review available from Business Over Broadway.