An increasing number of organizations are monitoring the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS metric. While NPS can help an organization get a sense of where it stands with its customers, measuring NPS – by itself – is no guarantee of improved success in performing for customers. However a process based approach to measuring, modeling, and improving customers’ experience can produce significant results.
Just for clarity on the use of NPS, let’s recall that it is based on having customers answer one simple question – “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” on a scale of 0 through 10. Then, to calculate NPS, the organization takes the percent of respondents that answered with a 9 or 10 (Promoters) and subtracts the percent of customers who answered with 0 through 6 (Detractors) to arrive at a NPS. Let’s be clear that NPS may be important to companies – but not important to customers. Customers don’t care much about scores such as NPS. They don’t care about how a company is organized – or what IT systems it operates. They simply care about the ease of doing business, whether they received good value for money, and whether they received what they ordered on time and defect free.
While monitoring NPS may be useful tactic for some organizations, a process based approach to customer experience can do more to help employees simplify and improve the task of delighting customers. It all begins with measuring how the company is performing for customers in areas such as the ease of search and placing orders, whether customers received what they ordered on time and defect free, and how the company has performed in resolving customer inquiries “first time right.” These set of so called “outside-in” metrics that were introduced over a decade ago in my book: Business Process Management is a Team Sport: Play It to Win!
Some organizations find it challenging to see their business from the customers’ point of view. In speaking with executives recently at a regional electric utility, when I asked them to describe their business they essentially said that they plan, engineer, build, operate, maintain, bill, and collect for their service to customers. This was totally an “inside-out” view. Customers would have said that they view their relationship with their electric utility provider differently. What would be important to customers includes ease of ordering, on-time and first time right installation of service, quality of ongoing service, speed of restoration in case of an outage and prompt, first time right responses to questions and complaints. When an organization begins to measure what’s important to customers it can serve to shift management attention from how the company is organized to the critical business processes that deliver value added services to customers. The concept of “prefect orders” originally popularized by the Supply Chain council can be extended to other areas as shown in Table 1 below for the above mentioned regional electric utility.
| Key Performance Area | Metrics | Related Business Processes |
| Ease of ordering | First time right | From inquiry to order |
| Installation | On time (when promised) and first time right | From order to installation |
| Reliability | % of up time | From operate to maintain |
| Restoration | On time (when promised) and first time right | From outage to restoration |
| Responsiveness | Prompt and first time right | From inquiry to resolution |
Table 1: Example of Metrics and Business Processes
Measuring what matters to customers is just the first step. It can bring attention to the areas that most need improvement in order to delight customers and improve customer experience. Then, the organization has to engage in modeling, analysis and design to improve performance. This again requires an “outside-in” perspective, as well as a compelling case for change and attention to pacing. The integration of Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) in the design of new processes can be a set of powerful tools to improve performance at customer touching moments of truth. However, many organizations sub-optimize the use of BPMS by using mainly the process engine tool in the suite and not paying sufficient attention to the use of other tools such as the rules engine, analytics, document management and forums, portals and other related tools.
There’s nothing wrong with measuring NPS as long as an organization understands that it is simply a thermometer – and perhaps not the most accurate one at that. Measuring and taking action on what matters to customers is what is needed.
