The simple metric that’s taking over big business
Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley sees his firm’s Net Promoter Score every time he looks at the management dashboard on his screen. Bill Barton, CEO of California Closets, checks his company’s score first thing every morning and has built his highly successful business on it. Intuit product managers check their score every day and have been using it since it was invented 17 years ago. Some 40,000 employees use it at IBM, and the executive who oversees its use, Michelle Peluso, says, “It’s more than a metric. One could use the word ‘religion.’”
All this devotion for a particular measure of customer sentiment? It may seem bizarre, but the phenomenon is real and growing. At least two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 use the Net Promoter Score, including most or all of the financial service companies, airlines, telecom companies, retailers, and others. Quietly, steadily, without anyone much noticing, NPS has moved into the C-suites of most big companies and the owners’ offices of thousands of small ones—extending its reach deeply and broadly through the global economy. Skeptics and enemies have largely been vanquished. It is now used in every developed economy and many emerging ones. It’s pored over in all types of organizations, not just businesses; in Britain, the National Health Service uses it. As organizations everywhere obsess over the customer experience, NPS’s advance across industries and countries is, if anything, accelerating.
If you are somehow unfamiliar with the Net Promoter Score, you have nonetheless been touched by it—guaranteed. That’s because you have received an email or a phone call asking the one simple question at the foundation of the NPS empire: “On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend [Company Name] to a friend or colleague?” You were probably asked a second question also: “Why did you give the answer you gave?”
