A wide, though rarely spoken of, position in the tech industry says that customer satisfaction scores are BS. We’ve known for some time that they simply have become binary and reflect whether the customer is upset with you at the moment. There is no lasting meaning and the ratings are more closely tied to the mood of the respondent than any empirical vendor ranking. There is no penalty for scoring a vendor badly, customers don’t want to waste time on a call from someone if they don’t score the vendor high enough unless really pissed off, and vendors game the scores, often providing incentives if the customer provides a positive review. As a result, the smart vendors have largely switched to #NetPromoterScore (NPS), which looks more at customer behavior and whether that customer will, and does, advocate a vendor. This system, when done right, is far more granular because it looks at the behavior the vendor actually wants, advocacy, and looks in detail at the reasons behind the score, providing a far more granular sense ranging from services to features for what motivates a customer to go beyond using and not complaining about a product, to recommending the product to friends and peers. Of the companies that I follow that use this metric, #EMC, now #DellTechnologies, stands out as turning this into a CEO-level effort, which passed largely intact from #JoeTucci to #MichaelDell, who assigned the most powerful woman in his company, EVP and Chief Customer Officer Karen Quintos, to the effort, showcasing how highly he valued it. I was briefed this week on HP Inc’s methodology and, though it is different, its approach actually has advantages over Dell’s for a company like #HP Inc., which is far less complex than EMC was or Dell Technologies is. In short, this isn’t about which tool is better overall, but how a different approach may be better for a far less complex company.
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