Blogdom Buzz on Net Promoter

The Net Promoter scale is one of the most powerful single questions you can ask to measure customer satisfaction. Here's what it looks like:

Would you recommend this blog to a friend?

• Absolutely
• Likely
• Maybe
• Not Likley
• Never

There's a good bit of dialogue around the blogosphere on this, and some recent research.

Metrics should be actionable

A key objection is that the Net Promoter scale is not a actionable. It's certainly not diagnostic, but much of business is about maximizing the intersection of user needs and business objectives. Choose to balance between these objectives poorly, and the NP scale will reveal the affects of this choice. Diagnostic surveys, and correlations between them and NP score, can reveal the variety of ways customer SAT (satisfaction) might be improved.

Triangulation & Large Scale Business Practices

This process of correlation between metrics is called triangulation and is an essential piece of every analysts' toolkit. Triangulation helps you resist validity challenges and provides a useful testing ground for industry wisdom to your specific situation.

I worked with some very strong NP advocates at MSFT and while I never got the religion, I strongly value it's ability to distinguish good and bad profits. For instance, over monetizing search results pages would have increase a pretty core metric for any search engine, revenue. But revenue is closely tied to the size and frequency of the customer base. NP is a way to check gains in revenue to insure that in the longer run, the business strategy is not pyrrhic.