Steve Jobs never asked for Customer feedback. Except this one time!

Steve Jobs was famous for saying that he never asked for Customer feedback. But when Ron Johnson was tasked with creating the Apple Retail store experience he needed a way to benchmark Customer loyalty. That same question had occupied the minds of management consulting firm Bain & Co. They found that many customer surveys failed to measure this important metric, and so they began a journey to develop a single question that could act as a customer loyalty benchmark. We'll see how Ron fared later in this post.

The first thing they did was to seek out survey questions that had the strongest correlation with a repeat purchase. They examined thousands of surveys and found that just one question could accomplish this. That question is: Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?

This is what the Bain & Co survey question looks like. It's an 11 point scale from 0 to 10.

The survey starts with 0 rather than 1, since the number 1 can represent a "pole position" for some.

In analyzing the results, Bain decided to group responses into three distinct categories. The first group, known as Detractors, marked the answer 0-6. These guys don't like you. The next group (answers of 7 or 8) and are known as Passives. They have no energy for your company. The final group really do like you and responded with a 9 or 10. These guys will recommend you and are most likely to repeat purchase.

Your score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. Passives are discarded as they neither like or dislike you -- but only for the purpose of the score calculation. Bain also recommends that a text question be added, so that context can be derived from the measurement with Sentiment analysis.

So now we have a score that can measure customer loyalty. It's called the Net Promoter® Score, or NPS for short. What's more, it's a number we can trust because it's an external measure and it's a number used by our peers too. Every year Bain & Co publish a survey of scores so you can see how you measure up. Top firms like Apple, Amazon, and Costco score in the high 70's That's the number to beat !

The 11-point scale is nothing new, however. Thomas Juster came up with the same scale in 1966 as part of a buyer intention study. What's new is that more and more leading firms are adopting this measure as their benchmark and employing tools that react quickly to feedback.

NPS is now available on the SENSORPRO platform so you can start to measure NPS for your firm using your subscriber data right away. The app has NPS as a standard question type and does the calculations for you. And because it’s integrated, you can feed your email list to quickly send email campaigns for Detractors and Promoters. Instead of blasting your subscribers with the same message, now you can respond more appropriately to their feedback.