It looks like we may be involved in a 'bottom-up' NPS project shortly and this has set me to refreshing my working knowledge of Net Promoter Scores, customer satisfaction measurement and Customer Experience Management (CEM).

'Bottom-up NPS'?

One of the best resources for understanding the difference between bottom-up and top-down NPS can be found on the NPS official site (provided by Satmetrix). The case studies are particularly useful to practitioners, with the Allianz presentation being one of my favourites, though the Aviva entry has a more evocative title; "You don't Fatten the Pig by Weighing it..."

Simplistically, bottom-up NPS requires a focus on individual customers at moments of truth in the service experience. It involves asking enough customers as close in time to the experience as possible -

•     the NPS question ('Would you recommend to family and friends?") and
•     the open-ended "Why did you give us that score?"

so that you can isolate the key drivers of bad and good experiences and fix and reinforce them respectively.

The closer the sample is to a census the better, but if you have ever been annoyed by the ubiquitous 'Do you have a FlyBuys card?' question when grocery shopping you will understand that with overuse the NPS question can itself become a driver of dissatisfaction. Marketing's own uncertainty principle. So a statistical middle ground is required.

The results of the actions taken to fix / reinforce experience drivers are monitored through the on-going use of this bottom-up measurement - it is not intended to be a once a quarter snapshot, rather an analog gauge of how well you are pleasing your customers.

This is contrasted to the 'top-down' measurement of NPS, which is more common (also easier to do) and controversially a predictor of relative company growth. A good example is industry wide studies such as this one.  Top down NPS does not pass my, 'Specifically what do we have to do Monday morning?' test, bottom-up NPS is all about answering that exact question. You should do both, and the 2 should meet in the middle of course.

For years now I have been a (eyes wide open) fan of SERVQUAL as a useful tool for guiding customer experience management (CEM) initiatives. This is partly because the developers of this instrument started with an analysis of the drivers of customer experience satisfaction and then set out to measure the gaps in perceived importance and actual delivery - for both customer and organisation.

With the clear objective to make sure organisations focussed actions on the areas of CEM that were either most important to customers or seen as most broken by customers. I like the action emphasis.

In the analysis of drivers they discovered that customer trust is a prerequisite to a good experience, trust built by high levels of reliability (always keep your promises). Here are the generic dimensions of service measured by SERVQUAL (aka RATER);

Now as we run the bottom-up NPS initiative and mine verbatim customer comments for drivers of customer 'promotion' and 'detraction' it will be really interesting to see if these drivers line up with the SERVQUAL dimensions. We routinely mine customer contributions for 'actionable themes' in our online communities but there may be a short-cut here.

A CEM approach that;

• starts with SERVQUAL to identify the largest and most important service shortfalls, currently and periodically
• confirms improvements as these are addressed through bottom-up NPS
• fine tunes process changes through bottom-up NPS
• measures the impact on brand perception with top-down NPS

May make the successful project path just that little bit shorter and more direct for your customers.

What do you think? Have you tried mixing these two instruments?