If you happened to catch last night’s episode of Gruen Planet on the ABC you would have seen Consumer Psychologist Adam Ferrier describing the Net Promoter Score. It is probably one of the most simplified explanations I’ve heard and it went a little like this:

Take the number of people promoting the brand and subtract the number of people detracting the brand and express that as a percentage. This equals your Net Promoter Score and can be correlated to brand growth.

The enormous amount of customer feedback data generated by Net Promoter ¹ (Closed-Loop Feedback, Customer Insight & Action, Voice of the Customer etc) programs generates a very interesting challenge: "how do you separate out the signal from the noise?"

The corporate world has long known the power of the voice of the customer.  This started decades ago with traditional paper feedback forms but has evolved to include Net Promoter programs (that measure advocacy), customer satisfaction surveys and online communities that all give your customers a voice.  Now thanks to the prevalence of social media in Australia, listening to the blogosphere can inform you almost instantly of your successes and failings.  And, if integrated with your CRM system, y

As practitioners in the customer feedback game, we are only too aware of customer voices falling on deaf ears. And with the explosion of social media the imbalance between "user generated content" vs "enterprise generated action" has become the herculean challenge. Which is why any mechanism that enables an organisation to listen more effectively is, well frankly, gold.

In our NPS self-improvement efforts we read a lot of literature on the intersection of social networks and marketing and especially we take note of studies that use data from mobile telephone operators. Why? 

Like a lot of apparently good ideas, the 'devil is in the detail' with Net Promoter Programs...

The good news, however, is that there is a developing body of public NPS knowledge and to some degree an "open source" approach fostered by the originators of the Net Promoter concept - Frederich Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix Inc. The Satmetrix NPS certification course attended recently by this student is one example of this.

We have been lucky enough to work with a number of retailers recently and the research and campaign results have given us a start to a growing library of marketing 'rules of thumb' that are proven to get the tills ringing. 

A summary is below, but if you are interested in the details behind these learnings, please feel free to ask here, or directly through email, twitter etc...

Learnings

An explosive mix of social media, online communities, text analytics & visualisation technologies together with Net Promoter Score (NPS) programs is presenting marketers with the opportunity to deliver on the type of Customer Relationship Management vision promised 10-15 years ago. In my humble opinion of course... but as practitioners, we are now seeing some of the more innovative companies closing in on this position.
 

At the risk of repeating myself, consider the following statements:

1. Never before have brands had so much data about their customers or capabilities to analyse this data
2. Never before have we had customers so willing to interact with brands and each other online (social media, user generated content)
3. Yet, we are the least connected that we will ever be...