Net Promoter Scores

I was recommended The Ultimate Question by our investors earlier this year. It is an easy read but not less compelling for being so.

It deals with asking customers - would you recommend the to a friend? A scale of 0-10 is provided and all scores less than or equal to six are deducted from all scores greater than or equal to nine.

The book is originated from a survey undertaken in the US and suggests that the strongest companies would have a net promoter score (the result of the sum above) of 70 or higher. When I initially looked at this number I was a little incredulous but the book includes the survey results. That companies in the US can achieve such a mark I think underlines the importance of customer service in the US and how it is actually rewarded.

The results in the UK are a lot lower. Thanks to Simon Andrews in his Big Picture blog for alerting me to the LSE survey for the UK. The report is excellent. No surprises that the mobile operators (the red bar in the chart) return hopeless scores.

This chart (which is more legible in the report) shows that O2 is the best of a bad bunch with T-Mobile bringing up the rear. This is not really that surprising (though the survey was in 2006 and I observe the laggard getting better and the leader getting worse recently) but I am interested that the sector as a whole is so far off the average for the whole UK.

Returning to a previous theme: if the operator wants to be more than a bitpipe - they need a BIG shake-up. Customers need to love them and they oh-so-clearly do not.