Prefer the Dutch version of this blog? Check out the blog on Marketingfacts.
I’ve never been an NPS fan and the CES is still too new, so I wanted to check it for myself. And how about customer satisfaction (CSat)? Well, nobody seems to think it’s sexy anymore… This blog therefore contains a passionate and substantiated plea to make us love customer satisfaction again.
Not an NPS fan
The reason for me not being a fan of NPS steering is the fact that it produces inexplicable scores. Over the years, I’ve seen examples of an NPS which is -10 in Q1, +18 in Q2 and back to +1 in Q3. A further example, which concreted my resolve to start a lobby to at least end NPS steering, was the following. Two surveys had been conducted within exactly the same customer group, by the same research agency, at an interval of no more than 2 months. Both surveys reported exactly the same score for customer satisfaction, accurate to one decimal place. In terms of the NPS, one survey scored -5 and the other survey +15. You got me, good luck using that for steering…
And not (yet) a fan of CES either
In the Customer experience program at the Delta Lloyd Group, we’ve also been looking at the impact of CES in recent months. We have found the CES to have hardly any predictive value at all when it comes to loyalty. This study has shown NPS and CSat(!) to be equally strong predictors of loyalty. When regarding CES separately, it seems to have impact but becomes totally irrelevant once you add CSat and MPS to the equation.
And still a C-SAT fan!
And so CSat proves itself to be a consistently good predictor of loyalty. And equally important perhaps: customer satisfaction is an extremely stable metric, versus NPS. A gradual yet stable increase becomes apparent if you simply perform well from the customer’s point of view. I can hear you thinking: yes, but aren’t there are many surveys indicating that satisfied customers are still walking out the door? Indeed there are, but not the customers who score you an 8 or more. CSat is therefore not a poor predictor of loyalty, you simply need to perform extremely well in order to bind customers to your organization. And yes, that’s not as simple as it sounds. Instead of searching for other metrics, I believe that we need to do our best to perform our moments of truth, in order to score that 8 or higher!
