Complainers, cry-babies and whiners: Smoking out resistance to culture change

If you're not truly serious about changing your company's culture, don't even think about adopting the Net Promoter approach for achieving customer advocacy.  Just changing metrics accomplishes nothing but heartache and pain.  Yes, culture change is hard work.  It requires persistence, patience and perseverance.  But only by changing the culture do you create a sustainable focus on earning your customers' enthusiastic recommendations.

Bain Detractor emoticon available for download by registered site membersAttempts to change a company's culture invariably draw heavy resistance.  One of the most common and distracting forms of resistance often involves a debate about success metrics.  Resistance usually starts quite early in the change process, typically with objections to the validity, advisability or practicality of the new approach.

It can be tempting to dismiss those raising objections as complainers, cry-babies or whiners.  Yet, they sometimes raise important points worth attending to.  Well, okay, not very often.  But sometimes.

This is the first in a series of (probably three) posts focused on resistance to changing customer feedback metrics.  In this one, we'll just try to catalog some of the most frequently-raised objections.

Typical complaints and arguments

Do any of the following resonate?  Have you heard them in your organization? (Fill in the bracketed phrases with whatever is relevant to your company.)

• "We have years of experience with [our existing customer metric] and we would lose our baseline if we make a switch"
• "Our existing metric is very sophisticated.  It was developed by [reputable research company] based on [gazillions] of data points and has been shown to be statistically superior to [whatever other metric you like]."
• "I saw a study by [a guy who wrote a book or is a professor or gives speeches or has a blog] that says [new metric] is bunk and is statistically inferior to [what we're already using]."
• "[Market research firm we're using today] says the [new metric] is dangerous and bad.  They say their [proprietary customer loyalty or satisfaction model] is far superior."
• "We already measure [new metric].  It is the __th question in our customer satisfaction research survey already.  We don't need to change anything.  We'll just calculate a score in addition to [what we're already doing]."
• "The [new metric] is too volatile.  [Current metric] is very stable and doesn't change very much over time.  If we base our goals on [new metric], people will be really concerned when it changes."
• "The [new metric] is based on a [different scale than we currently use].  This new scale will confuse our customers."
• "The [new metric] is based on a [different scale than we currently use].  This new scale is flawed because a study by [some professor somewhere] showed that it wasn't as good as [what we currently use]."
• "We don't know how to drive [the new metric].  Setting goals on a metric we don't know how to change will cause [gazillions of problems]."
• "The [new metric] is just a score.  It doesn't tell us what to do.  We don't know why it changes.  So it is not actionable."

Sound familiar?  What have you heard?  Add yours to the comments below.

Next time:  Is it worth listening to the complainers?

Update on Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 12:26PM by Rob Markey

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a great story about California teachers objecting to publication of metrics gauging the improvement of their students year-over-year on standardized tests.  Different type of organization, similar issue.  Wall Street Journal article link

Comments

[Adam Ramshaw]

Rob,

Couldn't agree more. I've heard all of these reasons and more. It seems that they often stem from the market research group within the company.

In fact two specific articles drove me to write the following blog posts:
What's not wrong with Net Promoter Score.

Net Promoter Score: Deficient or Efficient measure?

I guess the empiricists (in which I include myself) will always be arguing with the theoreticians.

Adam Ramshaw