In this final post on resistance to changing customer metrics, we consider some of the tips for responding to the objections. Our first post catalogued the objections, the second one tried to ferret out kernels of truth among the complaints, and this final one provides some proven techniques for addressing the complaints. This couldn't possibly be a comprehensive list. But it is the distilled experience of our clients and members of the NPS Loyalty Forum. I bet you have other advice, too.
A few tips for addressing metric-based resistance to change:
- First, make sure they have their facts right. Many of the purported "studies" that attack the value of Net Promoter Scores or other metrics simply don't provide factual evidence supporting their claims. Others are fundamentally flawed. The most popular of all of them actually supports Bain's research under an inflammatory and provocative headline. (See related post: Don't just read the text - pore over the data. Also, you should check out some of the other resources, including other blog posts, located on the Additional resources page of this blog.)
- Bring people back to the primary objective: Taking actions that will earn your target customers' loyalty (both behaviorally, and emotionally).
- Few employees understand complicated, proprietary satisfaction or loyalty indices. Fewer still find them motivating and energizing. And they rarely perceive them as actionable. This is as true in the C-suite as it is among hourly customer-facing employees. It has nothing to do with the intelligence of the employees, and everything to do with complexity and opacity of proprietary models.
- Sorting customers into Promoters, Passives and Detractors is more important than calculating an aggregate or average score. It is intuitive. It motivates action. It generally makes sense to anyone in the organization. If you can do that pretty reliably, you have a great metric. It's no more complicated than that.
- Learning why a customer became a Promoter or a Detractor, what could be done to improve the relationship, and how this compares to what they expect or get from competitors is even more important for unlocking action. Get people past the numbers and focusing on how to LEARN from the feedback. For a great example of this, see our video about how Schwab uses closed loop feedback.
- Focus on the operational improvements that closed-loop feedback and learning can enable, rather than the statistical precision of one metric over another. One of the key reasons to adopt the Net Promoter approach is to enable service recovery with customers, fast learning at the front line and to motivate systematically better product, pricing, policy, process and people decisions. You can't achieve that with a market research approach that takes months to execute, process, digest and make its way, in report form, back to the front line and middle management. Few proprietary, index based approaches to customer feedback accomodate this.
- Remind your colleagues that bombing a customer with lengthy surveys that don't result in visible action is a form of disrespect, eroding your relationship. A good closed loop feedback system is short, respectful of the customer's time, doesn't force the customer into your framework for evaluation, and results in visible action that reinforces the customer's decision to provide the feedback.
- If all else fails, give up on the new metric (for now) and focus on creating robust closed-loop feedback. In the end, the organization will be forced by both customers and employees to simplify the metric and the data collection. This is a longer, more painful path. But don't make it a religious war. Leave that to the academics.
What tactics have you employed to address resistance to changing customer metrics? Which ones worked? Which ones would you do differently next time? Add your experience to the comments!