Wheels falling off Net Promoter Score?

Vorige week vond ik een interessante post van Justin Kirby op VBMAnet op Ning. VBMA is de Viral en Buzzmarketing Association die tegenwoordig als social netwerk vrij toegankelijk is op Ning. Justin is initiator van deze community voor professionals op het gebied van viral en buzz, maar bekender als auteur van Connected Marketing. De volledige post, met toestemming doorgeplaatst, voor degene die nog niet lid zijn van VBMAnetwork:

For those of you in the Word of Mouth arena I thought you might be interested in the current debate about the robustness of the Net Promoter Score. Tim Keiningham, Bruce Cooil, Tor W. Andreassen (all on this network) et al have recently challenged the validity of the Net Promoter Score, which you can read here: A Critique of the Net Promoter Metric

Dr Alain Samson (also on this network) has commented on the recent debate here. I also interviewed Alain for a podcast, which touches upon some of the issued raised in the criticisms and you can listen to the podcast here.

I’ve also interviewed Tim Keiningham and will sharing this all with you later this week. In the meantime, Tim has let me know that Managing Service Quality has just released a paper by him and his colleagues that investigates other aspects of the original Net Promoter research, entitled, “The Value of Different Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Metrics in Predicting Customer Retention, Recommendation, and Share-of-Wallet.” Tim has told me that this research examines different customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics and tests their relationship to customer loyalty behaviors. The goal was to test the robustness of the customer-level analysis conducted by Reichheld and Satmetrix, which served as the foundation of their Net Promoter research. Contrary to Reichheld’s assertions, the results indicate that recommend intention alone will not suffice as a single predictor of customers’ future loyalty behaviors. Use of multiple indicators instead of a single predictor model performs significantly better in predicting customer recommendations and retention.

Managing Service Quality is making the paper available for free for download at the following URL:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentType=Article&contentId=1615783

Taking these finds in conjunction with the findings of their research reported in the Journal of Marketing regarding the relationship between Net Promoter and growth, call into question the robustness of the entire analysis conducted by Reichheld.

In een reactie voegt Justin toe op het uitgebreide verhaal in Journal of Marketing: “In some ways it’s easy to see why business managers were drawn to the NPS like moths to a flame. In a world of increasing complexity it’s reassuring to think that you simply need to trust your intuition, thin slice and only worry about One Number Your Need To Grow.
At the same time, the apparent link between advocacy and growth made the NPS a blessing for anyone trying to convince companies to adopt more bottom-up approaches to marketing and other business innovation … it’s such a simple tool.
As such, I hope that Tim (Keiningham) and colleagues, and those that have been doing research that supports Reichheld’s research, find some synthesis here. It would be a great shame if the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.”

Binnenkort ook hier zijn interview met Tim Keiningham.