Analytic expert Larry Freed’s admirable passion for improving companies’ understanding of customer satisfaction and experience emerges in his clear, useful and somewhat curious treatise. He champions the Word-of-Mouth Index (WoMI) of customer satisfaction at great length. If WoMI is as superior as he indicates, a few examples might suffice, so the energy he spends condemning the alternative, NPS, feels a bit excessive. But Freed’s focus on understanding customers’ perspective, establishing accurate metrics, gathering precise data and putting it in a meaningful context proves relevant and necessary. getAbstract recommends his book to those who need to make informed decisions on measuring and profiting from customer satisfaction.
Measure Once
You need a new set of metrics to measure your customers’ satisfaction with your business. Today’s constantly increasing rate of change produces new evolutionary pressures on businesses. New metrics can help your company adapt to this ferocious rate of change. This matters, especially since technological advances make it easier for your customers to switch to your competition, learn more about their choices, and share their good or bad experiences with your firm in countless venues. The power of the individual voice has multiplied. You must listen.
You also need new metrics because the limits of the standard Net Promoter Score, (NPS) are growing increasingly apparent. NPS once was a big step forward, clearly better than previous, haphazard calculations of customer satisfaction. NPS starts by asking a single question: “On a 0-to-10 scale, how likely is it that you would recommend us (or this product/service/brand) to a friend or colleague?” The next question asks why the customers responded as they did. The NPS “10-point scale” measures respondents’ feelings quickly and compares ratings easily. Frederick Reichheld, the scale’s originator, explained that...
Larry Freed, author of Managing Forward, is CEO of ForeSee, an analytics firm focusing on customer experience.
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