Читать книгу The Wallet Allocation Rule - Aksoy Lerzan - Страница 10

Before discussing the two most common problems, it is important for managers to understand that whether your firm tracks satisfaction, recommend intention, NPS, or some other commonly used customer survey–derived metric, you are unlikely to get managerially relevant differences in terms of their relationship to growth. This is because these metrics are actually measuring the same underlying construct – specifically, how positively customers feel toward the brand.37 So the argument that one metric works significantly better in linking to growth is not only erroneous but has been conclusively proved to be false in all large-scale peer-reviewed scientific investigations.38

Our own research clearly and easily demonstrated the fallacy of the “my metric is best” argument. We examined the NPS, which was sold as “the single most reliable indicator of a company's ability to grow.”39 To see whether that was indeed the case, we chose to examine the same data used to make this claim. Specifically, we replicated the charts used in the book The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld, the creator of NPS. These charts were used to demonstrate the performance of NPS in linking to growth. Because these industries were specifically selected for presentation in the book, they would clearly be expected to serve as the best examples of the relationship between NPS and growth.40

Without question, the strength of the relationship between NPS and business growth presented in these charts was impressive. But was it superior to other metrics? To find out, we used the data from these charts to compare NPS levels with customer satisfaction, specifically the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Reichheld asserted that the ACSI was examined and found to have a 0.00 correlation to growth.41 (A zero correlation means that there is absolutely no connection to growth whatsoever.) Therefore, our examination should have given every advantage to NPS.

The results of our investigation, however, unambiguously proved that the claims of NPS's superiority were false. The left side of Figure 1.2 shows the NPS charts presented in The Ultimate Question. For the charts on the right, we simply substituted the ACSI levels for NPS for the same time periods. Surprisingly, the ACSI tended to perform better despite the fact that these same charts were presented as prime examples of the strength of the NPS-growth relationship.

Figure 1.2 A Comparison of Net Promoter Score and the American Customer Satisfaction Index Using Net Promoter Data from the Book The Ultimate Question

It is important to note that these charts do not prove that either the ACSI or NPS are strong predictors of growth. These examples simply allowed us to test the claims of superiority by comparing the original NPS data with the ACSI. In fact, there were serious problems with using this method as evidence of a relationship to growth. The growth rates presented in The Ultimate Question included time periods that occurred before the NPS time frames (in other words, the linkage was to the past, not the future). As a result, it does not represent a valid test of the relationship between the ACSI or NPS and business growth. That requires a rigorous scientific investigation, which looks at firms in numerous industries over time.

Fortunately, as noted earlier, that has already been done – several times – by leading academic researchers and reported in some of the best peer-reviewed scientific journals. The results from all of these studies find the same poor relationship to growth. To quote professors Van Doorn, Leeflang, and Tijs, “We find that all metrics perform…equally poor for predicting future sales growth and gross margins as well as current and future net cash flows The predictive capability of customer metrics, such as NPS, for future company growth rates is limited.”42

Now we explain why this is so.