Net Promoter ‘not in competition with MR'

UK-- The Net Promoter Score, which measures customer loyalty by asking how likely a person is to recommend a company to a friend, can live alongside conventional market research, according to Laura Brooks, the co-author of a new book on the method, Laura Brooks.

Customer loyalty specialist Satmetrix and Bain & Company's Fred Reichheld introduced the method in 2003 and published a book on it, ‘The Ultimate Question', in 2006. But Net Promoter has faced criticism from some sections of the research world for being simplistic and failing to live up to its claim of being linked to revenue growth.

On the launch of the sequel, ‘Answering the Ultimate Question', Brooks told Research that businesses should not feel they have to choose between Net Promoter and market research.

Brooks, vice president of research and consulting at Satmetrix, said Net Promoter is “not in competition with market research”, but is intended to be adopted by businesses as an ongoing operational programme. In contrast with other customer loyalty programmes, it is intended to be a company-wide process, as opposed to providing information to separate departments, she said.

In response to the criticism the method has received from some quarters of the research industry, Brooks said: “Many arguments come from people that have a vested interest in their own methodology.”

The new book has been written as a handbook to give companies practical advice on using Net Promoter and dedicates a chapter to measuring word-of-mouth marketing, which Brooks is “very excited” about.

She said that the next stage for Net Promoter users would be to try and understand the monetary value of customer referrals. “One referral could be worth $100 for a phone company but hundreds of thousands of dollars for a different sort of business,” she said. “A lot of companies have not tried to quantify word of mouth, they think that one voice doesn't matter – but that's not true”.

Author: James Verrinder

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