Recently, there was a conference on Net Promoter Scores here in San Francisco. Bruce Temkin, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research (and upcoming speaker at MX 2009) put together two nice “state of the NPS” posts.

(Net Promoter Scores are a customer-loyalty metric, developed by Fred Reichheld. Essentially, you get your NPS by asking your customers whether or not they would recommend your product or service to a friend.)

My Closing Thoughts On Net Promoter

“Q: Where is Net Promoter Score (NPS) at in its lifecycle?

I’d say NPS is entering early adolescence. The excitement and exuberance of a single measure for customer loyalty is giving way to some second guessing and rethinking. Companies are learning that it’s not as easy as just using NPS, it takes hard work to figure out how to best use NPS to improve customer experience. The NPS conference, though, was at the right level. Rather than promote the greatness of the NPS metric, Recihheld led the charge around figuring out how to use it as a catalyst for change.”

Fred Reichheld Gives A Net Promoter Update

“The score, NPS, maybe was a mistake. It’s not the score, it’s what you do with the score to make promoters.”