Good service? That’ll be 9 out of 10 please.

As someone in the business, it’s always nice to see companies trying to engage with their customers. But I can’t remember the last time I was actually offended by a company’s efforts to hear my views, as was the case on a recent visit to a large DIY emporium (who shall remain nameless).

Initially I was delighted to see prominent till receipt space being used to encourage feedback – a nice subtle approach, well incentivised, making me feel valued as a customer…but then one little sentence ruined it all:

“If you had a good experience then score 9 or 10”

I’m not sure what upset me more – the sheer gall of telling customers what score they should give, or that all of sudden ‘good’ service is now a 9/10 score!

Reading between the lines I suspect some NPS linked performance target, but it can’t be healthy urging customers to give a certain score.

Inflated scores are no good to anyone (unless, of course, you’re an area manager pocketing a performance related bonus) – for those working with customer satisfaction data and making decisions off the back of it, the results could be far reaching – a misleadingly rosy picture of the firm’s performance vs. competitors, service issues underplayed or missed altogether, misallocated resources – who knows.

I wonder if the request to score 9 or 10 is the result of us Brits considering 7 and 8 to be good going on a ten-point scale, but whatever your views on NPS, we all have to live with its legacy, still deeply rooted in many companies’ customer loyalty programmes.

As my colleague Karen recently commented, we’re seeing an increasing trend of customers being less likely to recommend brands, while remaining satisfied with the service received, so while I take my hat off to the company in question for encouraging feedback, I’d urge firms to think about their motives for doing so, and to try and understand shifts in the numbers, not be afraid of them.
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