Once NPS data is flowing, the question of targets follows within weeks. Set them badly and you'll get score-begging, gaming and demotivated staff. Here's a practical approach to setting NPS targets — including the prerequisites that need to be true first, why local targets beat global ones, and the case for waiting longer than feels comfortable before setting any.
Reichheld's "one number you need to grow" has misled a lot of teams into building one-question NPS surveys. They don't generate enough information to drive change. Drawing on hundreds of NPS survey designs across B2B and B2C, here are the elements of an NPS survey that earns its response rate — including which questions to add, which to leave out, and whether you can change the scale.
Weighing a pig doesn't make it fatter. Measuring NPS doesn't lift NPS — you have to do something with the data. After 20 years working with companies on NPS and business improvement, here are the seven steps the organisations who actually improve their score follow consistently, starting with listening to the right customers at the right time.
"We tried Net Promoter and it didn't work." Almost every time someone says that to me, it comes back to a small number of fixable implementation mistakes — no C-level buy-in, treated as market research, no root cause analysis, score collected and nothing done. Here are the seven, and how to correct each one without restarting the program.
Simon Sinek built a TED talk on the power of "why". Toyota built quality systems on it. Toddlers run their entire education on it. Yet most NPS rollouts skip it entirely. Here's why "why" is the first question to ask before investing in Net Promoter — and the kinds of answers that should stop the program before it starts.
Without explicit governance, a transactional NPS program drifts back to whoever has the loudest objection. Best practice uses two specific groups — a Steering Committee and a Process Team — operating in a three-layer model. Here's the membership of each, what they're responsible for, and how the model holds the program steady through executive churn.