Habits at Work discussion

This is an easy read, that makes one point: Most customer satisfaction surveys are nonsense and often they're even harmful. But if you want to understand how customers really feel and aim for a target that will drive growth, then calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS), being the difference between the number of people who are prepared to actively refer you to friends and family and those who would not, or who may even be actively talking trash about your company. How do you know who is who? Ask them the one important question: "How likely, on a scale of 1 to 10, are you to recommend company ABC to a friend, colleague or family member?". 10 being very likely, 0 being not at all likely. 9s and 10s are promoters, 7s and 8s are passive and need some work, 6 and below are detractors and are probably generating "bad profits" for your company. Bad profits are real nominal profits, but adjusted for the costs of new business not gotten due to their influence, turn into negative actual profits. This is particularly the case because of the fact that people usually require something like 5 positive referrals to overcome one negative referral. Think how many times you would have to hear a good referral about a doctor before choosing one that your friend said was terrible! The rest of the book explains how to administer the survey to maximum effect, link it in time and granularity to the operating units that need the feedback to be able to see the impact of a change in their behavior, and protect the results from bias or tampering by employees (This section is worth reading too). If you want to know why Health at Work and other great companies use the NPS in their balanced scorecard, read this book.