The introduction of NPS as a key indicator with a significant weight in the remuneration of staff in direct contact with the customer is leading to situations where the customer is "bribed" if necessary to obtain the highest rating.
"Tomorrow they are going to call you to ask you for your rating of me, please give me the maximum, otherwise I will be fired". Only in the last 2 weeks I have received this or a similar request at the end of my interaction with customer service staff of a car dealership and a multinational car rental company. In the first case, it also happens that the person in question "overlooks" some small service without including it in the invoice "in exchange" for "tomorrow when they call you back, put me right, eh?
Although this is an experience that any of us may have had in recent years, perhaps more recently the phenomenon seems to be spreading, as when I check with my inner circle I confirm that this is not an isolated occurrence.
Between all of us we are destroying the NPS
Between all of us we killed him and he died alone (Note: the Cervantes Institute defines this saying as ".Sometimes a single person or a single cause is blamed for the damage caused by many, a damage that can no longer be remedied. It is used when no one wishes to assume his or her share of responsibility for some unfortunate event, to the result of which several factors have contributed").
What do I do if I am the object of such a request? Out of context it seems easy to think "I'll answer whatever I want, after all, how will they know what I've actually answered". However, more and more, thanks to new and advanced CRMs that allow companies to track every interaction in great detail, it turns out that it can happen that the customer service staff can know the details of our assessment, so if we are frequent customers, we will easily meet the same employee again, which can be uncomfortable at the very least. And even if this is not the case, and the employee really has no way of knowing our true rating, the simple fact that he or she asks, begs or "bribes" us with an "extra" detail is something that can certainly influence our rating.
Who is responsible for this situation: the companies for using the indicator directly, the employees for trying by all means to get the highest ratings, the customers for allowing ourselves to be influenced by emotional blackmail or small bribes? Well, possibly, we are all a little guilty, or in other words, we are all killing the NPS.
The effect it has
First of all, what we should ask ourselves is whether a system that poses a reward or punishment action on a direct metric that is easily manipulated through emotional blackmail, petty bribery or other tricks is really effective.
The effect of this situation is the worst of all scenarios: not only am I investing budget in rewarding the most rogue, but I am also killing the metric that has proven to be the one that, when used well, best diagnoses the customer's experience with us.
What do we do now?
In this case the solution, although not simple, is within everyone's reach. The very nature of the metric, which is closer to emotions and feelings (it measures the recommendation to the people we love) than to quantitative evaluations, makes it advisable never to use it as a direct lever for rewards or punishments. Therefore, it is sufficient to use a "voice of the customer" model which, although it also offers an NPS index as a result, is made up of other aspects in addition to the actual assessment of the interaction with the customer's staff. In this way we will ensure that, on the one hand, the indicator is more robust and less volatile between measurements and, on the other, that the staff in direct contact with the customer is concerned about the overall service they provide and does not focus solely on getting the customer to give them a good rating.
Whenever we reach a situation like this, in which the mechanism of measurement and continuous improvement causes the interested manipulation of the variable to be measured, we are undoubtedly facing a situation that needs to be worked on immediately, since, as we saw before, we are not only investing in rewarding cheaters, but we are also altering the validity of the indicator and therefore of our best means of diagnosing the situation.
José Luis Ruiz is a Partner at Brain Trust CS. He leads the lines of customer-centric digital transformation and Customer Experience Management in Spain, and is also an associate professor at IE Business School.
