Memorandum
To: John Bulleader
From: Barbara Researcher
Subject: How to improve our Net Promoter scores
In response to your question of last week, I have
considered several options for how we can improve our recently flagging Net Promoter scores and
thereby increase that portion of our year-end bonus linked to that specific metric.
1. We could restrict our sample of surveyed respondents to only those who have
recently purchased from us, and ignore those who either didn't like us enough to buy from us -- as well as those who bought from us a while ago, but may be having second thoughts due to our poor
reliability and service.
2. We could change our sampling approach to only solicit surveys from those who buy online, since our Web site is so slick and efficient. This
has the added benefit of reducing our research expenses so we can still afford those front-row football tickets.
3. We could change the way we calculate Net Promoter to
take the percentage of customers who score us as 7s through 10s, and subtract those who score us as 1s or 2s since we know that 3s to 6' are really the "marginal" middle group -- and
thereby take some credit for producing partial satisfaction.
4. We can offer customers a $10 bonus coupon to allow our sales associates to "help" them
complete the survey before they leave the store, thus providing both convenience and value to our customers.
5. We can reduce the frequency of surveying from monthly to
annually, to make it virtually impossible to link our marketing or sales actions back to increases or decreases in the scores. This will create some much confusion over interpretation and causality
that bonuses will have long been paid by the time anyone actually agrees on what to do next.
6. We can have our sales reps do the surveying themselves. This will allow
us to capture notations about body language of the respondents, too (side benefit: see football reference above).
Any or all of these strategies could essentially ensure success. Provided our
market share doesn't fall too fast, we're unlikely to draw any undue attention.
Please let me know how you would like to proceed. We can also adjust any of our other metrics in
similar ways.