Glossary
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score asks how likely a customer is to recommend you on a scale of zero to ten, then subtracts the detractors from the promoters. Nines and tens count as promoters, zero to six as detractors, sevens and eights not at all. Fred Reichheld published it in 2003 and the name is a registered trademark. The result runs from minus one hundred to a hundred.
01
What a single satisfaction number is and is not good for
Quarterly, not weekly. Survey responses arrive in a trickle and a weekly figure is mostly noise, so keep the score for the quarterly leadership review and put something faster on the Scorecard: complaints received, escalations left open, or the count of customers who asked to speak to a manager.
The score compresses a great deal into one number, which makes it easy to report and easy to distort. Response rates are usually low and the people who reply are the ones with feelings about you, so treat the trend as the signal and the level as decoration. The written comments are worth more than the score, and almost nobody reads them aloud.
Worked example: A home services company tied technician bonuses to survey scores. Within a quarter the score moved from thirty-one to fifty-four, with technicians asking for a ten at the door and coaching customers on the wording. The trend meant nothing. The company moved the bonus onto first-visit fixes and kept the score as an unpaid quarterly read.
Sources: The One Number You Need to Grow, Frederick F. Reichheld, Harvard Business Review (2003); bain.com/insights/introducing-the-net-promoter-system-loyalty-insights
eNPS
eNPS is the same question turned inward: how likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work, scored zero to ten, promoters minus detractors.
02First-call resolution
First-call resolution is the share of customer contacts settled without a callback, a transfer or a second ticket: one conversation, problem gone.
03Churn rate
Churn rate is the share of customers, or of recurring revenue, that goes away in a period: customers lost divided by customers at the start of it.
04KPI examples by department: sales, ops, finance, HR
Concrete KPI examples for each department in a small company, tagged leading or lagging and weekly or monthly, to help you build a Scorecard that works.
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