Learn to RUN before walking - Marketing 101

 I had interesting conversations with CEOs of local startup companies while attending a Voyager Capital offsite meeting in OR last week. When discussing about establishing a NPS practice in a web 2.0 company, Tom Romary, CEO of YAPTA (if you are planning to book any trip and want to save $$$ you must give it a try) pointed out that in many cases we get a biased picture with NPS and Customer Satisfaction surveys, because only the most loyal users or the people actually seeing value in a service are the ones hanging around and hence answering surveys.

    It is a very valid point, and something I have experienced when deploying scorecards to measure the success of emerging web 2.0 companies. This is why I encourage using technology to go beyond the passive action of asking your customers to answer a hypothetical question via surveys. Through technology we can see the correlation between NPS (intent to recommend) and actual Referrals from customers as well as actual Usage rate.

    Referrals-Usage-NPS: RUN™ . I have found this to be a powerful combination to look at when evaluating the health of a business. High NPS (intent) and low Referrals could point out to opportunities for improving the functionality of the refer-a-friend feature. High NPS and low Usage could indicate a targeting problem or a marketing sizing issue, etc.

    Technology allows us to build things in such a way that our customer experience is improved based on actual actions taken by our customer base, not only based on answers to hypothetical scenarios.

    But that would only address partially the issue raised by Tom. Bad targeting is probably one of the most basic marketing problems. Getting answers from only the loyal user base is a case of targeting done poorly. We cannot collect input only through surveys, but through the whole user experience, starting with sign-up, during the act of using the product/service and also during defection/abandonment. We need to capture a comprehensive view of the customer experience through a well-established voice-of-the-customer (VOTC) program, and that includes a properly designed signup and usage experience that allows us to collect data from our customers so we can interact with them even if they decided to defect because our product experience was not at par with their expectations.

    We can learn as much from defectors than from promoters. We just need to learn how to RUN™ before walking.