The Voice of the Customer

In 2021 I took over a Customer Success organization that had a Net Promoter Score, and an honest one. It gave directional insight on the big customer-experience initiatives. It told us which departments were pulling their weight. It sampled the past so we could improve. And it could not tell a bad week from a bad relationship, a person from a program, or a team's contribution from the company's — because it was one survey, sent to everyone, after everything, asked to do two jobs at once.

That is the most common state of customer listening I have seen, and the fix is not a better survey. It is two instruments. The Voice of the Customer is the program I built to replace the one survey, rebuilt here as the first instrument on the shelf.

A third word

When I put the Operating Model and the Business Review up, the shelf learned two words: a model says how the organization is built, and a play says what a person does on Tuesday. This document is neither. It does not describe a team and it does not describe a meeting. It describes a signal — what to measure, how to ask, and what to do with the answer — and both the model and the play read it. So the shelf has a third word now, and I expect to use it again: a health score is an instrument; so is a renewal forecast.

What it says

Customer Satisfaction measures happiness after a moment — a ticket closed, a contract signed, an invoice paid — on a scale of one to five, and it belongs to the team that delivered the moment. Net Promoter measures loyalty to the company — would you recommend us — on a scale of minus one hundred to plus one hundred, and it belongs to the whole company. Ask them in the same breath and the customer answers the one they just lived through, twice.

The part most programs skip is that Net Promoter itself comes in two kinds. Transactional NPS is asked at the end of a journey stage — everyone who finished onboarding this quarter, as a population — and measures loyalty to the work. Relational NPS is asked of established customers twice a year, in six staggered cohorts so that some of the book answers every month, and measures loyalty in the absolute. The two scores disagree, and the disagreement is the insight: a high transactional score with a falling relational one is an organization executing well on a product the customer is losing faith in.

And then the asymmetry that makes it a program rather than a dashboard. Satisfaction reaches out to the unhappy only; a satisfied customer thanked for every ticket learns that replying costs them a conversation. Net Promoter reaches out to everyone — promoters to Sales, because they just told you they would put their name behind yours; passives to Renewals; detractors to Success, because a detractor is rarely one team's doing. Get those rules backwards and you have a program that annoys the happy and ignores the loyal.

What is gone, and what is new

The company's name, its people and its systems. What is new are two drawings the program always needed and never had: the journey with both instruments placed on it, and the cohort calendar — six rows, twelve months, every contact asked twice a year and never more. Fifteen pages, free to use with attribution, and the checklist is on the last one.