● Customer Success · Instrument 01 · v1.1
The Voice of the Customer
Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Score, kept apart and administered properly — the question, the scale, the arithmetic and the survey design for each; transactional and relational NPS; the cohort calendar; who reaches out to whom; how to stand the program up in a year.
Why it matters
Most organizations have a Net Promoter Score. Fewer have a voice of the customer. A score is a number you report; a voice is a signal you act on — and the reason the score never becomes a voice is almost always the same: one survey, sent to everyone, after everything, asked to do two jobs at once. This instrument is the fix: two signals, two questions, and a rule for which to use when. It is the middle column of the Operating Model’s funnel — signs we see — written out in full.
What’s inside
One survey, two jobs. What a single NPS program does and cannot do, and why the fix is two instruments rather than a better survey.
Generous listening has a purpose. Feedback is insight only if it is consolidated, actionable and opportunistic; the five criteria of a program — capture, maximize, analyze, act, monitor; loyalty as the macro and happiness as the micro.
Happiness and loyalty. Both instruments placed on one journey: satisfaction inside the stages, after the moments; Net Promoter at the edges and over the whole relationship.
Customer Satisfaction. The question, the one-to-five scale, what CSAT must be and is not, and the two numbers that come out of the same replies — the composite score that drives improvement and the satisfaction rating that predicts retention.
Net Promoter Score. The question, −100 to +100, what NPS must be and is not; detractors, passives and promoters; scoring with a worked example; one vote company-wide, ARR-weighted by segment; three segmentations.
Transactional and relational. The part most programs skip: tNPS at the end of each journey stage, to comparable populations; rNPS twice a year, six staggered cohorts — with the survey design and the reporting for each, and a calendar.
Closing the loop. Satisfaction reaches out to the unhappy only; Net Promoter reaches out to everyone — promoters to Sales, passives to Renewals, detractors to Success. A speed rule.
Standing it up. Disengage and re-engage, measure and analyze, benchmark and synthesize — three phases from one manual survey to a fully automated sentiment regime. And the checklist to print.
How to use it
Read the first part once, for why one survey cannot do two jobs. Keep the two instrument parts open while you configure the systems — each has the question verbatim, the scale, the arithmetic and the survey design. Put the routing table in front of Sales, Renewals and Success together, because each owns a row. Run the three phases over a year. Print the last page.
Provenance
Built in 2021 as the Voice of the Customer program for a Customer Success organization at a managed services provider, and presented to its leadership that April; rebuilt here as a Juan.co instrument, with the journey map and the cohort calendar drawn out for the first time. The company’s name, its people and its systems are gone; the method is intact.