Net Promoter Telecom Industry Scores

Fred Reichheld

I have long been a fan of the Net Promoter scoring matrix. Fred Reichheld’s simplistic approach to measuring customer loyalty works well for me and for Surveylab’s clients.

I see that Satmetrix, the company that works with Fred Reichheld, has just published a number of reports on Net Promoter scores in the US. They cost almost $1,000 an industry so I don’t advocate buying any of them but they have published some interesting facts in their sales promotion material.

Telecommunications was one of their poorest performing sectors with an average score of minus 7% score. The best performer in the sector was Vonage scoring 45%. I use Vonage for my Internet connected telephone service and I back up that finding  – in fact I would say it is one of the best organisations I have dealt with. Not only is their service very reliable but on the occasions that I have needed to speak to someone I have always been promptly connected to a very capable, helpful and polite agent in their Canadian call centre. UK telecom companies could learn a lot from their example.

The latest Customer Care Alliance study conducted by Surveylab mirrored these poor results for the UK telecoms sector. This survey specifically looked at problem experience and organisation’s response to complaints. Telecoms was responsible for 8% of respondents’ most serious problems but only 6% were completely satisfied with the action taken to resolve them and based on their experience – 62% said that they probably or definitely would not buy from the company responsible for their problem again.

BT was the most mentioned company responsible for respondents’ most serious problems but with a national study of this type (10K+ respondents) the bigger organisations do appear more frequently. What was interesting however, was  that separately, respondents were asked to identify the organisation that had provided them with the best and the worst customer service experience they had ever received and BT featured on both sides with 138 votes as the best service experience but 403 as the worst. This suggests to me a lack of consistency with BT’s customer  service delivery.

Satmetrix has kept back the good bits for those paying for the reports but banking scored an average of 15% with a wide range between organisations. Apple scored well for Technology at 77%  – way ahead of Microsoft and online shopping sector was led by Amazonwith a score of 74%. This was also reflected in our UK CCA study with Amazon.co.uk scoring positively (108 votes as providing the best customer service experience but the best UK  performer was John Lewis with 271 positive votes and just two negative votes).

To learn more about Net Promoter I recommend Reicheld’s three books on the subject: The Loyalty Effect, Loyalty Rules and The Ultimate Question but the latter is the newest and the most relevant. Watch this space for more about Net Promoter.