Month: December 2013

The more astute among my gentle readers will have spotted that I have not written much about the company for which I purport to work lately.

There are two reasons for this. One is that it hasn’t been very interesting. Life has carried on, with the dreaded rain of brown envelopes, asking for the normal collections for birth and marriage (though not death). There has been canoeing down the Wye for charity and people’s children running marathons for other people’s children who have (take your pick) need of a mouth-operated wheelchair, a cancer ward, or a memorial charity for drug rehabilitation.

I could discuss the difficulty of making people redundant and the effect it has on company morale, or perhaps whether the privatisation of the NHS is going to bring us in as much money as we hope. But the second reason that I haven’t written about the company is because currently I am totally and utterly bored by it. Everyone is working very hard, and their little foibles are more concealed than usual. It is intriguing to see who is browsing which websites on the run-up to Christmas: is it amazon or ebay? Hunting for a job or trying to move house?

I myself am spending more time researching the latest discussions on the benefits of U/X thinking than is required for working through the tests I have devised for the latest products.

I don’t know whether it is the time of year, the shortage of daylight hours, or just an overwhelming weariness with the futility of life and the avarice and laziness of a vast proportion of the populace.
Perhaps it will improve when the child has its wheelchair, and a few more teenage souls are reclaimed for hard-working family values.

Come cheer me. remind me that applied cognitive psychology is not merely about making it easier for people to do what you would like them to do, but can also be used to, somehow, encourage people in those seasonal pastimes of good will towards mankind.

First of all, I’ll start with the credits: The Net Promoter Score, or NPS® was developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix in 2003. (See The One Number you Need to Grow). It assumes that all customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.

It seems that the big idea was who you should concentrate your marketing on. There are your loyal recommenders, who will buy your stuff pretty much whatever, there are the people who don’t really care one way or another, and there are the people who had a bad experience with you. Given a limited budget, where should you concentrate your efforts?

You will notice some sympathy with triage. I think the human brain is naturally comfortable dividing things into three groups. Like Gaul. (For anyone who has neither read Asterix or De Bello Gallico, that is a reference to Caesar. Caesar’s title is not a reference to his summer holiday in beautiful Gaul, but to the Gaulish wars. I love faux amis, or in this case, armies.) Back to triage. This used to be the battlefield technique used to decide who to save and who to leave. The ones that you saved were the ones that you could save and who would not survive if you did nothing. How does this relate to customers?

You don’t want to spend much effort on your loyal supporters. They don’t need it. You don’t want them to resent you (see the bad publicity that accrues when people realise that new customers are getting better deals than old faithfuls) but you don’t need to woo them either.

The people who hate you hate you. There are those who bad-mouth you, which has a major effect on your business, and those who only chose you because you were the last one left in the playground. Who can you safely sacrifice and who is worth turning around?

This is where one number doesn’t cut it. Bye bye NPS. It’s a fair measure if all the bodies on your battlefield are privates, but we all know that what counts is the power that the body wields. You’re obviously better getting a loyal high-spender than a low-spender, turning round the opinion of someone who whose opinion is listened to than that of a dead end Derek. The thing is, you can never be quite sure who that is. First, you can see who in the middle section has money and is worth investing in. Secondly, you can see what the cost of attempting to fix the problems are. If it’s going to cost more to fix than you’re going to gain in sales or spend in support, then consider leaving the problem as a straightforward problem. People do it all the time. Look at the list of known bugs. Look at that well-known bug category of “won’t be fixed”. So long as it isn’t a deal breaker, you can ignore it.

Finally, be honest to yourself. Remember that everyone likes to think that they’re important. If you can convert someone, they may turn out to be your strongest supporter.