Net Promoter Happiness

The net promoter score idea’s been around since the mid-Naughties. It’s simplicity is lovely of course. Ask your clients if they’d recommend you to a friend and if more give you above eight out of ten than mark six or below, you’re winning.

It was quite bizarre that on the same day earlier in the week, I came across this and possible evolutions of it for the first time in years. The first was with excellent American serverfarm, Hostgator. After my webchat, I was confronted with this drop-down request:

I was also asked to “Please provide a further explanation of your rating.”

I suspect many customer service operations desire feedback, yet I myself have only encountered it in a form which encouraged me to do so once in the past five years. That was a JoBurg-based isp-plus, run by two English chaps that subsequently sold out, who’s support emails simply wanted a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as to whether your query was sufficiently dealt with.

Then I came across the ever-reliable 37 signals. This is what appears at the foot of their support mails;

Image my delight when I found their page that reports on these clicks. They call the project smiley. Here’s a headline status graphic;

And here’s “The last 100 customer support ratings. Last rating 3 minutes ago.”

I mention these as I always thought it was also a neat way of getting feedback in account management review meetings. Especially when allowed anonymously. Think post-meet questionnaire.

But this latest discovery got my mind-a-whirring. What would happen if during the heat of a campaign, you put these options at the foot of prospect emails? Did I answer your question? Are you ecstatic at my advice? That kind of thing.

Even if you’re not all that clued up with faceblogpoketwiting, copying over a standard chunk to the foot of an email that had links to a pair of webmail addys (one for happy, one for grumpy) wouldn’t be too arduous, would it?

And if your prospect replies, how likely is that to be some sort of buying signal indicator?