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10
Scott Cook of Intuit, on Net Promoters
September 10, 2007 | Anita Campbell
At the recent 2007 Inc 500 event, Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, gave one of the keynote presentations. In it he made a key point about net promoter scores. He said (paraphrasing):
“Don’t just focus on the detractors, trying to fix what’s wrong. Pay attention to the enthusiastic promoters of your business.”
If you’re familiar with the concept of net promoters and can’t stand to read another line about it, feel free to skip this post. Otherwise continue on. 
The net promoter concept is all about asking your customers one question: “How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?”
The answers get ranked on a scale of 1 to 10. Those at 9 and 10 are considered “promoters.” Those at 7 and 8 are neutral. And those at 0 to 6 are “detractors.”
To figure out your score, you take the percentage of 9s and 10s (promoters), minus the percentage of 0 through 6s (detractors), and the result you get is the “net” promoter score. The neutrals don’t count for purposes of scoring.
The higher the net promoter percentage, the better.
But it was something that Cook said that hit home: “focus on the 9s and 10s — the promoters — the really positive people — and not just all the negative ones.”
His point was that the 9s and 10s are a growth engine for your business …the source of powerful word of mouth, noting, ”Today it’s as if every customer has a megaphone to broadcast how they feel about your company.” You need to work on creating enthusiastic promoters and encouraging the already-enthusiastic. They are the ones will talk up your company and your product/service widely and actively. They are the ones responsible for driving most new customers and new business.
It is not enough just to have people be non-negative. For instance, he showed a picture of a restaurant with a sign in front that said “No vile flavors.” Whether you are a restaurant or a software company, you need more than just an absence of bad stuff in order to be successful. You need some really good things so that people will recommend your restaurant or software or whatever you offer.
Intuit created a page listing some of the tools that Intuit uses, including a few of the slides from the Inc 500 presentation. You will find them at http://www.intuit.com/inc500
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Image above courtesy of Satmetrix Net Promoter Fast Start Edition (PDF).
Update: thanks to alert reader, Jim G, for notifying me about the typos (and I used a spell checker, too!). Fixed!
Comments
3 Comments so far
I think some people just enjoy being negative. You can never please them not matter how hard you try. I agree that focusing on the positive is more important. I get a lot of referred business from my loyal repeat customers and that makes it all worthwhile.
Scott Cook’s comment - “Don’t just focus on the detractors, trying to fix what’s wrong” - conjured a Net Promoter blog by Fred Reichheld called, “Don’t Forget About Promoters.” Here is the link to that blog: http://netpromoter.typepad.com/fred_reichheld/2007/03/dont_forget_abo.html
Just for fun, for contrast, here’s a Net Promoter blog from Jeanne Bliss, author of Chief Customer Officer, called “Mining the Gold: Listening Hard to ‘Detractors.’” Here is that link: http://netpromoter.typepad.com/jeanne_bliss/2007/07/mining-the-gold.html
Her next blog, do out in a few weeks, will focus on promoters.
Amanda, you put it all in a nut shell. Being in the restaurant business I can vouch for some of those very negatives that come in and all the comps and free gift certificates just doesn’t work…they just enjoy being negative. The majority of our business is from referrals. Scott has a great listing of tools here.