We Don't Need No Stinking Evaluation, Our Customers Love Us!

Transactional, university and enterprise in-plant printing operations of all kinds can benefit from performance evaluations, even if they think, “our customers love us.” We often hear this from companies that use poor survey tools and/or do not fully understand how to measure customer loyalty. They may look at the results on the table below and say 85% of our customers say they are "very likely" or "likely" to recommend our services, so we are world class.

However, an in-depth analysis of the data can yield a much different picture. We use the customer loyalty metric known as net promoter index, or NPI. Frederick F. Reichheld introduced NPI in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article, "The One Number You Need to Grow." We have been using this tool for years and can compare the results to similar in-plants. Converting this same data to the NPI and comparing it to results of six similar in-plants, we found that their customer loyalty was not world class, it was almost the worst.

If you are going to evaluate your performance, find the right measure and understand how it compares to the industry leaders. Otherwise you may be lured into a false sense of security.