Would you recommend this to a friend?

If you travel, attend events, subscribe to anything, have a phone, or have an email account, you probably have been asked this question: would you recommend this to a friend? If your inbox is anything like mine, it seems like this question has been turbo charged recently. In fact, last week I was asked this question by my credit card company, the project management platform we use, our cloud storage vendor, a hotel chain, my doctor’s office, and even a company I bought something from in preparation for a bathroom renovation we are about to undertake. If you need proof of the power of the crowd, this question is a perfect encapsulation. It is also a prime example of how bad ideas, or at best, outdated ideas, are the hardest to kill.

The popularity of this question should be credited to Fred Richfield from Bain & Company, who started pushing out the idea of customer loyalty and his Net Promoter Score in the early 2000’s. His main argument (shorthand version) is that customers can be your best promoters, and if they recommend your product to a friend, they will do your marketing for you. Conceptually, this seems like a solid theory, and in its most basic form it holds true. The challenge is — we are stuck with this one ridiculous question that is used over and over, doing nothing but allowing someone in a boardroom to point at a meaningless metric to prove their worth.

This question assumes two things: 1) that a complex decision such as advising a friend can be boiled down to one question that people will answer honestly, and that 2) engagement with your audience should be based on a top-down approach, where the company dictates everything and the customer is forced into the box the company provides.

Humans are complicated beings. Our decisions are often not overly rational and are certainly not universal in nature. Trying to distill this complexity into a one-question measurement is impossible. Research treats individuals as if we were all teenagers in our conversational abilities:

How was your day? Fine.

What’d you learn at school today? Stuff.

Are you hungry? Maybe.

On the plus side, with this feedback, I get to walk into the living room and report that I am an amazing parent. Indeed, 100% of my kids are fine, they have learned stuff, and they may or may not have eaten something (although, judging from our grocery bills, this seems to be happening). Yay me!

Forcing your customers into a grunt-fest not only belittles your customer, but it isn’t actually helping you understand how the dynamics of your relationship is changing. It is providing you with a data point to put into a scale that someone invented 20+ years ago, which then gives you something to put into a PowerPoint presentation.

As Seth Godin recently stated:

It’s so much easier to see and process the world if we divide it into discrete bits.

This is non-fiction, that’s fiction.

This is a good restaurant, that’s a bad one.

This person is successful, that one isn’t.

These distinctions are almost always wrong.

Not just wrong, but unhelpful, because by ignoring the stuff in between, we isolate ideas (and people) instead of seeing them as part of a continuous whole.

Not convinced? Let’s take an example of a hotel stay, since the hotel chains are probably one of the biggest offenders of the “recommendation” question.

Before the outbreak of COVID-19, I had to take a last-minute trip from Washington, D.C. to New York City. I had a few meetings at the end of one day, and a dinner meeting. I had no desire to take a 10pm train, but I did need to be back in DC mid-morning the next day. As was the norm, I went onto my hotel chain of choice’s website to see what was available, found something within a few blocks from Penn Station, and it was less than $200. Book it!

Within 48 hours of returning to D.C. I got the email…”Please fill out this survey so we can better serve you.” And of course in the survey, I found, ”Would you recommend this property to a friend?”

If this was an actual conversation, this is what my answer would be to a friend: “Hey, if you ever need a place to crash near Penn Station, Hotel X was cheap (for New York), and it’s two blocks from the station. The place won’t wow you, but whatever, it was clean and convenient. Definitely not a place for a family trip or a weekend away with your significant other, but does the trick for a short work trip. Oh and you should definitely grab the breakfast sandwich at this bodega around the corner.”

And here is the conversation I had with the hotel chain: “8.”

They learned zero from me. They did not engage me, and they certainly did nothing to make me feel like they are actually paying attention to me as a loyal customer. It was just the same old survey, with the same old questions. But somewhere at Hotel HQ, someone has reported that X% of loyalty members give a 7 or above on the recommendation scale. Hooray.

Hotel HQ learns little from this method. It also shines a bright light on the top-down approach that companies take when it comes to engagement with their customers.

It is noticeable when you get the same survey over and over.

It is noticeable when you are not allowed to share actual nuance to your feelings (no offense to those who feel strongly about the difference between a score of 7 versus 8).

It is noticeable when companies blindly follow an orthodoxy that is almost 20 years old, created in a world that no longer exists, and do not deviate from the plan.

The old adage is, “you don’t get fired for hiring IBM.” This is the customer engagement version of this sentiment…you won’t get fired if you use the Bain-proven customer approach. But not getting fired is a far cry from truly engaging with, and learning from, your audience.

What Richtfield and his disciples are doing is forcing customers into a belief system that says all customers are the same and they are either happy or they are not. They are binary and they must give us the metrics we need to complete our spreadsheet and prove our worth. Well, the world has changed a little over the last 20 years, and the relationship between customer and company has changed as well. No, really, you can read all about it on your MySpace account.

If a company wants to grow customer loyalty, the customer has to be engaged with in a way where they are at the center of the relationship and the learning radiates from the customer, not the company forcing them into the proverbial box. The way that customers get information, the way that they share their feelings, the way that a relationship manifests itself has all changed. If you think a single question can actually teach you something, I look forward to hearing all about what your teenager learned at school today.