Net Promoter 3.0

As a consumer, you’ve probably encountered this sort of question dozens of times—after an online purchase, at the end of a customer service interaction, or even after a hospital stay.

If you work at one of the thousands of companies that ask this question of their customers, you’re familiar with the Net Promoter System (NPS), which Reichheld invented and first wrote about in HBR almost 20 years ago. (See “The One Number You Need to Grow,” December 2003.)

NPS has spread rapidly around the world. It has become the predominant customer success framework—used today by two-thirds of the Fortune 1000. Why has it been embraced so enthusiastically?

Because it solves a vital challenge that our financial systems fail to address.

Financials can easily tell us when we have extracted $1 million from our customers’ wallets, but they can’t tell us when our work has improved customers’ lives.

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