Improve the customer experience, and the score will follow.

I’ve seen lots of companies put extraordinary efforts into getting great NPS scores or favorable Google reviews. For most, it’s the optics of a high score that matters, but is that right?

I’ve led customer experience efforts and instituted different means of scoring processes and performance across the customer journey throughout an organization. When doing this, I found many functional leaders then would create team and individual rewards based on achieving a high score for their particular business unit or function. What that led to was “score-stuffing”, where employees pressured customers, vendors and even co-workers to offer favorable NPS ratings or write high-star Google reviews, all the while missing what was right in front of them.

What was right in front of them was this: what you get from NPS scores or Google Reviews or other customer sat feedback mechanisms is not so much a score but, rather, a roadmap to creating a better customer experience, a path to improvement to better acquire and retain customers.

I always caution folks to focus on what the scores tell you, on what the customers are saying. If you focus on that and make the improvements necessary, then better scores will follow. The score isn’t what the goal should be; the goal should be creating a means of listening to your customers so that you can become better for them.