The Future of Feedback Is Here—It’s Time to Move Beyond Surveys

I recently caught a terrific article in the Wall Street Journal skewering the over-reliance on Net Promoter Scores. As I read it, I couldn’t help but take it one step further.

NPS was created at a time when we didn’t have the technology to understand customer data in its native form. We now have that technology and can move beyond calculating metrics to deriving deep meaning from the natural conversations customers are having through open-ended comments, social media channels, contact centers, video, voice and even images.

In essence, NPS attempts to reduce the human experience to a number. And at a larger scale, structured surveys dumb down feedback regarding the real and complex human experience.

The future of feedback is in allowing customers and employees to communicate whenever, wherever, and however they want, preserving that data in its native form, and then applying advanced analytics to uncover the intelligence that will drive true change in the business.

This philosophy was a big reason Madison Dearborn Partners chose to become new investment partners with Pearl-Plaza. John Lewis, current executive partner at MDP and now executive chairman of Pearl-Plaza, shared this validating perspective with us:

It used to be that owning third-party market data gave companies a competitive edge. Today, most organizations are awash in data, and the real opportunity is integrating large and disparate types of data using advanced analytics techniques like artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems very differently.

This is especially relevant in the fast-growing area of customer experience, where understanding customers and what you can do to drive increased loyalty is everything. Most vendors try to do this with traditional surveys. In light of the multidimensional relationship brands now have with their customers, that simply isn’t enough.

I couldn’t agree more. The CX market has long been under served by both metric-heavy and market-research-led approaches.

In launching the XI Platform, we are making our vision of moving from basic insights to true intelligence, real — bringing valuable first-party data together with social and operational data, and then applying advanced analytics all in a single environment.

Yes, there will continue to be business leaders—and even experience management platforms—who rely on metrics like NPS and structured, do-it-yourself surveys that dumb down the data, but the industry is changing. And it will not be toward more surveys, but beyond surveys.