Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success

by Josh Seiden

Case Study: Improving NPS Here’s an example from a recent non-profit client. I was working with a team that had been asked to raise the customer satisfaction score of the service they delivered. The score they were using, called Net Promoter Score or NPS, is used to assess the likelihood of a customer recommending your product or service to others. The team I was working with had been given a goal to improve their score in the coming year. They were trying to figure out how to do this. NPS is an impact. It’s the sum of many factors. So we needed to break that impact down into smaller parts: we needed to identify the outcomes that would contribute to increased customer satisfaction. Our first step was to try to understand the current state of the service and see what was creating satisfaction today—and conversely, what was creating dissatisfaction. We did this by creating a customer journey map. My client runs a two-sided marketplace. So we created our map with three swim lanes: seller behaviors, buyer behaviors, and organizations/system behaviors. Then, in each lane, we laid out an end-to-end, step-by-step picture of the things people do as they interact with the service and with each other. This gave us our raw material: the behaviors of the people and systems that make up the platform. Next: Boosters and Blockers With that mapped out (on a big wall, from left to right, with sticky notes), we then went back through the map and asked our magic question: “What behaviors at ...