Last year, we announced our use of Net Promoter Score customer surveys.

The idea of NPS is to ascertain not only customer satisfaction, but the potential for growth within a business. In other words whether customers are happy with your company and whether they will actively promote your product or service, thus bringing in more customers and growth. NPS provides the way forward!

Customers are asked whether they would recommend your product or service using a scale of 0 to 10, where:

• 0 means ‘not at all’
• 5 means ‘neutral’
• 10 means ‘extremely likely’

The NPS percentage is then determined as follows:

• You ignore scores of 7 and 8
• Add up the number of scores at 9 or 10 (the promoters)
• Subtract the number of scores at 0 – 6 (the detractors)
• You have a Net Promoter Score

It is not easy to score highly, something the results from benchmarking and research surveys confirm. A Harvard Business Review study shows the median score for net promoter as only 16%. The study shows the best company in the world for NPS score to be Harley-Davidson, achieving nearly 80%.

Closer to home, recent Millward Brown Research in the UK shows the following top and bottom three:

• At the top: Cafedirect, Google and Waitrose
• And the bottom five: Barclays, Spar and Texaco

The overall scores from their survey are not generally available, although Barclays was at minus 3%.

So, how is Catalyst doing? Based on our data through to the end of July 2007, our NPS for all products and services averages out at 62.5%; the mean scores are averaging 8.72.

Given that we teach the importance of analysing data, we have broken the results down in a number of different ways, including by major product. This shows particularly high NPS scores for our Open Training Green Belt and Black Belt Programmes, where the result is in excess of 90%.