Ep. 225: Jason Barro | Trapped: The Hidden Forces Behind Counterintuitive NPS Results

Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth

How do high-quality NPS benchmarks unlock strategic priorities and initiatives? What if your NPS data seems highly counterintuitive? For example, what if Detractors seem to be more loyal than Promoters?

Host Rob Markey and Jason Barro, a partner at Bain & Company and the leader of Bain's NPS Prism benchmarking service, unpack this situation in the airline industry. It’s an illustration of how Net Promoter Score benchmark data might be misleading when not all customers have the freedom to choose, revealing the nuanced understanding required to transform raw data into strategic business insights.

Jason and Rob use this example to explore some of the ways a sophisticated knowledge of how customers buy, the choices they have available, and how a market’s competitive dynamics inform the interpretation of customer loyalty benchmarks like NPS.

Episode Highlights:

1. Introduction to Jason and NPS Prism [01:02]
2. Using NPS Data for Market Insight [02:05]
3. Exploring the complexity of NPS in different industries [05:12]
4. Concept of Trapped Customers [10:17]
5. Earned Growth Strategies [23:52]
6. Banking and Insurance Customer Dynamics [27:22]

Quotable Quotes:

“The more captive you are, the more likely you are to give high share of wallet to somebody that you don't like very much.” [15:53] - Rob Markey

“One of the effects we see in the Prism data for airlines more broadly is that high frequent travelers are happier than low frequent travelers.” [18:06] - Jason Barro

“You can see this strategy of, ‘Earn the respect and happiness of your customers,’ is a path to profitable growth, and you can see…just how much it actually matters.” - Jason Barro [23:28]

Additional Resources:

NPS Prism by Bain & Company

Net Promoter System Overview

Listen to Jason’s earlier podcast, NPS Prism: The Source for True, Deep NPS Insights

Bios

Jason Barro

Rob Markey

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