Prompted Response Prompts Lies.

When it comes to customer satisfaction evaluation, I've written often of my distrust of prompted recall and my preference for the net promoter score. But I'd never expected to encounter them simultaneously.

Earlier this week I had a ten minute conversation with John Maeda as Part of his Fortune Cookie performance. Before I left the gallery, I was asked if I had heard of the net promoter score and, when I answered yes, was asked to rate my experience

You'll be surprised to read that I tend to grade low, so while I had thoroughly enjoyed the conversation I was going to rate it as an 8. But,under net promoter rules, I know that rating would be discarded as middling and so I found myself rating it a 9. In other words, the prompt had changed my behaviour and my perceived appraisal.

Now this was an art event and the prompt may well have been an innocent conversation-starter or, indeed, part of the event but the bottom line is, if you want
a true reflection of your customers' experience, you have to be utterly agnostic and make no attempt at prompting.

You may think it's going to facilitate the rating, but Heisenberg taught us otherwise.