The Customer Confidential Podcast

Piloting Change at Herman Miller

Pam Carpenter talks about the office-furniture maker's NPS® pilots, lessons about email surveys, how to write effective feedback requests and how to turn feedback into action.

By Rob Markey

March 07, 2014

One of the biggest debates inside the Net Promoter community is about how many questions you should ask customers when you collect feedback. The fundamental issue is this: Should you try to include multiple-choice questions so you can do fast and easily quantified analysis?

In our latest Net Promoter System podcast, we delve into this issue and other common questions that practitioners face with the help of our guest Pam Carpenter, who is the employee communications manager at the office-furniture maker Herman Miller. We introduced you to Pam and her colleague Michael Ramirez, who is the senior vice president of people, places and administration, in an earlier podcast. They’ve agreed to let us follow them as they develop their Net Promoter System. In our earlier discussion, we talked about Herman Miller’s approach to customer loyalty and how the company chose Net Promoter.

In our latest podcast, Pam explores the challenges of getting the right kinds of feedback from customers. In classic Net Promoter style, the company has been asking customers two questions: “likelihood to recommend” and the open-ended “why?” questions. Now Pam’s team is debating whether to add more questions in the hopes of collecting more data.

You can listen to our discussion of this issue on iTunes or through the player above. Click here to browse more Net Promoter System podcasts.

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