You may not have heard of the Net Promoter Score. When I first heard of it, I was introduced to it in a way where people were bragging about having a 76, or an 82. I thought, isn’t a 76% a C-grade result? As in just average? What about 82%? That’s like B-minus work, right? How can people be so proud of average to middling results?

Companies are, (and should be) proud of those scores because Net Promoter is not measuring customer satisfaction. NPS measures the strength of word of mouth for a business, and that is hard to generate.  Extremely hard.

Net Promoter Score (which sounds like the score for a network of concert promoters) is a powerful measure of how consumers talk about their experience of working with your company to their friends and family. But NPS is not only for business owners.  NPS is a tool consumers can use to rapidly evaluate the reputation of a company. It means, with one number, you can assess the reputation of a company and decide who you can trust to work with.

I look for NPS scores wherever they are available, and I am wary of companies that do not provide them.

Why?

While I don’t expect companies to be perfect, I know that it’s easy to hide upset customers inside customer satisfaction survey numbers. Here’s how it’s done.

Why Customer Satisfaction Scores Can Be Misleading

My wife drives a Toyota Highlander. She loves that car. I love that car. We both hate buying Toyotas. Why? Because Toyota apparently does not want to know what their customers think of their product or service. When you buy a Toyota, or any brand of car from Toyota, you will receive a call from a sales manager hounding you to rate them 10 out of 10 on their customer service survey. (I do not think they are unique in this, but they are the most insistent I have seen). Anything less than perfect is a failure they will tell you.

Never has anyone asked me how I felt about the experience, they just plead with me to give them a perfect rating so they can get their bonus. I cannot imagine that Toyota executives are unaware of this behavior. Since I have personal experience with this going back over 10 years, I believe they must be well aware of it. Wells Fargo for example, had employees calling their ethics hotline for over a decade about their sales problems according to Simon Sinek in his book the Infinite Game. (Sinek, 2020). Executives were aware of their problems but didn’t want to know.  When I worked at Motorola I got in some trouble for pleading with the marketing team to stop sending out customer surveys.  Why?  Because we never did anything with the results.  We were just pissing off our customers by asking them over and over again what they wanted and then never following up or making any changes.  Far too often customer satisfaction can be manipulated.

Even if management is not trying to manipulate the results, I still look at “customer satisfaction” scores with a skeptical eye. Written reviews are better, but reading a slew of them can be time consuming.  I also wonder how genuine they are. For example, when there are only positive reviews… that can look suspicious. Who is perfect? And then there are the ugly cases where someone tries to take out a vendetta on a business. Ask any small business owner about Yelp. Most tend to roll their eyes in frustration. (It has been my experience that Yelp suppresses positive reviews but publishes negative reviews instantly). Even if you feel what Yelp is doing is fair, or you like Google reviews, or Facebook reviews all of these “star” based systems that use simple averaging miss a crucial point.

Human beings react very differently to positive vs negative experiences.  Nobel Prize Winning Economist Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman, 2011) demonstrated that people are twice as sensitive to loss as they are to gain. Put another way, if a business upsets 1 in 10 customers, they could still report a customer satisfaction rating of 90% – an A-Grade. While from a math point of view, that might sound reasonable, the reality is that this one upset customer is way more upset than their score would indicate.  The math is misleading.  Put another way, how much risk are you willing to take that your experience could be as bad as the unhappy guys?  This is much closer to the question we are trying to answer.  People are driven much more by loss aversion than positive gain. 

Averaging customer satisfaction can be as misleading as trying to manipulation customers into giving perfect scores. This is where Net Promoter Comes in. Net Promoter Scores reflect the way people actually share their experiences with each other.  We don’t relay all experiences equally. We are much more likely to tell the story of a bad experience… over, and over, and over again.  Sometimes for years afterward.  A single upset customer, could generate more negative word of mouth than 10 happy customers could create positive word of mouth.

How NPS Works

Sometimes called, “The One Question” the Net Promoter Score is based upon a simple idea backed by research. It tries to measure the likelihood that a customer will recommend your product or service.

When I got into business I heard it this way:

A happy customer might tell one friend that they liked your service. An unhappy customer will tell everyone who will listen how bad their experience was.

The actual data according to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs:

• A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people.
• Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4-6 people about their experience.

Unhappy customers are not simply twice as sensitive to loss as Kahneman wrote, they are between 3 and 4 times more likely to discourage people from doing business with you. A positive review and a negative review are not the same. Net Promoter factors this into its score.

Here’s how it works.  Businesses ask their customers:

On a scale of 0 to 10 what is the likelihood you recommend us to a friend?

That’s it. Why the zero? To remove confusion whether 1 is best or 10 is best. First place, after all starts with a 1. But a ZERO is never a good thing (sorry zero). Customers are then grouped into 3 categories depending upon their answer:

• 9-10: A promoters. These are people who would absolutely recommend your business.
• 7-8: Are passive. These people won’t say anything to anyone about your company. they are not upset, they are just not impressed.
• 0-6: Are detractors. These are people who have had a bad enough experience to want to tell people about it.

You calculate a net promoter score by adding up the number of promoters, then dividing by the total sample size to get a percentage score (promoter %). You then add up the number of detractors, and you divide them by the total sample size to get a percentage score (detractor %).

You arrive at the net promoter score by SUBTRACTING the detractor % from the promoter %. The passives are ignored.

Let’s look at our example of customer satisfaction. Let’s say we had 5 scores: 10,9, 8,8, 6. This average would be: The total score would be 41. 41/5 = 8.2*100=82%.

But what if we look at this way. There are 2 promoters (2/5 = 40%) and one detractor (1/5) = 20%. What about the 8s? Well they are not going to promote your business so they are silent. That means your Net Promoter score would be: 40-20=20.

That’s right. 20.

A business with a customer satisfaction rating of 82% might have an NPS as low as 20!

This might seem harsh, but it’s a much better indicator of the word of mouth a business generates.  It is even possible to get a negative NPS score (something that can’t happen with averages).  Earning, and keeping a high score takes a complete dedication from everyone in the company.

What it takes to get a high score

In the year ending 2020 – one of our most difficult years ever, The GameTruck Franchise system had a global NPS score of 86.  We are extremely proud of that score.  A score like this means that nearly everyone who had a GameTruck Party – in one of the weirdest years ever – would recommend GameTruck to their friends.  We were not perfect but we met or exceeded customer expectations often enough for the vast majority of our customer to want to recommend us to friends.

What does this mean for business owners?

• Only a fraction of our leads come from paid advertising. Most come from word of mouth. It is not uncommon for a paid lead to cost $10-$15 to generate. That’s not the cost of a sale. That’s how much real cash goes out the door just to talk to someone who might be interested in having us host a party for them.  When you factor in our repeat business rate (about 30% – one and a half times higher than is typical for birthday party concepts) this means a great reputation can be worth thousands of dollars per month in advertising to our franchise owners.
• Coach tips are strongly correlated with high NPS scores. This means our staff earn more money which increases retention and job satisfaction. It’s not just the money, our people like making people happy.  In general, it is much easier to serve happy and satisfied customers than frustrated customers.

Instead of calling customers to change their answers, our owners talk to customers who are dissatisfied and try to make it right. Just as importantly, they call customers who responded in the neutral range to learn what we could do to improve our service so that they would gladly promote it to their friends.

Instead of hiding problems, our owners are seeking them out so we can resolve them.

This attitude has made our business better over time. The results of their efforts show up in the surveys.

As Erik Maxwell, a franchise owner, explained succinctly, “When we meet customer expectations everyone wins. When we don’t, everyone loses.”

The key to Erik’s success? (his business routinely puts up NPS scores in the 90’s) – setting expectations, for his staff, for the customer, even for corporate. (I wrote a while back about hyper-communication– Erik personifies great communication).

Conclusion

While high NPS scores are great for business owners, the real payoff is for the customer. Why? Because everyone in the business is aligned to deliver a great party, and they genuinely want to create evangelists. We are not perfect, but instead of trying to deliver a “good enough”, everyone knows every party matters.  Each experience adds to our word-of-mouth reputation. “Just okay” is not good enough. And leaving someone upset? You can see how damaging that is to a reputation. So we take it seriously.

At the end of the day, when you see an NPS score the simple way to think about it is, nearly 9 out of ten people (NPS: 86) had such a great experience they would recommend the service to their friends. And most of them do.

NPS is not simply about satisfaction, it is a system for making sure clients get the value they are paying for and more. It is the best measure for word of mouth we have found, and personally I believe it is one of the reasons we survived 2020 while our competitors folded.

In my experience you can trust NPS because it is hard to hide the unhappy customers. And this should give you confidence that chances are good that you too will receive an experience worth raving about.

It is hard to believe that we have been doing parties for 15 years at GameTruck. Over that span of time we have seen many companies rise, and fall. Many claim to do what we do, but over time, discerning parents seek out gametruck.com for a party.

Why?

I believe this speaks as much to the experience economy as anything else. Renting video games is easy. Anyone can do it. Few can be successful at it, plus that’s not exactly the business we are in.

What people want from us is a memory they can cherish. They are looking to buy a celebration that will mark a special occasion they hope to never forget. It is not the video games in and of themselves that is interesting, it is how we manage the event that makes all the difference.

At GameTruck, we do three things exceptionally well, and in my experience those things make all the difference. First, we over communicate with the host. Second, our amazing game coaches maximize player engagement.

Finally, we finish strong, which leaves people with a compelling memory. I’m not just saying this because I’m a fan. I am looking at Net Promoter Score of 86.7 for 2020, one of the toughest years ever for our industry (or most event industries).

Communication

My mother told me this story. When she was the manager of the prestigious Bloomfield Hills Country Club in Michigan, she was elected to the president of the club managers association. You would think that a group of professional managers, responsible for planning amazing events for their members would be on top of their game when it came to communicating with annual association convention. “They always waited until the last minute,” she told me. “Every time. You would think professional managers would know better, how late registrations can throw the kitchen into chaos. But they didn’t. It’s human nature.”

Going to a well planned event is a blast. Managing a well planned event? Not so much. That’s why GameTruck invested in developing a state of the art system with advanced notification to make sure we over communicate with the party host. We also invested in an email invite platform, “Party Link” to help the host stay in touch with their guests. What’s more, Game Coaches go out of their way to communicate with the hosts. From the first person you talk to, through the coach, to the franchise owner, everyone understands throwing a party, even a kids party can be a stressful event. Our goal is to do everything we can to reduce that stress.

Having systems in place to manage the consistency, allows our staff to focus on the personal touch. When you rely on a single human to do all the work? Book events, send emails, make all the calls, drive the trailer, manage the event, clean the trailer, and run the business. Things can slip. It takes a team to execute. We don’t always get it perfect, but we always try to get it right. A great event starts with effective communication. As I like to say, “fear fills gaps in communication.” When the host and guests know what to expect, they can relax and focus on having a good time.

Max Engagement

One of the things that makes a GameTruck party work is the design of the environment, and the subtle work of the Game Coach. Both of these combine to create a thoroughly engaging environment for the players. Our goal is always to get everyone playing the entire time. With the rise of games like Fortnite however, we have seen a growing number of kids who engage by cheering on their friends as they compete. I have heard of parties where, “they rocked the trailer” when their team won the game.

What is really interesting about this, and something we’ve seen since the very beginning of GameTruck is that being in the same space, surrounded by games rocks. And I think after spending a few months on Zoom, we can all agree that there is something special about being there in person. This can be explained by the 7/38/55 rule. Only 7% is the words we use. 38% is the tone, and 55% is the body language. The other day my wife changed our dinner plans because while my words said, “I’ll eat there.” my tone and body language screamed, “no”.

Experts call this the lyrics, music, and dance of human communication. When more people are present the density of communication energy goes through the roof. Keeping the rhythms of communication in harmony is the job of the Game Coach.

The Game Coach makes all the difference by helping players negotiate what games to play so no one is left out. What’s more, they remove the learning curve. They help players get into games and focus on play. Coaches remove the sand from the gears when it comes to playing together. We call this Zero Friction Gaming. The faster players get into games, the more time they spend during the party playing games together, the higher the level of engagement. We have learned that players remember games they played with friends better than any game they played alone.

Finish Strong

There is a quirk of human memory that we do not remember everything that happens to us. For the sake of efficiency the human brain “collapses” or “folds” our experiences down to two points. We remember the moment of maximum intensity, and we remember how the experience ended. This is a crucial point. This means that half of how someone will remember their celebration depends upon how it ends. Now hold that thought.

When parents ask their kids to stop playing… what kind of experience do the parents and the kids have most of the time? It’s miserable right? Welcome to the single biggest piece of magic performed by our game coaches. They end the party not only with no crying, but many have personalized ways of making the end of a party memorable. Whether it is singing happy birthday, trying to “flip the truck” or getting the kids hyped up for the next part of the party, they not only end game time strong, they leave the kids energized. Many gamers remember their game coach for years aftward. I received an email from a mom just last week from one of the first GameTruck Parties held in Georgia. Her son still remembers that party.

Conclusion

One of the craziest parts of the video game industry is the relentless rate of change. As I write this the PlayStation 5 and XBox Series X has hit the streets. GameTruck started with PlayStation 2, GameCube, and the Xbox 360. How did we survive so long? By delivering great celebrations that kids never forgot. That did not happen by accident. Dedicated partners, and outstanding systems focused on communicating with the hosts made throwing a GameTruck party easier. The latest games, and tremendous staff helped not only boost player engagement, but our Game Coaches help end the parties on a high note – which means the memories of the event are as strong as possible. At the end of the day, parents want their kids to feel respected, valued, and to celebrated. That is what makes a GameTruck party next level. It’s not just a party, it is a celebration.

Answer: All the Difference

One of the great things about GameTruck is that when people see the Game Trailer, they instantly get the concept.  I frequently hear things like, “How fun!” and “That looks amazing,” or the timeless favorite, “Wow.”

I know the truck is extremely cool, but, that is not what people buy from us.  As sweet as that game theater is, at the end of the day, this is not actually what people buy from us.  Remember the story about Laser Tag?  Before we offered it as a service, people would call, ask for it, and despite being told, “We don’t offer that.” They would book us anyway.  Who does that?  Who calls a store looking for one thing and then buys something completely different?

As far as the equipment goes they are completely different.  A set of laser tag gear looks exactly nothing like a Video Game Trailer.  This caused me to ask the question, “What exactly are they buying?”

It’s not what the equipment is, it is what the equipment represents.  The equipment is a physical representation of an outcome.  They can see equipment.  They can visualize it.  But what they really want is a party.  And not just any party, they want a GameTruck Party.

And let’s be clear, a GameTruck party is a special kind of party.  If you only focus on the equipment, you might miss it.  People buy GameTruck parties to celebrate.  The outcome they want is a great celebration.  A celebration is a form of marking a special occasion or important event by engaging in enjoyable social activities.

From my experience, a celebration is a form of recognition.  You are acknowledging someone and elevating them into a position of dignity and respect.  They feel validated, seen, heard, and most of all valued.  A successful celebration is a confirmation of the value we place on the people in our lives, especially our children.

This is supported by one of the oddities of the GameTruck business.  Most parties are not ordered by the person playing in the game theater.  They are ordered by parents, by office managers, by school administrators.  The event is ordered by someone for someone else.  

A GameTruck Party is a gift, a gift of recognition, respect, and socialization.  It is a transference of emotion, and things don’t transfer emotions, people do.

At the end of the day, the magic of a GameTruck Party is delivered by and from the GameCoach.  The person in charge of the event, of managing everything that happens inside (and near and around) the Game Trailer.

When people say, “It’s about the experience.”  This is the experience they are talking about.  The experience their child has when they are the center of attention of an adult who cares as much about gaming as they do.  They are the focus of their friends and family, sitting at the front, choosing the game they want to play and who they want to play with.

The real magic of a GameTruck party is delivered by the amazing men and women who go to great lengths to:

• Make sure the trailer is clean before the party starts
• Put everything away after the party is over
• Make sure the host is comfortable with the selection of available games (we respect the right of parental choice for is and is not appropriate for their guest to play)
• Help the players negotiate who is going to play what games and when
• Translate the players expressions for the parents (concentrating gamers do not look like they are having fun – but they are)
• And most importantly, making sure the VIP – the focal point of the celebration is feeling seen, heard, and valued.

It’s easy to focus on equipment.  We see people do it all the time.  They get sucked into comparing this thing vs that thing, this feature vs that feature and they lose sight of what they really want to buy.  They want to let their child know how much they mean to them. They want to celebrate.

A great Game Coach makes that all seem effortless, automatic, invisible even. Yet we know it’s real and it matters because we see the tips that flow through our system on a regular basis.  We also get the calls from distraught parents who, for the sake of $25 went with another company that cancelled on them at the last minute because their “driver got sick”, or “flaked”, or “didn’t show up” or my personal favorite, “the driver is in jail.”

We never call our staff drivers.  They are Coaches.  A coach works to grow human potential.  A coach is focused on helping you play your best.  A coach brings specialized knowledge that will make it easier for you to play the way you want to play.

Drivers are focused on things.  

A coach is focused on people.

When people ask, “What does a Game Coach do?”

I answer, “The most important work of all. They turn a party into a celebration.”

And that is what every parent is really trying to buy from GameTruck, and that is what everyone in our system works so hard to deliver.