Very interesting article. My guiding principle in business has always been to deliver what we said we would and then find ways of adding unexpected value to give the best customer experience. At a high level this article resonates with that. The challenge though, is finding what's of value to customers quickly enough, especially as this tends to be fluid. Real time monitoring and aggregation of the pain and pleasure points from across your customer base gives you intel on where you are not delivering on your brand promise and where the opportunities lie to use your resources as efficiently as possible to add unexpected value. As the article says these are things customers will remember.

If you take a helicopter view of this, a business wants to get somewhere (their vision) and they have a map of what they think is the best route to get there (their mission and objectives). They have determined what they think is the best mode of transport (their business plan) and the mile markers they need to pass to get there (their KPIs). Throughout the journey they have multiple different levers they can to choose to pull or push to change things, which means they pass the mile markers at a different rate; however, if you don't know why things changed its a bit like driving with a blindfold on (I do not recommend this literally or metaphorically speaking).

Any KPI number like NPS, sales, profits, costs are all just mile markers which you can statistically argue about until the cows come in (remember 89% of all statistics are wrong and the other 12% are made up). In my opinion whether NPS is less more or less valid than other measures is academic unless you remove the blindfold whilst driving. I totally acknowledge the summary point of the article is exactly this and the foray into the value of NPS will stoke debate but there is a danger that the real issue of not asking why could get lost. Fred Reichheld has always said your not using the system correctly if you do not ask why. Maybe they should change the open source licence to make the follow up question mandatory?

As children we used to ask why a lot and yet as we get to be adults we seem to get scared of asking that for fear of looking like we don't understand. We all need to embrace our inner child more.