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"Which is more important? Net Promoter® Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)"

Wrong question! The correct question is: Which drivers of NPS and CSAT are more important than others?

So! let us get right down to it.

NPS was first discussed by Fred Reichheld in the 2003 Harvard Business Review. It measures customer loyalty and tells you if your customers are likely to promote your company or product or service.

But CSAT has been there forever. It measures customer's (or user's) overall perception about your company and tells you if your company or product or service actually met their expectations.

CSAT depends on your customer's expectations and the critical-to-quality (CTQ) requirements.

NPS predicts potential for renewals, revisits, "come back again", and crowd-sources your referral revenue-stream. CSAT summarizes your company's or product's or service's performance.

Both are business-outcome metrics that are equally important to measure and both relate to Kano's Customer Experience and Competitive Advantage story.

There is a known strong correlation between the two metrics, especially in the tails of their statistical distribution. Causality or "which one causes what" is yet to be determined. High CSAT is likely to result in Promoter status. Low CSAT will push a customer within the detractor and neutral zone. Neutral and Passive makes a dead zone where drivers and behaviors of customers are harder to decipher. In this zone, studying behaviors shown by repeat customer (#bigdata), can provide additional insights.

There are however important business processes and behavioral drivers that are common to both CSAT and NPS.

As a consummate change-maker and a Games-based learning pioneer, Ken Thompson writes, speaks and deploys Games to teach corporate teams, the consequences of their decisions and help them manage change in business processes. He is the managing director of BioTeams Design and Swarm Teams.

RD:> Are you a gamer?

KT:> My kids are fanatical gamers. They humiliate me all the time, when I play with them. In fact they no longer include me even when they play Xbox soccer. So! I would not describe myself a gamer.

RD:> How did you get into Games and stuff like that?

KT:> I am a social mathematician. My educational background is in mathematics. Then I worked for more than thirty years in change management. I wrote books about teams, social networks and change management. I gave a TedX talk about high-performing teams.

Over  two decades, as a hobby, I have been building these models, simulations and games. In the last five years or so, my clients started asking me to commercialize these simulations and games.

Some are pure simulations. For example, I have a simulation that optimizes how one organizes a sales process; another is about determining ROI from social campaigns.

Many are games and are based on immersive-learning principles. Most of these games are paper and pencil and role-based games, i.e. hybrid or blended learning game. Typically, a game runs for a full day with a leadership team.

RD:> I completely relate. We did those for twenty years prior to starting PAKRA.

KT:> Yes! In these games, I add:

(1) Realistic and relatable constructs i.e. stories with artifacts.

(2) Then there are, what I call, “golden rules”. By “golden rules” I mean: You should “Always do this” or You should “Never do that”.

(3) Basic resource constraints.

(4) Dilemmas and conflicts. Dilemmas, such as, “I want six pack abs” and “I love chocolates”.

(5) There are, of course, roles and metrics.

(6) The component of social learning where I facilitate in-person or online.

They typically play these games for 3 rounds. The first round is to normalize the mechanics and at the end, the players will be supremely confident. Then in the second round, the unexpected happens; for example, the suppliers increase prices, the market demand collapses, competitors eat their lunch, Euro spins out of control etc.  In the third round, the innovation happens. Almost all participants find these blended experiential learning as the best way to learn.