Tellingly, NPS has been adopted by many of the biggest service based companies including Microsoft, GE and American Express. NPS has several key strengths that make it a perfect fit for superannuation research. First, it is simple. That means it can be measured with a short and therefore low-cost questionnaire. Its brevity and simplicity also means that you can immediately explain to service staff how the metric works and even use the score to motivate and reward service staff on the front line. The other big advantage of NPS is that it allows a company to compare itself to other brands in its industry that also collect the data. It was here that the group structure of the research we conducted in 2009 came into its own. Each fund that took part in the NPS research was supplied with a detailed report showing them their NPS and grouping the qualitative comments from members to demonstrate what made members more or less likely to recommend their fund to others.

But crucially, each fund was also provided with the anonymous NPS scores for the other 23 funds that took part in the research. The comparative value of NPS will come into its own in 2010 when the funds repeat their research and examine if their performance has increased or decreased against 2009 levels based on their member strategies. We took this cohort idea further by also running the one-day seminar in October at Melbourne Business School. The results from the NPS research were examined and explained and funds had chance to discuss their approaches and learn from others. We brought in senior speakers from other service businesses that use NPS and have achieved stellar levels of satisfaction to explain how they have used NPS to drive their business forward.

Most results are now the intellectual property of the funds that sponsored the research in 2009, so if you want to learn what your NPS is, or how it stacks up against other funds that you compete with, you will need to sign up for the 2010 session. One recurring theme was the importance of small things: the returned call, the personal touch or that extra service that turns passive members into promoters. And equally important, it is the missed call, the inefficient service and the thoughtless approach to statements or web pages that usually turns a happy member into one who actively considers a switch. One NPS score I can reveal was the one from the fund executives who took part in the 2009 research. It was +80: 80 per cent of the participants in last year’s group gave us a 9 or 10 and none of them scored us less than 7. Enough said.