Page 76 - The Apple Experience

The Ultimate Question

One reason why Apple scores higher than most other retailers on every

metric (visitors, revenue per square foot, employee retention, etc.) is
feedback. Interestingly, when you ask the casual Apple Store customers why

they were satisfied with their experience, they will rarely, if ever, mention the

word feedback. Conduct a Twitter search for Apple and customer service, and

you will find dozens of enthusiastic customers who are sharing their positive

experiences with friends on their larger social networks. Add the word

feedback to the search term and no results will show up. Yet feedback is

Apple’s under-the-hood philosophy that guides nearly everything Apple

does, and it’s a key component in cultivating an engaging team.

Apple uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to “monitor the employee and
customer experience and to identify and address where we can better serve.”
2
The NPS score measures engagement. Studies have consistently shown that

companies with higher levels of employee and customer engagement

outperform their peers on the stock market and other metrics of financial

success. But recall from the earlier Gallup research that a full 70 percent of

employees in the United States are either “not engaged” or “fully

disengaged.”
3
In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, created a new

way to measure customer relationships. He called it the Net Promoter Score.

But as thousands of companies adopted the score, they expanded it,

customized it, or improved the methodology. The result is an NPS that

thousands of companies, including Apple, use to measure customer loyalty

and to transform their organizations.

Companies like Apple use NPS to ask two important questions, one

aimed at internal “customers”—employees—and the other at external