Today I got a “3 Minute” (Net Promoter) Survey from LinkedIn. The survey was apparently triggered by my most recent request to LinkedIn customer service.
Because I have been using LinkedIn so actively for so many years, I do have far more followers than the average user. This also means I have surpassed their intended limits for the ‘average user’. No, I’m not an average user, I’m one of their biggest advocates, especially in the MR industry (see my recent post about LinkedIn’s MR sample).
Anyway, today’s post is not so much about how to treat or not treat your fans, but a wake up call to market researchers who let other departments, like customer service, handle their survey research.
After answering a “2″ out of “10″ on the LinkedIn Customer Service NPS question I was asked the standard NPS open-end ” How could we improve your likelihood to recommend LinkedIn Customer Service to a colleague or friend?”
Now rather than just typing in the common “n/a”, “nothing” or just leaving it blank as many survey respondents/panelists often do, since I am such an engaged user I actually took the time to formulate a slightly more detailed answer in hopes that someone at LinkedIn might read it and reconsider the policy that currently requires me to contact LinkedIn once every 30 days and beg for an invitation limit increase.
My thoughtful answer was 104 words long (4 short 3 sentence paragraphs). I typed them directly into the Open End box. When i clicked Submit, here’s the screen i saw:
“Field contains too many characters”. Apparently my answer was too long (thoughtful) for the Net Promoter survey. Can you imagine how this makes me even less likely to ‘promote’ LinkedIn Customer service to my friends and family?
I thought about it for a minute and figured out a way to get more than the few characters allowed into the LinkedIn survey. I posted the comment above on the blog here and just posted the url link to it into the survey. Hopefully LinkedIn customer service will check the link and end up here (though I’m not hopeful).
If LinkedIn Customer Service is reading this, feel free to give me a call and I’ll tell you what I intended to say in my open end and how to improve my NPS rating from 2 to 10. I may even give you a few more pro-bono market research/survey tips!
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10 responses so far ↓
1 Joe Hendricks // Apr 6, 2010 at 5:55 pm
I sure hope they take you up on your offer to provide “pro-bono market research/survey tips”.
I suspect that like FaceBook and Twitter, their fast growth has caused internal dysfunction - if so, I hope they get past this soon!
2 Tom H C Anderson // Apr 6, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Well lesson is, when you ask someone what they think, and then don’t let them tell you, it’s not a good way to encourage ‘promotion’ of your service/product.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter which are ‘free’ services, I’ve been a paying member of LinkedIn for about 5 years. So I really do feel they have an obligation to listen to me/us.
3 Mike Handy // Apr 6, 2010 at 6:42 pm
Love the thinking… I am rather shocked that a social company would limit engagement from a user. I get if they were twitter but Linked in…wow.. thats shocking.
4 @BretIG // Apr 6, 2010 at 10:34 pm
That’s a great story on so many levels! Thanks for sharing
5 Gordon Morris // Apr 7, 2010 at 6:14 am
Me thinks the problem is not with Linked In itself, but the company what ran their survey. That’s just terrible designing for a B-2-B study.
The worse crime, though, is somebody using Net Promoter Score. I’ve just ran through with my business why it does not work. This is after the business planners have spent 3 years wondering why it hasn’t correlated to other metrics, like profitability, net sales, etc.
6 Paul Eichberger // Apr 7, 2010 at 8:55 am
I agree with the comments thus far. The survey should have been tested with short and long comments before release to the public.
I understand the ideal behind the Net Promoter Score (NPS); for the score condenses satisfaction measures into one simple score. The researcher in me, however, sees the need to disect satisfaction into logical areas of the customer experience. For a wireless provider these areas of customer experience are devices, sales experience, and customer service. The NPS has it’s merits, but too often in research we need a deep-dive into the experience of the customer.
7 uberVU - social comments // Apr 7, 2010 at 10:14 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by levitanl: RT @TomHCAnderson: My Problem with LinkedIn’s Net Promoter Survey (NPS) http://ow.ly/1vkiy #mr #marketresearch…
8 Michael D. Scott // Jul 21, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Tom,
I’m not an apologist for LI, but their “character limits” represent a societal trend. Nobody reads anymore!
Although I am, by education and historical avocation, a corporate lawyer, I now spend most of my time “giving back”/”paying forward” working for a non-profit at an urban, public high school. [Any kid can get a pass to my classroom, and I will teach them anything: arithmetic to calculus, literature, composition, chemistry, physics, biology, economics, business, history, government, whatever.]
Anyway, a kid asked me for help on a history project that required her to read a famous U.S. Supreme Court case, In re: Milligan, involving Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and establishment of trial by military commission during the Civil War. The court’s decision is 89 pages long.
She had to list the constitutional issues - not an easy assignment (at least not for anyone who understands constitutional law, which the teacher clearly did not). Anyway, I talked her through it, and she wrote her issues. Her work came to about 1 1/2 pages. Very proud of her accomplishment, she asked for a pass to go hand it in, and I gave her one.
She returned crestfallen. The teacher rejected her paper because she wanted the issues in no more than 4 sentences! Summarize the constitutional issues in a highly unusual, extremely complex case of first impression in 4 sentences? Impossible for a high school kid.
I wonder how this same kid is going to respond to her next English composition assignment requiring her to use the “6+1″ rubric (don’t ask) with paragraphs containing at least 5 sentences? I suspect not well.
Anyway, LI may establish “character limits” based on what they can get their employees to actually read and comprehend. In most organizations, only the most highly educated (and motivated) employees are capable of reading more than a few sentences, and few are capable of comprehending more that a single, substantive idea.
Having said this, LI should improve its survey questionnaire to address this phenomenon.
Regards,
Mscottesq
9 Tom H C Anderson // Jul 21, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Thanks Michael,
Your should know I read your entire response above
I suppose in the future all communication will be limited to 140 character tweets
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