It may be an old joke, but it was new to me, and for customer experience (CX) professionals, it’s timeless.
Someone on LinkedIn posted an image that ostensibly came from Microsoft, asking for the user to answer the one-question survey, “How likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend or a colleague?”
The user opts for the lowest selection, “1” and is presented with a free-form field instructing them, “Please explain why you gave this score.”
The user writes:
“I need you to understand that people don’t have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another.”
The reference to a previous version of Windows suggests this particular meme has been going around for a while, but the punchline still lands. Big time.
A recommendation reality check
Beyond a knowing nod or a laugh, CX leaders should use this scenario to ask themselves a critical question: If you can’t imagine people actually recommending your product, why ask customers about advocacy?
“All feedback is useful feedback,” you might answer. But the Windows 10 scenario is based on a fundamentally false premise. It’s asking the customer to pretend they would have a conversation as a way to assess their satisfaction and likelihood to promote the brand.
If you get a high number of people who simply check “5” because they’re nice (and-or want to move on with their lives), you haven’t gathered true insight. Any marketing or loyalty campaign based on such data would be unlikely to generate the desired level of engagement.
Rote recommendation requests (which I’m tempted to abbreviate as RRR) do a disservice to CX leaders, and they’re all too tempting to make given you can plug them into the flow of almost any website or mobile app.
What you should be asking instead
Maybe the real problem is this question focuses more on the product than the experience surrounding it.
For example, if the customer got their PC with Windows 10 pre-installed along with applications aligned with their core needs, and if they got service and support that made it easy for them to address initial setup and troubleshooting, they might recommend Microsoft, the brand behind Windows 10.
That’s more powerful than simply agreeing you’d recommend what has long been the dominant desktop OS anyway.
This kind of question is best posed as part of a deeper customer survey. It might also be captured with greater actionable feedback if it were part of a conversation between the customer and an employee at a store.
I realize what I’m suggesting is more complex than gathering numbers, but so is delivering an outstanding customer service. Ask a better, more realistic question and you might come back with data you can actually use.