Ep. 10: A better, simpler measure

May 15, 2014 - Richard Watts, who led the adoption of the Net Promoter System at Progressive, the insurance company, talks with Rob Markey about what led an analytical company to choose such a simple measure (4:22), challenges to adoption (7:44), how NPS became one of the company's key metrics (14:21) and what he would do differently if he had to do it all over again (29:22).

Is your company especially analytically oriented? We hear people describe their companies this way a lot, often as a way of explaining that nothing as simple as Net Promoter® could ever work in their company. They’re all engineers or accountants, or maybe even insurance actuaries.

As it happens, our latest podcast is with Richard Watts, who led the adoption of the Net Promoter System® at Progressive, the US-based insurance company. You probably know it as the company that employs Flo, the bubbly, white-aproned spokesperson who stars in Progressive’s advertising.

Richard retired from the insurer in 2010, but he remains active in the Net Promoter community. In our conversation, he explains why Progressive chose Net Promoter and reveals some of the points of resistance he encountered in its adoption, including the challenge of rolling out a simple metric at a company with an affinity for complex math.