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Customer Net Impression |
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Employee Net Impression |
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Service Delivery Channel Allocation |
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Net Impression Process |
PCG has successfully used our proprietary Net Impression® Leverage analysis on hundreds of projects over the past 15 years, including numerous projects for federal agencies and private companies. In addition to PCG's internal validity checks on the Net Impression® Leverage model, IRS statistical experts have reviewed the Leverage algorithm and concluded that it provides a valid measure of improvement potential.
What is Net Impression® Leverage and what does it mean?
Net Impression® Leverage tells you where to concentrate efforts in order to increase satisfaction. PCG delivers these improvement areas in an easy-to-understand prioritized list. A ranking of "10" on the leverage index means high improvement potential, and a "1" means low improvement potential.
A high Net Impression® Leverage area is one in which customers or employees are relatively dissatisfied and/or the item is very important to them. Think of the Net Impression® Leverage ranking as a "bang for the buck" type of measure. Making improvements to high leverage areas will improve overall satisfaction more than if improvements are made to low leverage areas.
Below is an example of how we provide Net Impression® Leverage results to our clients.
Why not just work on the items with the lowest satisfaction ratings?
Satisfaction ratings do not illustrate the importance factor. Customers or employees may be relatively dissatisfied with an item but not consider the item very important. Improving in such an area would not necessarily increase overall satisfaction.
The Net Impression® Leverage ranking combines dissatisfaction and importance into one simple summary measure. Addressing a high leverage area (one in which the customer/employee is relatively dissatisfied) will significantly contribute to overall satisfaction with the service.
Where does the importance information come from?
Net Impression® Leverage uses a method of derived importance based on how related each individual rating item is to overall satisfaction. If an individual item is heavily influencing the overall satisfaction score, we can assume that attribute is more important than another item that may have little relationship to the overall score. This derived method is more accurate than asking respondents directly to rate importance because when given the opportunity, respondents are likely to rate most items as important. Respondents are also more likely to feel social pressure and rate something as important if they feel it should be rated as important.
Why is Net Impression® Leverage better than other types of analyses?
Net Impression® Leverage is superior to the most commonly employed alternatives, typically performance/contribution grids (quadrant analysis) which use regression analysis to derive importance or separate importance questions for each item.
It is superior to quadrant analysis in the following ways:
- Easy to understand and explain
- Directly actionable
- Allows for the possibility of significance testing among individual items
- Less subjective
- More reliable formula for deriving importance
- Minimizes the number of questions that must be asked of respondents (compared to direct questioning for importance information)
Beyond the analytical power of Net Impression® Leverage, we have found it has a behavioral impact as well. Often, managers will resist the inter-unit comparisons of a balanced scorecard approach. In many cases, the resistance is justified because many things can influence satisfaction scores that have nothing to do with service. Leverage removes this barrier to acceptance by focusing attention on the comparisons among service items and emphasizing that all units, from the lowest rated to the highest rated, have improvement opportunities. As a noted organizational behavior expert has observed about private sector companies, a focus on improvement promotes "fighting the competition" versus "fighting each other."