Verizon missed a golden opportunity to delight a long-time customer (me, customer since 2004).

Here is the deal. I went to China on a business trip and shut off my Verizon phone. However, it went on in my luggage by mistake and racked up ridiculous roaming charges completely unintentionally. I spoke to Verizon and they cut the charges in half, but it still was ridiculously expensive.

I get it. They were doing me a “favor” by cutting the charges in half, and they made a big deal about this “favor”.  Also, I had to beg them to do so.

I am a longtime customer who has almost never called customer service and never made this mistake before. I would have thought that they would have taken this “moment of truth” to completely delight me by waiving all the charges. They did not.

After this experience, it hit me. This is the difference between high NPS (Net Promoter Score) companies and neutral to negative ones.

A high NPS company like Zappos would have seen this as an incredible opportunity to delight a customer and make them passionate about their company by waiving all the charges. It would not have been about cost, but about high NPS which research shows leads to higher profitability and stock price.

A neutral to negative NPS company like Verizon goes half way. They do as much as they think they can so the customer is not angry or even feels guilty (and they very aggressively tried to make me feel guilty), but not far enough to delight the customer.

When you align your company against driving high NPS, your employees will never go half way just to save money in the tactical short term. You delight the customer first, maybe take a hit in the short term, and you drive profitability in the long term. NPS research has shown this time after time.