* Letter to Joseph Jaffe * Comments on your recent podcast *

Dear Joseph,

I have been an avid listener to Jaffe Juice/Across the Sound for 2 years now. I believe my first episode was in the 20s or 30s. I wanted to participate in some recent conversations from your podcast.

1. Regarding your partnership with Deliver magazine and the listeners comment about their most recent “conversation starter” attempting to separate themselves for the impact of direct mail on the environment. When you began the sponsorship with USPS, I complexly understood the need to create a business model that made sense for podcasting. However, the “announcer” that delivers the “conversation starter” is anything by conversational. In my opinion their segment is just another form of the “30 second spot”. Advertisers have trained us to tune out the voice over and this is no different. I enjoy your audio comments, your rants, and your guests, but honestly you need to lose the commercial sounding message. If Deliver magazine wants to participate in the conversation, make it a conversation, not a commercial message. Put a real person on that is an expert in their business, in the industry, not a hired voice. I’m quite surprised that you have let this go on as long as you have as I find the segment off message.

2. Secondly regarding your recent discussion of the Net Promoter Score. First, let me make sure all disclaimers are completed. I’m the CMO of Satmetrix, the co-developer of Net Promoter and an organization that makes it’s living helping companies implement Net Promoter. In your most recent podcast you indicated that “easy to do business with” was the most accurate reflection of loyalty, not NPS. In the original research behind Net Promoter we found “likelihood to recommend” to be strongest correlate to actual customer behavior, with “easy to do business with: coming in at #5. While I get the point that it’s about the experience, doesn’t it make sense that recommendation sets the bar higher than easy to do business with? In your Delta experience, their lack of easy to do business with not only impacted your loyalty, but also your recommendation.

3. On the topic of Delta airlines, I encourage you to be the Jeff Jarvis of the airline industry and take up the battle with Delta. I will sign up for your war against poor customer experience. One way I am considering is to play a portion of your podcast in my module of the Net Promoter Certification training. I teach the closing module of which a portion is to redefine the customer experience for an airline. Funny how we all find that airlines needs this re-engineering but they just can’t seem to do anything about it! You would be amused at some of the experience design our students come up with.

I could “rant” on and on about the topics covered on Jaffe Juice, but a long blog post won’t get read. In summary, I ask that you:

1. Reconsider the delivery of your commercial sponsor more along the tone of a conversation.
2. Reconsider Net Promoter as a measure of both loyalty and word of mouth.
3. Take on Delta airlines and enlist your fan base to fight the war with you. Jeff Jarvis did Dell a big favor, look how far they have come in joining the conversation. Perhaps you could be that helpful to Delta.

I was disappointed to have missed you at WOMMA this year, but I was teaching Net Promoter in London at the time. Hope our paths cross in the future. Let me say explicitly, I recommend Jaffe Juice and Join the Conversation to all marketers. This captures both my loyalty and my positive word of mouth.