We build our business on trust, not just code

Depending on how they answer the standard “how likely are you to recommend us” question, customers are categorised into three groups—promoters, detractors, passives:

Promoters (score of 9 and 10) represent a company’s most enthusiastic and loyal customers: these people are likely to act as brand ambassadors, enhance a brand’s reputation, and increase referral flows, buy more and stay with you longer, securing your company’s growth.

Detractors (score of 0 to 6, included) are unlikely to recommend a company or product to others, or worse, they could actively discourage potential customers away from a business; in all likelihood they will not repeat purchases with your company or cancel their service.

Passives (score of 7 or 8) are not actively recommending a brand, but are also unlikely to speak badly about you. Although they are not included in the NPS calculation, passives are very close to being promoters (particularly when they give a score of 8), so it always makes sense to find a way to win them over and.

Net Promoter Score is always expressed as a number from -100 to 100; the score is negative when a company has more detractors than promoters, and positive in the opposite situation.

In the Net Promoter system, average scores vary greatly between industries and on the internet you can find various benchmarks for different industries. I encourage you to look at them to understand what is a “good” or “bad” score in your particular industry. Regardless of the industry averages, any score below 0 would mean you have more detractors than promoters and you should take special care to remedy this situation.

Important thing to consider is that the value of the NPS survey comes largely from the open-ended questions where customers are asked to give feedback. Usually, the question looks something like this: “Why did you choose that score?”, “How can we improve?”, “What is the main reason you chose that score?”.

This input serves as a basis for satisfaction/dissatisfaction drivers analysis and for the feedback loop where you will work on fixing your relationship with your dissatisfied customers, mend broken processes and exterminate points of friction from your customer relationships.

In the NPS system, everything starts with the survey. Depending on what you will use the NPS survey results for, as well as at what maturity level your customer experience organisation is, there are several options.

It is important to understand different options that you may use to understand which is most appropriate for your particular situation:

1. rNPS

The, so called, relationship NPS is a survey that most companies do when they do NPS surveys. This survey is meant to be a measure of  the health of your customer relationships and is usually done periodically, in most cases, once a year, on a representative sample. In this survey, your customers are most likely to give you the idea of what they think of your company in general and it is a good measure for the likelihood that the customer will stay with your company.

Things to consider:

1. Make sure your sample reflects the structure of your customer database, based on the criteria relevant to your particular industry (for example, demographics, geography, usage criteria, purchase patterns etc.).
2. Remember that you have randomly selected your sample and that customers may be referring to events that happened some time ago in their open responses. rNPS, although a great measure of general attitudes, satisfaction and advocacy of your companies is just not fast enough to catch certain problems you may have in your processes.
3. Accordingly, since it is a sample, it may be difficult sometimes to understand how big a certain problem is and what is the real % of your customer database that is affected by a certain problem.
4. Very often, companies get disappointed from the value of insight they get from their NPS surveys and, in our experience, this almost always happens because they have only been doing rNPS surveys which is just not enough if you are really serious about your customer experience.
   

2. tNPS

tNPS – the so called touchpoint NPS is a survey that measures the performance of certain touchpoints, usually within a certain process in the customer journey. For example, if you are selling and servicing garden equipment you may want to evaluate how your customers are served in different stores, how satisfied they are with the buying experience on the website etc.

Also, you may want to see how you are doing in your after sales activities, how your customer support is doing, what are the typical problems when doing repairs etc. tNPS surveys run 24/7 and surveys are usually triggered by some event on a touchpoint that you have identified as relevant and important for customer experience (has ability to delight or anger the customer), has enough volume, is governable etc. Scores and open answers are collected continuously. 

Things to consider:

1. tNPS is what will give you the fuel to run your customer experience effort. No better way to learn about what is really going on, than from customers, right? However, if you will not do anything with the feedback, get in touch with the customers and let them know that they have been heard and that you will do something to fix the problem, it is better you do not do the surveying at all.
   
2. tNPS is a great input for subsequent surveys that can measure how certain drivers are performing over time in the whole database. For example, if you keep seeing problem X on a certain touchpoint, you may run a separate survey to understand the problem in depth or survey in the database to understand how big the problem really is.

3. sNPS

sNPS is “strategic” NPS, a variation of rNPS. The focus of this study is the benchmarking with your competition. Usually, the sample sizes are smaller and there may be a problem of statistical significance, so usually this survey is compared to the other NPS surveys that you would be doing.

“Vision without action is daydreaming” as the old saying goes. The same applies to insight that you have gathered but are not using to improve how you service your customers.

If you do not use insight for concrete action, this will hurt you in several ways:

• All the effort and costs you have put into surveying goes to waste.
• Internally, the teams working on the NPS system end up wasting a lot of energy for surveying, making reports and presentations that lead to nothing which demoralises the organisation and has long lasting negative effects on any future attempts at improving customer satisfaction.
• Finally, you lose credibility with your customers. Actually, it is better not to survey at all if you will not use customer feedback for meaningful action and let your customers know what you have done based on their feedback.

In the NPS system, the actions we use from the insight is called “the feedback loop”. 

How it works?

1. A special team in your organisation will have regular meetings and go through the feedback which will then be categorised into “fix now”, “reach out to customer” and “root cause analysis”.
2. Individual problems that have been identified will usually require someone from the company to reach out to customers either to get more data on the issue or to fix the relationship – say you are sorry, say what you will do to fix the problem etc.
3. Whatever you can do to fix the problem now – do it. And let the customer know about it.
4. A lot of the problems that come up during surveys have to do with some systemic fault that usually takes some time to analyse and fix. This is where typical project management or agile methodology steps in.