When it comes to the Net Promoter Score® (NPS), don’t make the big mistake that many businesses do: to use NPS in isolation. Instead, learn use NPS to get a holistic view of your performance and how to innovate using the data you derive.
NPS is a powerful tool. You can use it to gauge the likelihood of your customers recommending you as well as your customer satisfaction levels. It also provides an excellent way to benchmark yourself against other organisations in your industry and understand how you're performing against your competitors.
But there is more to NPS than that.
When it comes to NPS, the New Zealand (and to some extent Australian) market is relatively small and innovative. Thereby, our approach to NPS and the information we derive from it is often nimbler.
The key to any NPS initiative is to use its information strategically, be it informing your business strategy or implement positive change in your business. Industries are constantly changing. This is why it’s so important to survey your customers regularly to ensure you're keeping up with change.
Learn more: Dial up your NPS and your business with our free guide Grow your business with NPS.
Don’t just look at NPS as the score you get after your customer survey. Use it to actually look at a combination of your customer feedback (both qualitative and quantitative) and usage patterns over time to analyse what your customers say and do. Can you see any patterns or discrepancies?
You want to use NPS to get a holistic view of your business performance. This is possible through a number of means.
Read more: What makes people give a high Net Promoter Score?
Further, use micro segmentation when you look at all of the data points where you have customer metrics: usage, behaviour, spend, products, channels, customer attributes, tenure and history.
An obvious point in theory, but ensure you follow up with the customers most at risk of leaving you. It’s not about getting the actual feedback itself, but it’s what you DO with the feedback that matters. To ensure this gets actioned, put a process into place for your team to facilitate actioning negative feedback quickly. Actually creating a strategy for how to deal with negative feedback quickly and efficiently and closing the loop as soon as possible is vital.
Consider including actioning negative feedback (or any feedback for that matter) into the KPIs of your front-line staff, to ensure accountability across the team.
Ensure your customer feedback loop feeds directly into your business process. If your NPS is linked to your individual employee KPIs (it should be!), you want the KPI to ideally go from your agents (or front line staff) to executives straight away. This keeps everyone accountable and responsible for keeping the NPS high throughout your business.
Furthermore, make sure the KPIs for your CEO is directly linked to your NPS. This makes a huge difference as it ensures your NPS initiative gets actioned and that everybody has bought in to it internally.
Remember, as with everything, consistency is key. Regular, strategic surveys are key to achieving NPS success. Depending on your business model and sample size, consider sending surveys every 30, 60 or 90 days. Consult with your customer feedback expert as to what is right for you.
NPS is all about gathering insights over time, as you can then track and analyse performance to spot trends to be able to use these to your advantage. It’s about getting “miles on the road” as any Voice of Customer or NPS program will prove most successful after a good period of time. Once you have collected a good sample and robust feedback over time, you can get some real, gritty insights.
Keen to know about how you can leverage your NPS to its full potential? Achieve customer retention with the strategies in our free e-book: Grow your business with NPS