Does your Voice of Customer (VOC) programme use Net Promoter Score as its one and only metric? Chances are you’re missing out on valuable insights that could be helping your business.
The problem with Net Promoter Score (NPS)
We’ll caveat this to say that NPS still has a key place in any Voice of Customer or customer experience programme. It is a powerful metric that quickly and easily provides a performance measure of your brand as a whole. It is particularly useful in the boardroom and gives a good sense of customer advocacy and willingness to recommend your business to others. It can help forecast growth and identify weaknesses in your overall experience.
However, when dealing with individual customer touchpoints, sometimes NPS doesn’t go granular enough. This is especially true for businesses that have numerous customer touchpoints, from online presences and real-world store fronts to different customer-facing service teams (the insurance industry is a good example of this, with different specialist teams for each type of insurance).
As customers move through these different touchpoints, their experience may vary. However, when filling in an NPS survey, customers won’t score these touchpoints individually; they score on overall experience, start to finish. The result is that where one touchpoint performs poorly, it may unfairly skew the NPS overall, particularly if it was the last point of contact a customer has with a business. A poorly performing touchpoint may also get overlooked if it occurs early in the customer journey, resulting in a strong NPS that obscures the problem touchpoint. In instances where several touchpoints perform poorly, the general overview NPS provides may not be enough to identify where the issues are or how to prioritise them.
A scenario: NPS as a frontline metric
Imagine you’re a salesperson who has Net Promoter Score as your primary KPI; how you perform on this metric could be tied to your career progression, salary raise or end-of-year bonus. So, you work hard to deliver a superb customer experience to customers who walk through your door. However, once you hand a customer onto another team—say ordering or dispatch—you have no control over the customer’s experience from that point onward. Worse, if the experience the ordering and dispatch team provide is poor, this will directly affect the Net Promoter Score the customer gives the business—and you—at the end of their purchase. Your performance is dragged down as a result of issues beyond your control.
The bottom line, NPS is a good metric to help businesses understand performance at a high level but as a key performance indicator for specific teams and interactions, it can be misleading.
The solution: Pair NPS with CSAT and/or CES
It's for the reasons above that businesses often pair Net Promoter Score with other customer metrics, giving them the best of both worlds. Each metric has a different role to play for business strategy, improving performance and driving commercial results.
NPS provides a useful and holistic understanding of customer experience for the business as a whole. However, for more granular customer feedback and insights at key milestones and/or touchpoints (such as at point of purchase or upon delivery), customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer effort score (CES) can provide additional layers of insight and pinpoint issues down to individual moments in the customer journey.
Don’t forget the role brand plays in your customer experience strategy
In addition to laying NPS, CSAT and CES into your Voice of Customer programme, it’s also necessary to consider the impact of brand and how it influences customer experience.
Customer experience and brand are two sides of the same coin. They work in conjunction with one another to elevate your business. Good experiences drive your brand. Likewise, brand also drives experience—or rather, the expectations of experience.
A premium brand comes with higher expectations. If customers are paying top dollar, they expect a top experience. Failure to deliver on that promise can lead to customer dissatisfaction, leading to poorer Voice of Customer metrics.
Similarly, in the case of a low-tier brand, customers are more likely to score the business highly because they entered the relationship with low expectations.
Read more: How customer experience fuels your brand health
Closed loop feedback is key
It's all well and good to talk measures, metrics, and collecting feedback across your customer touchpoints, but if you are not actioning anything off the insights your VOC programme is generating, then your programme is not worth the paper it’s reported on.
Fortunately, there are not many businesses that do this; however, where some frequently come unstuck is forgetting to communicate the changes they’re making as a result of customer feedback.
According to Statista, the majority of consumers (51%) believe brands don’t action feedback provided by their customers. Which is why it is important to let your customers know how their feedback is translating into action in your business. What’s more, it’s an easy and effective way to build rapport with your customer base.
“Communicating changes you’ve made or are planning to make as a result of customer feedback lets customers know you’ve heard and that you care,” says Kate De Marco, Strategy Director at Perceptive. “Even if some of the actions are already part of your long-term business plan, communicate them anyway.”
There is also an additional, deeper psychological reason for why you should communicate change to customers to close the feedback loop.
“If customers don’t believe anything will happen as a result of their feedback, they stop answering surveys; they simply don’t see the point,” says Kate. “So, if your survey response rates are dwindling and it’s not due to fatigue from surveying too often, consider whether you’ve communicated with customers about the changes you’re implementing as a result of their feedback.”
The best VOC programmes combine layered insights with action
If you’re relying on one metric to inform your entire customer experience strategy, then it’s likely you’re not getting the full picture of experience across your business. What’s more, your ability to accurately pinpoint issues and act on feedback is hampered. As a rule, a VOC programme that provides both overview and detail is going to pave the way for more effective and efficient action and ultimately more value to your business.
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