"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." - Bill Gates
In 2003 Majority companies were spending too much money on tools to accurately measure customer success. Fred Reichheld from Bain & Company noticed several issues in those companies' customer success journeys. Rather than asking questions he wanted a more actionable approach.
With over 2 years of research he surveyed several people to understand the bridge between customer behavior and their response. Whether the purchasing pattern led to business growth ?
In several industries he discovered suggesting friends, family in the best indicator of loyalty. In most of the industries he studied, he found that the willingness to recommend a company to friends, families, and colleagues is one of the best indicators of loyalty and can ultimately lead to a positive impact on growth rates. positive recommendations created a bond of trust. whereas a negative one led to trust issues
Customers didn't realize that they were putting credibility at stake with their enthusiastic recommendation.
This Ultimately led to the birth of the Net Promoter Score, one of the most important customer experience metrics.
What is net promoter score?
NPS, or Net promoter score is a customer loyalty metric that measures customer satisfaction and the growth rate of companies. It uses an index that ranges from -100 to 100.
Companies first ask their customers-
“How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?”
Customers can then select an option from a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means that you're dealing with unhappy customers who aren’t likely to recommend the product or service at all, 10 means that you have happy, enthusiastic customers who are highly likely to recommend.
Net score ranges into 3 different categories
The question is oftentimes followed up with a “why?” to further understand and analyze the customer’s reasoning for promoting or not-promoting.
How to calculate net promoter score?
Once you gather the answers from the Net Promoter Score survey, you can determine your company's NPS with this formula:
NPS = (% of promoters - % of detractors)/total number of respondents.
While NPS calculation is generally done manually, it’s best to use a survey tool or a chatbot to accelerate the process NPS score Graph
What is considered a good net promoter score?
Net promoter score guide: A score of a perfect 100 is considered an excellent NPS score. Take the B2B NPS benchmarks from HubSpot as a reference point of where you stand against your competitors and to help measure your progress.
Following are the types of net promoter scores:-
Why is net promoter score important?
High response rate
The shorter your surveys, the higher the chance of getting responses. Since NPS is, at max, a 2-question survey, it’s easier to get a customer to engage. And because it’s convenient for customers and doesn’t consume their time, you can gather insights in seconds.
Easy to use
You don’t have to have the most sophisticated software for understanding Net Promoter Score, and you don’t have to be a genius mathematician either. All you need is a chatbot that’s integrated with Google Sheets. The chatbots fetch the insights and import it to Google Sheets, and the formula can be calculated then and there.
Richer insights
NPS is a popular metric amongst many organizations. It can help you understand not only your customers, but where you stand amongst your competitors.
Makes segmenting a breeze
NPS has a defined grouping system- promoters, passives, and detractors. As you gather responses, the survey automatically segments your customers which saves a lot of efforts. Saving this time allows you and your teams to focus on understanding the “why” behind your score. It also allows you to better serve each group accordingly and to take action on the NPS feedback you’ve received.
Boosts Customer Loyalty and value
By identifying your promoters, detractors, and passives, you can better serve each group accordingly. For example, when you identify your promoters, you can continue to impress them through rewards which will ultimately lead to an increase in net loyalty score
.
How to improve the net promoter score?
Here's a NPS Score guide to promote your score
It’s very easy to get lost in trying to convert detractors to promoters, but in doing so, you end up neglecting the most important vital part of your audience. Promoters provide lots of valuable information, to ignore them would be similar to converting them to a passive. Avoid alienating your promoters, reward them, and give them a platform to voice their opinions and suggestions.
If you want to see a shift in your Net Promoter Score, you have to get into your detractor's shoes to understand what went wrong. Hearing criticism isn’t easy, but you have to understand how important it is to hear it and act on it. Detractors will rarely criticize and give a negative score for no reason.
They can provide valuable suggestions on how to better meet their needs, and it’s better to know precisely than it is to read their minds and guess. This extra step might actually encourage them to turn the other leaf and to become promoters.
Complacency is a silent killer. Having a perfect score does not mean you can turn a blind eye. Attention to details with optimizations to make improvements. You have to understand why your customers are giving you a certain score and what you can do to improve it.
Communication is key. If your customers are giving you a score, you have to respond, regardless of how gnarly the score is. Show your gratitude, and respond immediately. Actively engaging with your customers will make it easier for you to earn loyalty points and further increase your Net Promoter Score.
Why?
Because customers want to know that their opinions are valued. When you appear aloof and uninterested in their feedback, it makes them feel unappreciated. When asking for NPS, always follow up with a “why?” to open the platform up for communication. Engage, thank, and implement to deliver an enhanced customer experience.
Regardless of where your customers are in their journey with you, you have to provide a delightful experience across all boards. This means:
- Offering fast and transparent service
- Treating each customer like royalty
- Reducing average response and resolution time
These steps may be simple but they always guarantee success.
Customers these days, though they may come in all shapes and sizes, all demand the same thing- Speed and attention to detail.
Personalize each interaction but provide options that allow for easy convenience. Say your customer is facing an issue with a product, and your engagement strategy is to go through a chatbot to collect information.
The customer is already distressed, so provide them with the option to directly talk to an agent to avoid harming CX and lower NPS scores.
Many customer service departments have plans in place that make things convenient for agents, or for the business. It might be more affordable, but spending money on unnecessary tools adds up, and the cost of losing a customer with these tools is much higher than the tool itself.
Having a contingency plan ready for customers. Focusing only on customers will help achieve a lot of customer success. This means providing your agents with the best tools and resources to handle your customers- Be it a CRM, a customer engagement platform, knowledge bases, chatbots, integrations to 3rd party applications to allow efficiency. You have to provide your agents with the tools that allow them to be truly customer-focused to see a positive change in your net promoter score.
It is statistically impossible to get the customer journey right at the first instance, and there are many touchpoints that affect NPS scores drastically. Processes like ID verification, providing documentation, compliances, contracts- these activities have a tendency to tune the customer out, cause them to drop off, and hurt your NPS.
Customers are on the hunt for processes that are quick and convenient. Always be on the lookout for new, innovative, and interactive ways that better handle these heavier processes
Let’s take an example.
There’s a free trial of a highly-coveted service that many customers are in line for- in fact, the hype is so apparent, that now you've formed an interest. You see the word “free,” and think of the convenience. “All I have to do is create an account and I am free to explore the service for the time offered,” you think.
But imagine if the reality didn’t match up-
Imagine instead going through a hefty, 10 page registration process, with over 50 forms to fill and an extensive terms and conditions page. And all that to be met with “please enter your credit card information.”
You’d be pretty bummed, wouldn’t you? Your customers are exactly the same.
In the words of Customer Experience guru, Dan Gingiss, “if the process takes 3 clicks, make it 2. If it takes 2 clicks, make it 1.” Make the process as seamless and as convenient as possible.
Remember- customer experience is a culture. Customer experience is the oxygen of your business. Everything you do, every product you make, every service you provide is ultimately for the customer. This has to flow through your organization.
Data Transparency is crucial; NPS scores help measure brand performance and can indicate loyalty. By implementing the score into agent feedback, you can provide insights on how well your agents are performing when handling customers. It also indicates the performance of your product. If customers are likely to recommend one thing from your line, but not another, your product team needs to be aware to improve the product.
This transparency overall enhances your customer’s experience when they have an inquiry that relates to multiple departments. Transferring between departments is extremely frustrating for customers.
By allowing your teams to have access to customer data, you can allow them to serve your customers better. Since teams are aware of the problems, almost anyone can handle the inquiry to speed up the process of resolving the query.
Are you ready to take your NPS to the next level?
To be truly customer-centric, you need to provide your agents with the most sophisticated tools to handle your customers. An easy way to get started is with a digital customer engagement tool like Engati
Register now to get started.
