Analysing your customers' major pain points is a simple, but not always easy, way to improve retention and reduce customer churn. The key? Identify the issues and their root cause(s).
Here are a few pointers to help.
1. Ask what they would improve
Asking additional questions as part of your Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is one of the best ways to uncover what customers think of your business and why. Questions such as, “What are your reasons for rating us this way?” are a good starting point to understand your business’s strengths and weaknesses. However, the question that is best for determining your customers’ biggest pain points is this:
“What is the one thing we could do to improve your experience?”
Asking your neutrals and detractors this question means you can identify the issues that will have the biggest impact on customer experience (and therefore your NPS) once resolved.
Read more: Grow your business with NPS
2. Identify common themes
Look at the feedback on your NPS follow-up questions, particularly the feedback from your passives and demoters. Do their responses share any common themes?
Of critical importance is to investigate how often these themes appear and what they apply to.
For example, a Customer Monitor client recently noticed that the NPS scores for one of their distribution centres had a higher number of passives and detractors than their other centres. Further investigation of the feedback from these customers found a common delivery issue, which was later linked to poor internal processes. Once the internal problem was addressed, the number of passives and detractors in the region reduced while their promoters increased—along with their overall NPS.
If you’re a Customer Monitor user, you can easily identify your common themes in the word cloud in the Key Improvements tab; find out more here.
3. Look for patterns and trends
Looking at your NPS score and customer feedback are the first steps. Now it’s time to look for patterns and trends over time. Does your NPS score go through a cycle? Are there certain times of year that the number and frequency of negative themes grow? You may find it’s timed with a particularly busy time of year. Perhaps it’s in sync with when your company rolls out a service or product update.
Related content: Map your customer journey
Narrow by segment (optional)
Filtering the patterns and trends by customer segment can help pinpoint issues quicker. For example, a courier company may notice their NPS drops every year in December, along with a spike of negative themes related to late deliveries. However, narrowing this information by location may reveal that the issue is isolated to Auckland, and is not present in the other cities where they operate.
A few ways to segment your NPS include:
- Location.
- Demographic (age, gender, etc.).
- Buyer persona.
- By salesperson or account manager.
- By product/service.
Short on time?
Recurring customer pain points can cost you repeat business, future customers, and by extension, your bottom line. However, manually sorting your NPS data and commentary to identify them can take up a lot of time. It’s where software such as Customer Monitor, which automatically collates and sorts all your NPS data, really comes into its own.
Instead of spending hours, spend minutes identifying common themes and applying segments to uncover problems and set about fixing them faster.
Want to give it a go? Request a free demo of Customer Monitor here.
