If you’ve conducted a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey recently, chances are you’ve identified one or two key areas that your business could improve on. You make the necessary operational changes to address these issues—job done, right? Wrong.
The second—and perhaps most important—step is to measure the impact those changes have on your business. Skipping this stage is like changing a key variable in a science experiment and then not recording the outcome—did the change make any difference? How? Were there any unpredicted side effects?
The good news is that identifying areas for improvement and analysing the impact of subsequent operational changes is relatively straightforward. Here’s a step by step guide:
1. Survey regularly to track trends
It begins with fresh data. Like any other NPS survey, include follow-up questions, particularly: “What is one thing we could improve on?”. This customer feedback is critical to your analysis later. Regular NPS surveys mean you can track trends and/or known issues, and identify emerging themes (positive and negative).
Related content: Grow you business with NPS
2. Look at your passives and detractors first
There’s a reason why your passives and detractors haven’t given you a high score. Chances are they’ve encountered a problem in your business—be it poor customer support, late deliveries, faulty products, and so on. If your operational changes haven’t fixed the problem(s), they are the customers who will report it.
3. Choose common themes that may have changed
Analyse themes and to find those that are directly related to your operational change. For example, if you’ve recently opened a new delivery centre to accommodate an increase in demand, you may decide that “late” is a good theme to investigate.
If you’re a Customer Monitor user, you can find these common themes quickly and easily through your word clouds page. Learn more here.
4. Compare and analyse
Look at how frequently your chosen keyword(s) appear in the feedback from your passives and detractors. If you have multiple NPS surveys to draw upon, you may use these to track trends and change over time. In our above example, you may find that the them “late” has appeared less often since you introduced the new delivery centre. It’s a good sign that your operational changes have been effective.
Learn more: Using NPS to build your future strategic business plan
5. Don’t forget context
One word on its own doesn’t always give the full story. Filtering your comments to those containing your common theme(s) will give you the full context of the responses, and provide more detail on the specific improvement requested—and if you have fulfilled it.
Customer Monitor users can find this information in the filtered comments table on their word cloud page.
6. Drill down to segments
If you notice that there are few or no changes, you may want to segment your customers according to demographic, customer type, product purchase, and so on. This will let you see if your changes have had an effect on specific customer groups and identify whether the problem is widespread or isolated to customers over 55, or to those only living in Auckland or Melbourne, for example.
7. Continually analyse over time
If you’ve been conducting NPS surveys for a while, analysing trends in your data can reveal whether an issue is a long-term, overarching problem, a seasonal one, or potentially just a one-off. This will let you see if long-term problems are still present—and if they’re not, clue you into when they disappeared and what operational change may have caused it.
While it may seem time-consuming, assessing the success of your operational changes is well worth the effort. It can make the difference between effective change and change simply for the sake of it. What’s more, automation software, such as Customer Monitor, can make the task painless—and fast.
If you’d like to see the difference Customer Monitor could make on your business, request a free demo here.
