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 strategic NPS success
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.
How to use NPS to innovate in your business
1. Don't view NPS in isolation
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?
2. Get a holistic view
You want to use NPS to get a holistic view of your business performance. This is possible through a number of means.
- Using an intuitive, dynamic platform that gives you daily results means you can be proactive and highly responsive regarding your customer feedback. If you can combine features such as feedback over time, all the better.
- Ideally you want to overlay all of your data points (where you receive customer data, such as in-store, trade shows, online) and analyse these against NPS to get an overall view of what’s working and what’s not.
Read more: What makes people give a high Net Promoter Score?
3. Use micro-segmentation to correlate data points
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.
- Depending on the systems you use and how advanced (and integrated with other systems) they are, you can drill down and segment all of your customers to be able to know who they are, what they spend, their entire customer journey and how they have engaged with your brand.
- You can even see where they’ve initially signed up (which channel) that means you can look at the nature of those experiences and how you can shape or improve those experiences further.
- When you have product data and insights that you can overlay with your customer data and insights including NPS, you can drill down into what product set your customers have, how they have used those products and understand where they migrate to in terms of value propositions. This information can then be used to devise your cross-sell and up-sell strategies.
- An advanced customer experience platform, with NPS, gives you the ability to track customer sentiment through multiple lenses, right through your customer’s life cycles.
- If you’re using NPS right, you can innovate your products and services including your customer service, by reviewing trends and understanding patterns. This gives you the opportunity to provide point resolutions and a holistic service improvement.
4. Your actions matter
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.
5. Closed loop feedback is key
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.
6. Make your CEO accountable
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.
7. Creating NPS "wow" moments
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
