Last year, the keyword search ranking for “NPS’ was 60,500 times, and Net Promoter Score 22,200 was times across the USA on Google. Businesses across the globe are blatantly turning to NPS (net promoter score) to derive, measure, and evaluate the customer experience. From Silicon Valley start-ups to Fortune companies, NPS has been the benchmark for improving customer experience.
Many companies are blindfolded by this single metric, which is also causing a disservice to the customers.
Executives across the globe have convinced themselves that NPS is the only parameter that can help brands improve customer loyalty and brand awareness. Let’s take a look at what NPS means and why so much fuss around it?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is defined as a critical metric to measure and gauge customer experience from answers to simple questions. Under NPS, there are promoters and detractors. Promoters will refer your brand if they are happy, and detractors will not mention your brand if they’re dissatisfied. The formula to define an NPS score is the number of promoters – number of detractors. We ignore neutral responses and don’t consider it in NPS.
NPS surveys can serve a higher purpose other than just recording customer feedback and assigning them scores. To have broader implications of NPS across the organization, companies should make it readily available to all customers during all touchpoints.
Businesses have a bright chance to improve customer satisfaction by leveraging NPS across the customer journey. When customers give positive reviews, it results in profit and market share grows. But when reviews are negative, it intercedes high call rates, reduces customer satisfaction, and even increases customer churn.
While NPS is simple to execute and implement, simple questions and answers about the product or services will not help derive the correct score. Many-a-times NPS scores contain insignificant scores, lack context due to sample and question limitations. Businesses need to concentrate on new technologies that will raise customer satisfaction and improve the experience.
Connect digitally:
Customer experience is best enhanced digitally. Companies across the globe are showing similar behaviour.
The world is going digital, and so are customers. Digital platforms have made it easier to self-serve customers, self-support, and interact with the customer service team online and via a mobile platform.
Not only it reduces the cost of sales and services; it has a significant impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty program, and have a long-term relationship with clients. Face-to-face interactions at the store, phone call conversations still exist – but often used as “escalation channels” for customers to vent out their frustrations or share feedback if something is not working well according to them.
Moreover, these kinds of personal interactions are superior, more consultative, and require a good knowledge of the platform.
Achieving an exceptional level of the digital customer experience through customer experience platform requires more than just NPS surveys. NPS was useful to track customer feedback when customers considered call centres for communication.
A simple phone call to the customer service team would give you detailed information about the customer. The technology used to save data was also nonexistent and economical. But with the advancement of technology, the ability to store and access data, and with the increasing number of customer base, there is an increase in customer feedback, companies need to expand their horizon. There are various channels to collect direct feedback – calls, messaging, chat, and social media.
Businesses can also extract the correct data with the help of NLP and NLU techniques and better understand customer interactions and continue to make them happy at all touchpoints.
Go with time:
A customer spends an average of 6 to 7 hours online every day. Some customers use the same path to interact with companies along with other channels such as calls, messaging, chats, chatbots, social media channels, etc. Other drivers exist within these channels like customer issues, their emotions, their feedback about product or service, quality, customer support, and customer’s feeling. Despite technological advancement in AI and BI, still, some companies are stuck to the old method of evaluating customers on a rating scale of 1-10.
While NPS is easy to conduct, it does not necessarily get you to the root cause of the problem. Simple questions and answers are not detrimental in identifying the right issue. It doesn’t allow us to drill down information to reduce the churn rate and work on building better solutions. Even in the case of open-ended questions, the survey responses are not even close to providing the correct feedback.
Generally, NPS is not helpful to collect all levels of feedback. Mostly selective feedback. Only the most irate ones or dissatisfied customers fill the survey – creating an imbalance in the survey response. The happiest customer does not participate at all, even if they represent a business that involves interacting with customers all the time.
Create a top-down approach:
Once you record all survey responses, you can analyze the data, distribute the reports to the top management and across the organization in and out. Marketing folks and customer experience teams are more privies to the data. Still, to truly create a culture on delivering exceptional experiences, it’s imperative to include the product management team, marketing, sales, operations, and even the quality team. When everyone is practically involved in decision making, managing customer experience becomes easy.
We all know, building a business takes years of hard work and effort. Companies come and go, but only those companies with exceptional customer service stay.
Customers don’t wholly rely on products or services but considering experience over and above everything. No matter the size of the company, your department, or your designation, maintaining customer experience is tight. For businesses to grow and survive, it’s vital to understand and consider CX at the early stages.
Just relying on NPS won’t yield concrete results, but working on a more holistic approach will help improve customer experience, improve quality, increase customer base, reduce churn, and bring in more loyal customers to the brand.
