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Tag: Net Promoter Score

Improving NPS for a Better Customer Experience

Quality Assurance in the contact center is being used to improve NPS (Net Promoter Score) and overall customer experience

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague? Could you please rate your recommendation on a scale of 0-10?”

These are two questions that can induce anxiety into any business. But the questions are real and have been so since 2003 when Frederick Reicheld of Bain & Company wrote about what he coined the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in an article for the Harvard Business Review.

Reicheld’s premise is simple. Answers to the “likely to recommend” question are rated on a scale of 0-10 and the responses are divided into three groups as follows:

• Promoters (rating of 9-10)• Passives (7-8)• Detractors (0-6)
The Net Promoter Score is determined by subtracting the percentage of detractor responses from the percentage of promoters. The goal is to get as high a Net Promoter Score as possible as an indicator of customer perception of a company’s service and support.

So How Do You Boost Your Net Promoter Score?

1) Truly Listen to the Customer


Perform a deep analysis of your call records. Consider how many calls are subsequently transferred into other departments.  How many result in escalations or complaints?  Do some listening and consider what the main drivers are for these transfers and escalations. A big negative for NPS is when customers feel that they have to deal with many people or departments to get a query resolved. On many occasions, a customer’s issue will have several threads to it, all of which need to be resolved or actioned in some way.
Empower your frontline to handle queries outside their own department’s main scope and provide them with access to whatever systems they need. This greatly enhances their chances of providing the customer with a ‘one-and-done’ resolution to their call.

2) Perfect Your Greetings and Closings


While it might sound obvious, how consistent is your team with their hellos and goodbyes? The greeting is your customer’s first experience with your company, so make sure the call starts out on the right foot – keep it informal, ask them how their day is going, be interested in them as a person and show how you value their business.

Enabling an advisor to see a customer’s history makes for smoother handling of a call without the customer having to repeat themselves. Your employees also need to know what to do when a call is going wrong and how to get it back on track. Having dealt with the call or query, make sure your advisors finish each call on a positive – remember that’s the impression that your customer will leave with.

3) Review Your Scripts


Sometimes an advisor’s strict adherence to a script can bypass common sense and cause more problems than solutions. Giving employees the freedom to act with common sense and not stick rigidly to a script, regardless of the circumstances, can deliver better NPS scores. If a customer has not had their problem resolved and you ask: ‘Is there anything else I can help you with today’, it is likely to be met with a negative response. This lack of common sense is likely to increase dissatisfaction as the customer hasn’t been helped yet.
Frank Sherlock at CallMiner

4) Follow Up Fast


Prompt follow-up with customers can help contact centers drive increases in NPS. This closing works for several reasons:

• demonstrates your commitment to the customer experience
• resolves individual problems
• gives you greater insight into the issues that drag down your customer loyalty


How fast you respond, who follows up and even the means of contacting the customer can depend on the type of feedback received, as well as characteristics of the customer or account. Often, simply hearing that feedback was received improves a customer’s perception of your company. Use follow-up calls to learn more about customer issues. This can help you pinpoint the root causes of recurring problems so you can fix them at the source.
Richard Burns at NICE

5) Boost Morale in the Workplace


Without an emotional investment in their work, most employees are going to have a difficult time maintaining exemplary service, which can cause your NPS to slip. Allow the team to review themselves alongside their superiors. This demonstrates that the individual’s opinion is valued and their development matters, as well as allowing senior employees to build a rapport with their teams. Utilize reward programs like ‘employee of the month’ or competitions that encourage excellent NPS. Pride in good performance is always an incentive to raise or maintain standards of work. These schemes provide continued encouragement for advisors to provide the best service they can, which in turn goes towards raising your NPS.
Enda Kenneally at West Unified Communications

6) Make Exceeding Customer Expectations the Primary Goal


Rather than focus on the NPS itself, make exceeding customer expectations part of your call center’s goal. To do this, you need to look at the NPS as something that measures the difference between the expectations a customer has and the experience they receive.
Prompt advisors to deliver positive surprises and go the extra mile, rather than concentrating on compliance or reducing the call duration. This will exceed customers’ expectations and help you achieve better NPS scores.

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Is NPS outdated and irrelevant?

The Pros and Cons of Net Promoter Score

Companies across the globe continue to recognize that superior customer experiences yield greater business results, resulting in brand loyalty while driving revenue growth. When it comes to market share, losing the Customer Experience (CX) race can be detrimental for a business.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become a common tool to measure the state of an organization’s CX in an effort to improve customer service. It has become a measurement tool that’s widely recognized and increasingly adopted by organizations globally to understand a customer’s sentiment and loyalty towards a brand, as well as whether they are more or less likely to promote the company.

How it Works

The NPS system seeks to measure not just customer satisfaction, but it gauges whether customers like your company so much that they’d tell their friends about it. It asks one question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [Organization X] to a friend or colleague?”

Customers are asked to rate their answers on a 0-10 scale, which is divided up into three categories:
“Detractors,” “Passives,” and “Promoters.”
0 – 6: Detractors
7 – 8: Passives
9-10: Promoters

But can one question really provide enough detailed information to create a CX strategy? Some executives say no.

Let’s take a look at some pros and cons of NPS:

Pro: The NPS system is easy to use

The NPS online poll does not require a statistician to administer it. The example survey question is based around one idea, whether your customers like your company enough to recommend it, and often includes a few follow-up survey questions to understand why people would recommend/would not recommend your brand. You can easily send it out to customers through email or post on your website.

Pro: The NPS is great for management

When management is looking for an easy, big-picture gauge of customer loyalty, the NPS works. Not only do Net Promoter Scores help a company see how it’s doing against the competition, but managers can use it to see how one department’s services are doing against other departments. For example, does the tech service division receive higher scores than the field-service department? If so, how can the company improve so that all of the departments are getting equal, high scores?

Pro: The NPS uses a common language to classify customers

The NPS questionnaire breaks scores down into three customer categories: Promoters, Detractors, and Passives. The categories make it easy to classify a customer’s level of loyalty, and it gives everyone in your company the same language when referring to customers. Do you have a large group of Promoters who you should rally to post reviews or participate in a focus group? Are there Detractors who you need to assign someone to do follow-up work with? The system makes it easy to tell customers apart.

Pro: The NPS system is correlated with increased business growth

Numerous studies, including those conducted by the Harvard Business Review, Satmetrix, and Bain & Company have found a strong correlation between high Net Promoter Scores and revenue. The research shows that when companies adopt the NPS question, and use it as a key metric, it helps drive business growth as the company becomes more focused on improving the score.

Con: NPS is too simplistic

The NPS scale accounts for only three types of customers: ‘promoters’, ‘passives’, and ‘detractors’, and is based on a simple survey question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” Customers who give an organization a score of 9 or 10 are known as ‘promoters’, while those who provide a score of 6 or under are called ‘detractors’. An organization’s score is calculated by subtracting promoters from detractors, ignoring customers that give a score of 7 or 8, who are known as passives.

Not only is this question simple and vague, it fails to provide any insight or necessary information to interpret the opinion held by customers. It lacks detail and prevents organizations from actioning feedback in real time.

Because it is very difficult to understand a customer’s journey from the inside, organizations need to be investing in measurement tools that enable them to gain an in-depth perspective to really find out where their CX is failing.

Con: Without a plan in place to act on the results, the survey won’t help your business

Sending out a NPS questionnaire is a great first step to understanding customer loyalty, but to really make the NPS system effective, you need to be prepared with a follow-up plan. If your scores come back really low what is your next step? Will you send out more detailed surveys to pinpoint the issues? Make sure you map out a customer experience plan to address any issues your Net Promoter Scores reveal.

Solution: Implement more detailed follow-up questions

Every smart implementation follows up with a qualitative question, asking why? Some systems will even vary the questions based on the score, asking things likes “What did we do well?” and “What could we improve?” The real value is the Why answer. The customer tells you what just happened and how you could improve it. We add these Why questions to gather intuitive data, which allows a more specific game plan for future customer experience  success.

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How to Calculate NPS

 

Net Promoter Score

 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be a helpful snapshot of satisfaction and to learn more about consumers who are detractors, promoters, and passives. If you are collecting NPS data from multiple sources, you may be wondering how to calculate this score manually.

If you’re not familiar, NPS is a score that measures satisfaction. It’s based on one question you may see often on customer feedback surveys, asked on phone interviews, or even see on mystery shopping reports.

The question is quite simple: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s product or service to a friend or colleague?”

There are two data points to look at – the actual score given and the NPS score.

The actual scores, of course, range from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most satisfied. This is a helpful data point to look at for determining which customers, or how many customers, are detractors, promoters, or passive. This is how each category is defined:

Detractors are those giving ratings 6 and below. They are not particularly thrilled by the product or the service. They, with all likelihood, won’t purchase again from the company, could potentially damage the company’s reputation through negative word of mouth.

Passives are those giving ratings of 7 or 8. They are somewhat satisfied but could easily switch to a competitor’s offering if given the opportunity. They probably wouldn’t spread any negative word-of-mouth, but are not enthusiastic enough about your products or services to actually promote them.

Promoters are those giving ratings of 9 or 10. They love the company’s products and services. They are the repeat buyers, are the enthusiastic evangelist who recommends the company products and services to other potential buyers.

The second data point is the actual NPS score, which can range from -100 to 100. This is calculated by subtracting the detractors from the promoters – sounds easy, right? But what happens when you are collecting NPS data from multiple sources and end up with a spreadsheet of data? It could take all day to try to calculate manually. There is an easy formula to calculate this in Excel, and it only takes a few minutes.

Once you have your column of NPS data, you’ll want to add a formula to calculate your score.

The formula is: =100*(COUNTIF(BU2:BU27,”>8″) COUNTIF(BU2:BU27,”<7″))/COUNT(BU2:BU27)

In the example above, it assumes that your NPS scores are located in column B, rows 2 through 27. To make this formula work for you, all you need to do is change out BU2 and BU27 to the column and row numbers that contain your data.

Let’s take a look at a quick example of how the formula would change based on your data. If this is what your spreadsheet looks like, with the last column (E) being the data for NPS, which goes from row 2 through row 43:

 

 

Then your formula would look like this:

The formula is: =100*(COUNTIF(E2:E43,”>8″)-COUNTIF(E2:E27,”<7″))/COUNT(E2:E27)

All it took was a quick replace of BU with E.

NPS is a great tool to get a quick snapshot of satisfaction levels; it’s no longer a chore to calculate it manually across multiple touch points, so make sure you’re asking that very important question at every opportunity possible!

 

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