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Tag: NPS

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. Think about 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.

David Preece at QStory

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:

  • It demonstrates your commitment to the customer experience
  • It resolves individual problems
  • It 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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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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CEI is the new NPS

 

You’re likely very familiar with the NPS score – Net Promoter Score. This tool asks one simple question: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to friends or family?”Using a 0-10 scale rating, with 0 being “not at all likely” and 10 being “extremely likely” businesses use it as a gauge of customer satisfaction – after all, if customers are rating this question as a 10, it’s likely they had a good enough experience to want to recommend to others.

 

The newest tool that is emerging no longer focuses on the NPS rating. Instead, we’re seeing the focus shift to CEI – Customer Effort Index.

 

Simply put, customers are asked to rate the effort that was put into their interaction with your company on a similar scale as the NPS rating; however, with CEI, businesses want to see a lower rating, meaning that the effort was minimal.

 

How can you ensure your customers do not have to go through significant effort to do business with you?

 

1. Ensure your telephone system is simple, gets customers where they need to go quickly, and don’t ask customers to repeatedly enter information, such as a customer number, every time they are taken to the next step of the interaction.

 

2. For online purchases, make sure all costs related to the purchase, including shipping and tax, are spelled out early in the process. Waiting until the last step of the process can frustrate customers and lead to abandoned carts. Make sure your website allows for easy navigation so there is not a lot of effort put into finding what customers are looking for.

 

3. Is your return process simple? Ensuring that customers are not spending a lot of time in line, or filling out multiple forms to make a simple return can go a long way in customer satisfaction.

 

4. Are your registers well staffed? Long lines at the point of purchase can frustrate any customer – make it easy for them to complete the transaction. Some POS systems seem to have customers confirm information more than once, or answer feedback questions. Some even ask if you’d like to make a donation to a specific charity. This is the final step in their interaction with your business; make it simple and efficient.

 

There are many other ways to decrease customer effort, and taking the time to look at your operational procedures and reviewing interactions from the customer’s point of view will help you learn what takes the most effort. From there, you can find ways to make it easier on your customer base.

 

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