You are researching customer satisfaction and everyone tells you that the Net Promoter Score is the best way to gain insights into the satisfaction of your client file. It is true, the Net Promoter Score is an excellent way to receive a lot of valuable feedback from your clients. But there are a few aspects you should take into account if your really want your Net Promoter Score to be a success. Only knowing this score isn't enough. The real challenge is finding out the reason(s) behind this score. Below we have collected 8 tips you can use to get the most out of your Net Promoter Score research.
1. Use the Net Promoter Score for the gain of new customers.
The use of the Net Promoter Score makes important moments in the customer journey visible. These are customers that have given you a 9 or 10. Instead of asking everyone if they would recommend you to friends and colleagues, you can use the Net Promoter Score to ask the right customers for a recommendation at the right moment. At Airbnb, for example, they used this to make their referrals grow around 300%. Via Starred, you are able to get the most out of your recommendations by, for example, automating a follow-up action for Promoters.
2. Create client segments for the right insights.
Make sure your NPS feedback doesn’t change into a pile of unused information. Of course you can segment your data based on the given score (Criticasters, Passives, Promoters), but the real insights only appear when you add elements to the data that are important for your company. For example which product the clients buy and to what profit they are responsible. By linking extra data to the given NPS scores it’s for example possible to discover chances for successful promotion campaigns that will make you gain new profitable clients. Another option is to create a campaign that focuses on the valuable clients that are bound to leave you. This way you will reduce the cancellations and your company will grow because you use these client’s feedback.
3. Measure continuously instead of once every year.
Doing customer satisfaction measurements once every year is not enough to gain serious insights. Your product or service changes and there are plenty of other developments that will make you need to do customer research more often. When you only look into customer satisfaction on a yearly basis, it will take you another year before you can actually measure if the changes you made have been successful. You should be faster with your research. A possible solution could be to ‘cut’ your client file into smaller segments and to send these smaller groups an invitation for feedback that's evenly spread over the year. This way you’re not bothering your customers with too many invitations during the year, but you still have a continuous overview of your customers’ feedback. You will easily see if the adjustments you made have a positive effect on your product/service.
4. Ask the right follow-up questions.
Receive the most relevant feedback by asking the right questions, based on the given score. As you might know, after giving a score, the client will be categorized into one of the following groups: Detractors, Passives or Promoters. That’s why it’s important to ask the right follow-up question that is linked to the given score. You will find a few examples below:
- Detractors: “What should be improved in order for you to recommend us?”
- Passives: “What should we do differently to get a 9 or 10?”
- Promoters: “What makes us a 9? What makes us a 10?”
The answers to these questions will help you turn the Detractors and Passives into Promoters. With the right permission, you could use the Promoters’ feedback as a testimonial or quote to promote your organization and gain new customers. This is a feature we offer in the Starred platform: you have the possibility of immediately redirecting the Promoters to a review page or another website.
5. Consider alternative methods besides e-mail.
Over the course of the last few years, e-mail has been elected the channel par excellence to use to invite customers for feedback. Don’t be afraid to consider using other channels to ask for feedback. Don’t forget: when your response rate is 40%, there is another 60% of feedback data you miss out on. A 100% response is, of course, a perfect picture, but it's always good to reconsider the channels you use to grow your response rate.
6. Compare your Net Promoter Score against other metrics.
Try to view the development of the NPS Score and compare it to important metrics. How did your NPS evolve from the moment a new product was launched? Or since the starting day of a new Customer Success Manager? Another example that will give you interesting insights is combining your NPS score with the appreciation of your Customer Service department.
The most profit can be gained from the groups "Wildcards" and "Promoters" with a bad service experience. The Wildcards are customers that walk around with frustrations about your product, as well as customers that don’t see enough added value to keep on using your product. Stay in touch with these customers through proactive phone calls, and make sure the products are improved, in order to change these Wildcards into Ambassadors.
Your Promoters that have had a bad experience with Customer Service have to be blown away by service and attention, more than they ever expected. Invest in support for these customers, and turn them into Ambassadors. Starred has introduced the ‘Ultimate Short Questionnaire’ to prevent Customer Service complaints from remaining unsolved. How this works can be read in the blog: Evaluate your Customer Service.
7. Faults are chances.
A research by The Harvard Business Review shows these two remarkable statistics:
- 23% of the customers with a positive complaint evaluation told 10 or more other persons about this.
- 48% of the customers with a negative complaint evaluation told 10 or more other persons about this.
Apparently, customers with a bad experience share their story more often with friends and colleagues than customers with a good experience.
The creator of the Net Promoter Score Fred Reicheld says the following about mistakes: Every Detractor represents a lost chance to add a Promoter to your client file, a free salesperson less to promote your product and to help you grow? As soon as you understand why your customers are unhappy, it’s possible to take action and solve the problem. This will lead to fewer cancellations, keeps your customers loyal and, bottom line, creates growth.
8. Use the NPS score to create a customer focused culture.
Be transparent and use the Net Promoter Score to make sure the customer’ voice is heard within the organisation. For example, show responses from customers on a big screen in the department and highlight employees that caused the positive feedback. Do you continuously want to work on growing the customer satisfaction? Then also create targets in terms of NPS scores for departments and employees within the company.
Conclusion.
Unfortunately there are still plenty of companies that only want to know the Net Promoter Score, but don’t research the cause of this score. These companies don’t have customer loyalty highly on the agenda and and probably have to research their NPS once every year. Hopefully these tips will help you with taking the next steps towards new customer insights that will help your organisation grow.
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