Customer experience metrics like Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) clearly matter. NPS has gained a lot of traction in recent years and is now the most widely used CX metric. But now that you’re measuring it, how do you improve NPS? In this post, I’ll provide a detailed look at how to improve NPS.
Why you should make it a priority to improve NPS
A 10% improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion in increased revenue, according to Forrester.
In a Bain podcast, chief customer experience officer, Charlie Herrin, said that when he joined Comcast his first step was to focus the company on NPS: “I wanted a customer measure that we could incorporate into our business thinking. Just as we make business decisions at a revenue and profit and product perspective, I wanted a customer measure to be part of that discussion. So that was goal one. Number 2 is improvement against that metric and others. And the third was…what can we take out of our business that is costing us money, causing customer’s frustration, and it’s just not productive.”
NPS can quantify how your customers feel at a particular moment in time. But it doesn’t reveal what made them feel that way, how to change the way they feel or how to prevent them from feeling that way in the future.
It’s impossible to know which actions you should take to address a weak or declining score without first understanding the factors driving NPS. Nor is it possible to decide whether to prioritise small incremental changes or introduce sweeping company-wide measures.
How can you overcome these challenges? Let’s jump right in and explore seven strategies that leading CX teams are using today to improve NPS.
1. To improve NPS, first establish a baseline
The first step to improve NPS is to determine your starting point. If you’re not already measuring NPS, a variety of tools are available. These range from survey tools like SurveyMonkey to purpose-built NPS platforms like Promoter.io. Enterprise customer feedback management platforms are available from Medallia, Qualtrics, Clarabridge and others.
Once you’ve picked a tool to measure NPS, don’t just send out an email to all your contacts and call it a day. Take the time to embed it in every customer touchpoint, including your website, your online applications and mobile apps. And make sure that you’re capturing the exact time the response was provided and which customer provided it.
2. Analyse NPS within a journey-based context
“An understanding of customer feedback doesn’t tell you all you need to know about your customers’ experiences," says Kerry Bodine, CEO of Bodine & Co, and author of Outside In. "To get the full picture, you also need to understand actual customer behaviour. Customer journey analytics is an approach to insights and measurement that examines customers’ behavior not just at individual touchpoints, but along the paths they take as they attempt to accomplish their goals and tasks.”
Strengthened performance on customer journeys has been shown to correlate with increases in customer satisfaction and key organizational metrics such as revenue and retention. So, it’s not surprising that leading companies are now taking a journey-based approach to improve NPS.
If you’re using a software platform to measure and analyze NPS you may think you already have this covered. But, most voice of customer (VoC) platforms calculate NPS without considering when it was captured within each customer’s unique journey.
You need to know where NPS is being measured within each customer’s end-to-end customer journey to truly understand its root cause. Most CX teams make the mistake of focusing only on the last one or two customer interactions instead of looking at the entire customer journey. In reality, customer experiences and opinions accumulate over time, and trust and resentment in customer relationships build over years.
To truly understand what is driving your Net Promoter Score, it is essential to take a journey-based view. Customer journey analytics provides the power to look across millions of actual customer journeys spanning touchpoints, channels and time.
What About tNPS?
If you’ve already implemented Transactional NPS (tNPS), you may think you already have this covered. Transactional NPS is a specific form of NPS. It’s meant to determine the customer’s opinion on a certain business transaction, such as placing an order online. While NPS simply asks a customer how likely they are to recommend your business, tNPS asks them to rate your company based on their most recent purchase or order.
Transactional NPS provides feedback based on a specific transaction, but doesn’t address more complex customer journeys. It doesn’t help you understand, for example, the impact of an interaction further back in time. Nor does it predict the effect of customer behavior variations across multiple channels and segments.
3. Discover the journeys that are driving Net Promoters and Net Detractors
Many consultants advise that the best way to improve NPS is to:
- Identify Net Detractors (i.e. customers whose scores range from 0 to 6).
- Find a unifying trend (e.g. do they all use a specific customer service channel, a specific product, or a specific portion of your site that customers with higher NPS scores don’t?).
- Fix the problem.
The difficulty lies in step #2. How do you find unifying trends? Hunt and peck? Even if you’re able to assemble a large enough dataset to look for statistical correlation between all of your variables and NPS, do you believe you’ve found the answer?
As your statistics professor no doubt told you, “correlation does not imply causation.” To truly understand the root cause of your customer’s individual score you need to understand what each customer was doing before they provided it.
4. Link NPS with operational data
Voice of the Customer programs yield far more significant insights when VoC data is combined with operational data residing in CRM, POS, billing, fulfillment and other internal systems. These variables can provide insights about “why” an interaction occurred and can inform approaches to improvement.
However, it can be time consuming to manually add metadata like customer profile information to NPS survey data. Fortunately, this process can be automated by using a customer journey analytics platform that includes identify resolution to seamlessly integrate customer VoC data, such as NPS surveys, with operational data.
By linking customer feedback with operational data for each customer, CX pros can avoid asking questions they already have answers to. For example, a wireless provider can use information such as store number, visit date, time of transaction, device number and salesperson ID to analyse each customer’s post-visit feedback. This enables VoC teams to more effectively assess the root causes of dissatisfaction and make operational improvements, like retraining or coaching staff on problematic experiences.
5. Calculate the ROI of your initiatives to improve NPS
According to the 2019 State of Customer Journey Management and CX Measurement Report, 50% of CX professionals say they are unsatisfied with their organization’s ability to quantify the impact of customer experience on business KPIs like revenue, churn & lifetime value.
The importance of calculating the return on investment (ROI) of your initiatives to improve NPS cannot be overstated. VoC leaders, for example, often have a difficult time obtaining budget increases because they can’t show a quantitative ROI. All the time and effort you spend to design a modern voice of the customer programme can go to waste if you can’t prove the value that brings to your organisation.
In order to put VoC initiatives on a level footing with other business programs, it isn’t enough to simply provide the soft benefits. You need the quantitative ROI to make a strong business case and obtain approval for continued investment.
6. Automate proactive cross-channel customer engagement for high-impact journeys
After you identify journeys that have a high potential impact on NPS, you should proactively communicate with customers. Focus on preventing potential issues and minimizing damage in their aftermath. You’ll also want to pay particular attention to negative experiences.
The longer an issue takes to resolve, the more customer satisfaction is likely to decrease, along with NPS. One way to avoid this is to design targeted, rule-based customer communication initiatives. These aim to engage customers when they encounter a key obstacle that can impact their satisfaction. Delivering a helpful and timely solution to a problem can have a positive impact on satisfaction. It can also impact your customers’ overall perception of your brand and their level of trust.
Because customers’ preferences can vary greatly, sending important communications through a single channel will often fail. Instead, CX leaders will launch proactive outreach programs through multiple channels to successfully reach the customer in a timely manner.
One challenge with this approach is that it is difficult to deliver a consistent, personalized, cross-channel customer experience. CX leaders overcome this by using a journey analytics platform to orchestrate personalized experiences when customers reach key moments in their journeys.
7. Democratise access to NPS data
Every employee plays a role in the experience your company delivers. So, it’s critical to put VoC data, like NPS, into the hands of employees. For example, one financial services firm made it its mission to make NPS data visible to all employees. This empowered front-line employees to act to improve each customer’s experience and, as a result, improve NPS.
Why leading CX teams look beyond NPS
Although NPS is an effective means to obtain customer feedback, it shouldn’t be your only way to measure customer experience. Some customers may be confused by the survey or give you unclear descriptions of their problems. Many respondents omit an explanation of their score, which is vital to understanding each customer’s unique experience.
There are many other ways to measure customer experience beyond NPS. By using NPS alongside other CX metrics, you’ll be able to develop a more complete picture of your customer’s experience.
Now it’s your turn
A summary of the seven strategies that you can use today to improve NPS:
- Establish a baseline. The first step to improve NPS is to determine your starting point. If you’re not already measuring NPS, a variety of tools are available. These range from survey tools like SurveyMonkey to purpose-built NPS platforms like Promoter.io and enterprise customer feedback management platforms like Medallia, Qualtrics and Clarabridge.
- Analyze NPS within a journey-based context. You need to know where NPS is being measured within the context of each customer’s end-to-end customer journey to truly understand its root cause. Use customer journey analytics to analyse NPS across millions of actual customer journeys spanning numerous touchpoints, channels and time periods.
- Discover the journeys that are driving Net Promoters and Net Detractors. Use customer journey analytics to uncover the journeys that lead to Promoters (and those that lead to Detractors), so you can pinpoint their root causes.
- Link NPS with operational data. Voice of the Customer programs yield far more significant insights when VoC data is combined with operational data residing in CRM, POS, billing, fulfillment and other internal systems. Analysing responses with these variables at hand gives insights into the “why” behind the interaction and can inform approaches to improvement.
- Calculate the ROI of your initiatives to improve NPS. In order to put VoC initiatives on a level footing with other business programs, it isn’t enough to simply provide the soft benefits. You need the quantitative ROI to make a strong business case and obtain approval for continued investment.
- Automate proactive cross-channel customer engagement for high-impact journeys. Because customers’ preferences can vary greatly, sending important communications through a single channel will often fail. Instead, CX leaders launch proactive outreach programs through multiple channels to successfully reach the customer in a timely manner.
- Democratise access to NPS data. Once you are able to identify journeys that have a high potential impact on NPS, especially for negative experiences, you’ll want to proactively communicate with customers in key moments to prevent the issue(s) or minimize the damage.
This post adapted from an original blog by Steve Offsey.
