Satmetrix Debuts Social Net Promoter

Satmetrix, the company behind customer loyalty metric Net Promoter Score, today launched SparkScore, a benchmark for brands to measure and incorporate social media sentiment into overall customer experience strategy.

As of today, Spark-score.com provides customer loyalty insights on airline, hotel and motel, and computer and laptop industry domains, with more industries to follow. Brands can now access weekly data that comprises their social NPS, or SparkScore, which compares the brand to best, worst, and average scores in their select industry sector.

Richard Owen, president and CEO of Satmetrix, told CRM magazine that the ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive "cloud-based experience product line" that integrates social NPS with the traditional NPS loyalty metric. The intention is not to tread on the likes of a social customer service platform provider like a Social Dynamx, or a cross-platform social media management solution like HootSuite, Owen says, but rather to "get our metric into lots of different apps."

SparkScore uses Metavana's sentiment and influence engine to analyze comments and brand mentions across the social Web, which is the basis for the social NPS. Metavana's focused crawler collects data around set parameters, such as "hotels and motels."

The data gets passed through Metavana's classification engine, then is analyzed in its sentiment engine. A proprietary algorithm then determines the SparkScore, which takes the score beyond a mere positive or negative to then label the comment as Promoter, Detractor, or Passive.

"High scores are earned slowly and destroyed quickly," Owen remarks when asked, hypothetically, if an airline can boost its social NPS after experiencing a situation on par with the JetBlue captain meltdown. British Airways is another example of a company that came in "above average" in the airline domain, but which saw its SparkScore drop drastically after celebrity Kim Kardashian tweeted about alleged "stolen" belongings while on a British Airways flight.

While Owen points out that negative events do have short-term impact on a brand's SparkScore, over the long term, brands with a strong SparkScore will be the ones that incorporate social sentiments into customer experience, combining both structured feedback like that derived from surveys with unsolicited social data.

The company has plans to next introduce SparkScore standalone, as well as integrations with the company's Net Promoter in the Cloud software applications.