Delivering Great Customer Experience Takes More than the Net Promoter Score
Since 2003, companies have relied on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as the leading means to determine customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. The Net Promoter Score is derived from responses to a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” The scoring is typically based on a 0 to 10 scale.
Today, more than two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies still use the NPS as a way to quickly and efficiently survey customers. Are the results of the NPS as a stand-alone metric still meaningful today? According to a recent article in Bloomberg Technology, Fred Reichheld, the Bain & Co. executive who helped to develop it, has begun to question its effectiveness. It’s not just the NPS. “The tsunami of surveys,” the article asserts, “is making them far less useful.”
“We’re just in the middle of everybody doing it,” Reichheld said. “It works for a lot of service-oriented things, but I’m not going to rate my toilet paper online.”
Reichheld has a point. There are user satisfaction surveys for just about everything we do. Worse, consumers may feel pressured to score a person or service highly to avoid feeling responsible for a negative impact on the brand.
These are contributing factors to the sharp decline of survey response rates over the past 20 years. At the same time, it’s become more difficult to get accurate customer feedback with reports indicating that 96 percent of customers either don't or can't voice complaints. Add in survey fatigue, and today’s businesses end up with a distorted view of the quality of their customer service experience.
And yet, Gartner claims, “89 percent of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience.”
For every individual customer an organization has, the complete customer experience (CX) is an accumulation of many touch points, relationships, and interactions with the organization, the brand, and its products and services. While the complete scope of any CX journey will traverse many areas of an organization over an extended period of time, a significant chunk of most CX is the experience of accessing assisted-service and self-service through voice and digital channels.
Thanks to the proliferation of the internet and smartphones, the modern consumer has more information and power than ever and expects everything to happen instantly. In increasingly competitive markets, with increasingly homogenized products and service, it’s become easier for consumers to compare offerings and switch providers.
The businesses who have flourished best in this environment are those who have established highly loyal customers by differentiating their offerings with compelling value and great customer experience.
How can businesses measure and react to customer feedback? Understand the value of the NPS score, but use it judiciously and with extreme care.
More importantly, businesses should acknowledge that new measures need to be brought into the mix—ones that can complement the data derived from the NPS, and do so in a way that does not burden the customer for additional information.
As part of any customer satisfaction effort, here are four critical things you must do:
? Personalize the customer experience. Customers will reward companies that anticipate their needs; likewise, they will punish those that have to relearn basic information at each and every touch point on the customer’s journey.
? Implement a multidisciplinary customer experience strategy. Companies that transform operations to deliver high-value, personalized experiences will distinguish themselves from the laggards that are simply executing CX tactics.
? Evolve loyalty programs. Companies that develop ways for customers to actively participate with the brand and in product design will benefit from new and powerful levels of affinity.
? Master digital channels. Companies that are digital experts will further differentiate themselves from those that merely dabble in digital channels as a means of decorating their traditional business approach.
It is clear that the NPS taps into a real need—both for businesses seeking to understand the customer base, and for customers who are willing to provide feedback. But it can no longer survive on its own. For businesses to thrive in the digital realm, new measures and insights are needed to inform actionable plans and transform the customer experience in ways that truly benefit the customer.
Alok Kulkarni is the cofounder, CEO, and chairman of Cyara. Kulkarni founded Cyara with a belief that the right software testing platform would enable businesses to guarantee success in serving their customers while keeping up with the rapid pace of innovation and consumer expectations.
Alok Kulkarni is the cofounder, CEO, and chairman of Cyara. Kulkarni founded Cyara with a belief that the right software testing platform would enable businesses to guarantee success in serving their customers while keeping up with the rapid pace of innovation and consumer expectations.