Top tips for CX teams looking to improve their brand’s NPS

This article was originally published on qualtrics.com. 

As a commonly used metric used by brands to understand how their customer experience is performing, a Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customers’ sentiment over time and can help managers judge their business against the competition. The simplicity and popularity of NPS mean that many businesses are already using the metric as a core part of their customer experience (CX) program.

Leveraging CX programs to continually drive higher scores, however, requires far more effort than simply reaching out for feedback from customers.

Combined with other data metrics, NPS can be a powerful tool for establishing where a brand currently sits, as well as for predicting where it could be in the future. It can help managers understand what steps to take to positively impact their business and improve customer experience.

NPS can aid brand via improvements in key business metrics, which include:

• Increasing revenue
• Reducing cost-to-serve
• Mitigating risk
• Increasing customer lifetime value
• Improving retention
• Reducing customer effort

This article demonstrates how ways your NPS can be improved and how to develop a cohesive improvement plan.

In this article, you will learn how you can:

• Establish a baseline NPS.
• Track NPS feedback and monitoring progress.
• Identify root causes to improve NPS scores.
• Get buy-in for NPS improvement plans.
• Embed throughout the business.
• Improve NPS score.

Establishing a baseline NPS

A baseline NPS provide a solid starting point from which a CX manager can judge future progress and make predictions about what actions will make the most impact. This will help CX teams to repeat what works and fix what does not, so NPS can be increased over time.

• Get initial feedback from the customer base

  The simplest approach is to ask customers to answer the NPS survey question and provide a follow-up explanation of their score. Sent to all customers or a segment of customers, this helps to establish the starting point. Ideally, this will measure customers’ relationship with an entire brand, rather than just their experience after a single transaction.

  This can be done via email, but it is vital that customers feel as though it is a natural part of their experience, with the question asked at the right time. Personalizing and optimizing this outreach will enable CX teams to generate quality data for better customer experiences.

• Provide an incentive – even if feedback is negative

  To encourage customers to keep offering feedback, follow up on any negative experience feedback and address issues directly. Acknowledge their feedback and make sure the customer knows service teams are taking, or have taken, steps to fix the issues that arose.

• Conduct research on the competition

  Understanding an industry’s NPS benchmark will give brands a strong indicator of performance in comparison to their competitors, as well as providing a goal to supersede.

  This type of insight can help provide context around a score and may help to explain why a brand is succeeding or failing against its competitors. Not only that, it can help create internal standards for specific departments, services and interactions within an organization.

• Understand who the detractors and promoters are

  Getting a baseline measurement helps when segmenting customers into two groups: detractors and promoters. Those who are happy with a product or service (promoters) and those who have a negative experience (detractors) both need to be managed over time to bring NPS to the next level. Turn detractors into promoters and make sure they stay that way.

Tracking NPS feedback and monitoring progress

• Track trends

  The easiest way to monitor progress over time and accelerate a CX program is to track score trends. By regularly collecting feedback from customers, brands can keep a pulse on how their NPS changes and then make sure they are fixing the experience gaps impacting their scores.

Identifying root causes to improve NPS scores

• Understanding pain points: In NPS questionnaires, the explanation of why a score has been awarded can often flag particular pain points. If a certain aspect of the customer experience has not been working as intended – payment processing, for example – feedback can help identify root causes because multiple customers may flag it.

  Of all the ways to improve a NPS score, identifying and taking action on pain points – particularly ones that repeatedly arise and are a driver of a negative NPS – will be the best and most effective option.

• Figure out the drivers: Whether positive or negative, figuring out what is driving customers to provide certain scores will be vital for understanding how to improve it. Though NPS is helpful in providing a tangible metric, open feedback via text can help to narrow down precisely what is driving customers’ scores.

  Following up with detractors and promoters to get further detail on their provided score can do a lot of investigative work, meaning CX teams can better establish whether a quick fix is needed on a certain part of the customer journey, or whether the journey as a whole needs to be re-designed.

Getting buy-in for NPS improvement plans

• Make it a top-down initiative

  As with any organizational change, a NPS improvement plan should be endorsed and promoted by senior management to help drive change across the business. Executive leaders need to champion the actions that will make a difference across all teams for maximum buy-in.

• Help teams to understand everyone has a role to play

  To drive customer satisfaction and improve NPS, everyone in the business has a role to play. Whether it is providing customer service, managing accounts or developing products and services, each department needs to understand that they have an effect on whether customer expectations are being met. Senior management needs to help each team to understand the responsibility they have and the influence they wield.

• Share regular insights

  When implementing an NPS improvement plan, each area of the business should know the state of play and the steps they need to take. To help with this, business leaders need to share regular insights and suggested actions in a consistent, clear way. This will help to communicate precisely what the goals for customer support and retention are, and how they can be achieved.

Embedding throughout the business

• Provide training and create a culture of change

  To ensure staff have everything they need to implement any actions, a culture of change and adaptation needs to be fostered from the top down. Providing training on metrics and educating team members on the plan to improve NPS will make it a group effort and, therefore, far more likely to succeed, as individual areas of the business work together to meet customer expectations.

• Close the loop

  Each department should have its own methods of measuring change and success. Relational NPS is reflective of the end-to-end journey a customer has with a brand. If one part of this journey is not performing as expected then the experience and relationship can falter as a result. With this in mind, individual elements need to be measured against easily understood metrics and feedback taken at every step to help teams improve accordingly. Only then will a CX team be able to “close the loop” on negative feedback and ensure all steps are taken to improve NPS.

• Take action at scale with the right tools

  The three steps that make up a good NPS improvement plan – listening, understanding and acting – can be made easier with automation. Using technology to ensure that specific actions are taken in response to data being gathered makes embedding that culture of action across the business much easier.

  Creating signals for action in this way is not only more efficient but faster – especially given that negative experiences need to be resolved quickly to meet customer expectations.

  Using technological tools to analyze the wealth of data NPS surveys can generate, such as unstructured text feedback, can help businesses sort specific drivers from general commentary. Not only that but using technology to constantly analyze data provides the ability to predict issues and fix them before it is too late.

How to improve NPS score

• Engage with detractors

  Improving relationship with detractors is not just about following up on a negative experience. Businesses need to offer customers with negative feedback a tangible way of resolving the situation that caused it. By providing a resolution to their complaint, customers will feel supported and will potentially change their view of a brand's service. Empower staff to not only reach out for feedback but to help resolve specific issues and engage with customers more broadly to resolve any common negative experiences.

• Leverage promoters

  Mobilizing promoters to work in a CX team's favor is the easiest way to encourage new business and improve NPS further. Promoters already understand a brand’s strengths, but specific feedback should be sought to find out how a business differentiates itself from the rest and how it can continue to satisfy their expectations.

  Even if promoters are happy, businesses need to make sure they are not forgotten during a brand's efforts to win over its detractors. The Pareto Principle – that 80 per cent of revenue comes from 20 per cent of business – illustrates that retaining customers who are already promoters is more cost-effective than just trying to win back detractors.

Why NPS should form part of a wider customer experience program

An NPS improvement plan should always form a part of a wider customer experience program. Tracking feedback and data from customers against the NPS metric is helpful in getting a business heading in the right direction, but there is always room to find other metrics.

It is vital to a business’s success that data is turned into action. This will help in building a fuller picture of where the customer service gaps are and what needs to be done if a brand is to meet the needs of its current and future customers.

Top tips for improving NPS

• Make sure NPS improvement plans have been endorsed and promoted from the top down.
• Create a culture of action and culpability so the entire business understands that it is responsible for customer experience.
• Understand customer pain points and get insights from all areas of the business by tracking individual department metrics.
• Fix pain points as they arise by creating an action plan that addresses the issues highlighted and shows customers have been listened to.
• Continuously listen and adapt to the changing needs of customers by embedding NPS into a wider relational program.

Learn how Qualtrics helps businesses measure, analyze and improve their NPS.