Net Promoter score: it’s impact on customer service

What is NPS?

A Net Promoter Score NPS is a market research metric, based on a singular question asked of a company’s customers “how likely would you be to recommend our company to ….”. Using a scale of 0 to 10, you can gage a customer’s loyalty, their satisfaction and enthusiasm of your company, product and/or services. To measure NPS, there is a sole focus on the extremes of the score, specifically looking at the highly engaged customer, whether they are a detractor or a promoter.

What makes NPS important?

NPS is a great tool for me to get insight into the organic growth of our business through verbal recommendations, feedback and repeat business, it gives me an indication that our customer service, our product/services and our business is the right choice for any of our customers, there is nothing better than receiving an enquiry asking for our testing services, because someone told them about us and the excellence that we provide, including the fact that someone has put their reputation on the line to endorse us as a company.

NPS empowers our customers and helps bring insight into improvements or continuations customer want us, as a business, to continue doing.

 

How do you use NPS?

Managing accounts requires insight into our customers, and a great way for me to do that is reviewing our NPS score and customer feedback on a regular basis.

I use the feedback to make sure that I and the team are giving the best customers experience, it’s important to focus on delivering exceptional customer service at every single touchpoint in our customer journey, ensuring that each and every customer has positive interactions with myself, our products and/or services.

As an accounts manager, I need to both monitor and measure NPS, helping me to identify trends and progress, feedback and overall scores, helping both me and our team to make informed decisions about both business direction and help strategies.

How do you maintain and leverage NPS?

In order to leverage our NPS, I encourage customers to share their positive experiences, whether we ask for testimonials or post their comments on our website anonymously, nowadays social media is a great quick way for a wide audience to see.

Here’s how to maintain your NPS:

  • Continue to give the best customer service I possibly can to each and every single customer
  • Encourage my customers to fill out the survey
  • Continual training and engagement within the team
  • Personalising my interactions with my customers, I don’t just send out a generic template, I take thought in my own interactions with my customers and how they would prefer their communication.
  • I don’t stop engaging with my customers once their project, work or services have been completed, it’s imperative, particularly for repeat business, to keep interested and in contact
  • I take stock of what my customers are saying in their feedback, are there things I or the business can improve on and if so, do I have a plan to implement them and make their feedback into an effective change?

What are the challenges?

There are many things as a business that can challenge us, with NPS there are going to be occasions where we are going to receive negative feedback, none of us like to be criticised or told we are bad at something or we haven’t met expectations, it can be a hard pill to swallow, but as a business it’s important to look at that feedback and implement change, how else are we supposed to improve if we aren’t told about our potential pitfalls.

Focusing solely on the score alone and losing site of what we are being told. It can be easy to get tunnel vision and focus on the score alone, as a business as previously stated, we need to take on the feedback and implement it where possible. Just because we may have received one demoter score, doesn’t negate from the positive, it just means we work harder to get it right in the future.

Negative scores out of a businesses control. Sometimes a product or service might not meet the expectations of our customers, and due to that, negative reviews can be left. It happens in all walks of life, we particularly see this more so in the hospitality industry, but as a medical device testing laboratory, unfortunately some products fail their testing, this can inevitably lead to an unhappy customer, who in turn can leave a negative review or feedback, this is to no fault of ourselves, but bad news leads can lead to bad reviews.

As a customer I can appreciate that sometimes it’s a hassle getting various surveys to fill in, sometimes I don’t feel that a company is going to take on the feedback, so what is the point in me filling this in.

Customer not filling out the survey. As a customer I can appreciate that sometimes it’s a hassle getting various surveys to fill in, sometimes I don’t feel that a company is going to take on the feedback, so what is the point in me filling this in. Completion rate for NPS is a hard thing to grow, I don’t want to come across as bothersome by asking for a customer to fill out our survey but honestly, there is no better way to gauge how my customers are feeling.

NPS is a great way for me to understand how my customers are feeling, how I am doing as an accounts manager and how our business is doing. I can visually represent the scoring and feedback, presenting this back to management to show trends and areas of improvement.

I would highly encourage participation in a NPS survey when we send them, it allows me to understand, at the very end of a study, how you, my customer, feel it went overall, whether there are negatives, positives or a mixture of both, it gives me great insight into improvement and continuations.

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