Testing Laboratory Net Promoter Score

What is Net Promoter Score (NPS) and why use it?

A Net Promotor Score (NPS) is a common metric used by customer service teams across multiple industries by looking at how likely our customers are to recommend our businesses.

NPS is a great measure of our customers perception of our brand, our business and our people, it helps businesses like ourselves to effectively understand any improvements that could be made to our management and quality systems, testing activities and our customer services, it also serves as an amazing way to give glowing feedback to your staff, especially if our customers have taken to the time to write a review.

How do you calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

To begin with, you need to look at how the scoring system works.

Detractors – a score between 0-6

• Unhappy customers who will not recommend you to others within the industry and more than likely leave a negative review either via word of mouth or online

Passives – a score between 7-8

• Satisfied customers but possibly wouldn’t actively recommend us to their colleagues or peers.

Promoters – a score between 9-10

• Customers who will come back to you time and again, and happily refer you to others.

To understand how to get your NPS score, you first need to send out your survey question ‘How likely would you recommend us to others within the Industry?‘ to your customers. How this is sent out is entirely down to the business and what works for their customers. Typically companies will send this out via email, as times progress we are however, seeing more companies send their NPS via SMS or a fan favourite WhatsApp.

Once received you would calculate the total Detractors, Passives and Promotors into a percentage of total surveys received, then subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters to get an overall score. Working within other industries, I have seen this viewed on a monthly and 3 month rolling score, but it is down to each individual business on how they want to view their score. A great way for analysis is looking at your monthly score over time and seeing whether any trends are forming, are some months lower than others and if so why?

How do you interpret the results?

Dependant on your industry, it can vary but typically on a whole the below would be a standardised benchmark.

-100 to 0

If your NPS is here then improvements need to be made, things have gone wrong, dependant on the industry this is typically where customer service has failed, there are several complaints and customers are negatively reviewing your business.

0-29

If your NPS sits between 0-29 then this is deemed as a good score, customers may not be negatively reviewing your business but they certainly are not actively promoting you or recommending you.

30-69

This is great, you are doing better than a fair share of the industry and customers are reasonably happy and are likely to be recommending you to others, here you would expect to see business growth.

70-100

This is industry excellence, customers will keep coming back to you over and over again, they will recommend you to others and actively promote you.

How can you make improvements?

One of the first steps, if improvements need to be made, is to complete a deep dive into detractors. Why has a customer given a negative score? Were they given wrong information, did they receive subpar customer service or was it simply out of the businesses control?

Having a process for recording, tracking and reacting to NPS is key. As our customer experience is consistently evolving, we need to do the same, by keeping our ears to the ground and listening to what our customers are saying and asking ourselves how do we take their feedback and create improvements, a major step here is speed in addressing any issues, once they have been identified, we can work towards a resolution to get our customers back to being happy and loyal again.

How does Test Labs fit in and what do we do?

At Test Labs we aim to constantly improve the services we provide by seeking feedback from our customers. The feedback is used to help improve the management system, quality, testing activities and customer services.

As an accounts manager, my role involves ensuring a seamless experience for our customers throughout their study journey and beyond. After the study concludes, I seek feedback on how it all went. Typically I send a personalised email thanking our customers and inviting them to complete our NPS Survey, which takes less than 5 minutes to fill out and provides us with crucial feedback and that all important score.

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