Learn how to lead by design to make a positive difference for customers using a Net Promoter Score program. The Net Promoter Score tells you how likely is it that someone will recommend your company to their family, friends and colleges.
For more resources on building your strategic plan, view the Essentials Guide to Strategic Planning.
Video Transcript
“Hi. I’m Cammy Lore. Today, we’re going to talk about customer experience programs. In particular, leadership considerations and initiating the methodology called net promoter score. First, what net promoter score or NPS really is, is it’s simple and it’s one question. And that question is, how likely is it for your customers to recommend you to their friends or family? Now the answers to that are along an 11 point scale. If they answer at the top, nine or ten, they’re your promoters. If they answer seven or eight, those are your passively satisfied customers. They’re ambivalent and susceptible to your competitor’s offerings. And then if they score you zero to six, they’re your detractors, and this is a really important group. You can take good lessons from them on what needs to be improved but if you don’t pay attention to what they’re saying, they have the potential to do damage to your brand. Really important group here. In any program like this, leadership really sets the tone. They have to make it very clear to the entire organization that this is the customer experience metric that you will be looking at over time, so make no mistake that this program is important for everyone in your organization to understand and to reference. Do it with your actions, do it with your words, and lead by design for net promoter score.
Some other considerations for leadership is that you have to have your management engaged. With management, they need to take the information and do something with it. Based on your guidance, they need to go ahead and look at the processes that your company has that impact the customer experience. They need to look at your employee training to make sure that people are trained best to make customers happy. All those kinds of things have to be in place to make sure that the net promoter score program is instituted within your company in a way that’s going to make a difference for customers and that’s management’s role in NPS. Next, is transparency. We have to get the information down to the frontline to where people are interacting with the customers the most. That is the crux of the whole relationship and people need to understand how their service impacts this metric, so get that information to the customers. Another way to think about transparency is share it across your organization, that means with different branches, with different stores.
What you’re doing is inspiring competition, and competition is a good thing even within your own organization. Also what you’ll be doing with getting transparent across your boundaries is getting best practices established. You might have a really good store that is really strong with NPS, and the thing is that you want to be able to build on that. Share best practices that that store might be instituting and make sure that your whole organization benefits from the good things that are being done out there. Finally, is a commitment over time. This program is your customer experience metric. Over time it will let you know if your customer experience is improving or not. So, that takes time, you have to build trends. This isn’t just one or two surveys. This is a three, a five, a ten-year commitment that you’re going to make to make sure that when customers give you feedback, you’re going to use it and it’s going to make a difference for them in a positive way.
Also, this kind of information is very powerful. It can rebuild needed change within your organization. We know what change management is all about. It’s not easy and there’s a lot of things that might be impacted. You have to be able to take a commitment and take some very, very positive effort types of initiatives that might go against the grain of how things are now but it’s going to make a difference for your customers, and that’s why we exist, right? Because customers are a gift. Their feedback is a gift, so let’s go ahead. Track the kind of experience they have because it matters, and it matters for the long run for company survival.”
Adam,Thanks for the kind words!I completely agree with you rnuning a large Net Promoter Score program from an Excel spreadsheet eventually becomes impossible. In my experience, many companies follow a similar path regarding the systems that power their NPS program.Phase 1: A suite of non-integrated, mostly free tools. Companies at this stage generally use a free tool like SurveyMonkey for their survey, Microsoft Excel for reporting and analysis, and their email client for Close-the-Loop triggers.Phase 2: A purpose-built, standalone tool. Companies at this stage will use NPS software from companies like SatMetrix, CustomerSat, CustomerGauge, Vovici, MarketTools, etc.Phase 3: A system that is integrated with the core of the business. Companies at this stage will use purpose-built NPS software like in stage two, but now those tools are integrated with the systems that the business already uses. Examples would be ETL integration with the enterprise datawarehouse for reporting, CRM integration for Close-the-Loop activity management, and more complex analytical tools like SPSS, Minitab, etc.Regardless of what technology is used, the important thing is that companies start asking, understanding, acting upon and responding to feedback from their customers. Hopefully this post helps companies who are new to NPS get started just a little bit faster!