Employing Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to gauge how likely people are to recommend your business may have its shortcomings, but it’s gradually turning into a must-have for evaluating company perception and branding.
While this powerful metric is an ultimate measure of customer experience, it is rendered useless when companies are unable to use this feedback for bettering their customer experience, effectively sucking out the soul of NPS with the fatal Dementor’s kiss.
Embrace these 3 practices to ensure your NPS strategy doesn’t fall “behind the veil”, and is able to streamline business growth.
1. Closing the Loop
Unless your customers are good at ‘Accio’ charms like Hermoine, it wouldn’t be easy for them to retrieve your surveys from their cluttered inbox. Chances are, they will never fill out these tiring forms, and worse, even if they happen to fill it, they may never receive an acknowledgment. The effort of investing time in filling out such surveys would only bring them disappointment.
This is where closing the loop comes into play. As a follow-up, companies need to acknowledge feedback from customers and probe further to learn more about the customer’s concerns in detail. Topping it up with a reward is definitely recommended, as it gives customers a deep sense of recognition and contentment. While you can use a logo maker to create a creative one or share special brand values, these can help improve customer satisfaction.
This step is a subset of NPS and an important one. It helps companies exhume insights that were buried in the NPS survey.
2. Keeping Customer Feedback Integrated
Isolation robs people of their sense of identity, understanding, and opinions. When Sirius Black, Harry Potter’s Godfather, was confined in isolation in Wizard Prison Azkaban, his ability to do magic diminished, almost ceased. Likewise, if feedback by customers is kept in isolation or silo, the impact on growth can be negligible.
Many companies restrict NPS to only one or two departments, whereas NPS is an organizational element that ties all departments and functions together. This kind of isolation debilitates NPS’s ability to boost growth and development of an enterprise.
Integrating feedback and NPS loop across the organization is one of the cornerstones of success with NPS.
3. Setting Customer Experience Goal for the Team
In general, companies aiming to offer superior customer experience set an NPS goal for their team. The NPS goal is supported by a customer experience vision that is shared with every member. The end goal is to increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
At the end, delivery of a delightful customer experience is not the responsibility of a single department, its prerogative falls on everyone’s plate. Departments must integrate their data with each other and position NPS goals on top of them to drive themselves to a single, unified goal.
Just like Harry Potter alone was not enough to defeat the Dark Lord and his forces, individual departments can’t achieve that NPS goal on their own. NPS has to be substantiated with the customer experience vision and supported by the entire organization.
Considering customer success as an isolated initiative is one of the biggest mistakes made by companies nowadays. NPS is not just any other activity originating in a single department, it is an approach that echoes across the enterprise and requires an integrated mechanism to be successful with.
NPS is the magic wand that can help businesses gain a deeper understanding of their customers, alleviate churn, and increase customer loyalty, only if it is used correctly. The wand chooses the wizard, and if NPS has chosen you, you better be ready to use it well and prove your worth!