10 easy to implement Net Promoter® best practices

Written by: Vivek Jaiswal | Co-founder, Customer Guru

While Net Promoter System® (NPS) is quite easy to understand, it is still fairly new as a concept. As more literature is published on how to make the best of NPS and the Voice of Customer (VoC), it is also becoming difficult to find best practices when implementing NPS or VoC process in your organisation. I came across the “Ultimate List of Net Promoter® Best Practice Tips” that contains close to 40 tips, and thought of sharing the ten easiest and simplest ones as an excerpt. Anyone interested in going through the entire list may visit the blog originally posted by Adam Ramshaw. For those looking for a quick bite, read on…

1. Keep in mind that NPS is not a market research tool

NPS is a measure of your customers’ experience and loyalty with your brand. It is meant to be short and sweet, unlike most market research. Most importantly, it is an operational tool that triggers action while market research is ‘research’ that is passive and is meant for knowledge building.

Both are great tools but are meant for different purpose and have different end goals.

2. Close the loop

It is probably THE most important thing to do from the very beginning of any customer feedback program. Irrespective of what metric is used, closing the loop will improve customer engagement as well as create promoters just out of sincerely following through with customer feedbacks. Implementing service recovery or an account review meeting based on customer feedback will help recover detractors. But reaching out and thanking your promoters for their support is equally important; do not overlook the goods.

Closing the feedback loop is critical, it should be a part of everybody’s activity list.

3. Read the verbatim, they are a gold mine of information

First of all, it is purely out of respect for the time your customers invest in sharing their feedback that you should read every comment. But when tons of automatically analysed and beautifully reported data is available, why would you want to read through the free text comments, right? Wrong, because:

• 1 in a 1,000 customer survey responses is the gem of a business transforming idea – you don’t want to miss that right?
• 4% of responses ask you to take an action for the customer, including providing a quote for more business – again not something you want to miss.

4. Share customer comments across the organisation

Sharing your customers’ voice internally brings everyone closer to your customers. Don’t just share the good feedbacks but also the bad ones. It keeps employees motivated as well as on their toes at the same time.

5. Have the right attitude towards customer feedback

Every company has flaws and it’s best to acknowledge them. Customer feedback is like a mirror for an organisation, showing what is what. Abstain from shooting down customers feedback by saying ‘the customer doesn’t understand the process’ or ‘that was a one off’. If customer feedback is embraced with the right attitude it could really transform your organisation by continually improving and fixing problems that customers are pointing out.

6. Frontline employees know your customers best, get them involved in the process

Frontline employees would feel more committed to the success of the NPS program if they are involved directly in improving it. More over, most of the customer issues are already known to them and they are brimming with creative ideas to solve those problems. Listen to your customer facing employees, empower them to take action and they will make a huge difference in customer experience.

7. Make the NPS program your own, brand it

Rename it, brand it, give it a logo, a tagline and even a mascot! Make sure that the program is well recognised internally. This is probably the best way to get everybody excited about any new initiative – make it your own.

8. Be transparent, make it visible at the top

Install digital signage in CXO’s cabins, share daily/weekly/monthly scores and summary of customer issues. Show what is being done to improve NPS and make it visible through the NPS trend. Be bold, be transparent.

9. Take action on the feedback, utilise the data

So many organisations collect a host of data from their customers and report like crazy. However, they completely miss on making changes in the business and ultimately resort to blaming the process that it doesn’t work.

“If you do not use the information to make changes in the business, shut down the whole process because it is just a waste of time and money.”

10. Invest in automation – to reduce cost and failure

It is a bad idea to have your NPS or VoC program dependent on a person. Every time that one person is sick or leaves the organisation, the process should not come to a standstill.

Invest in a good NPS solution, automate as much of the routine survey process as possible: data collection, validation, collation, analysis and reporting.

 

It was hard to select just 10 out of so many other great tips. These are however the easiest to get right from the beginning. Let us know your favourites in the comment below.

7 Customer Experience Experts You Should Follow

Want to stay up to date on the latest and greatest customer experience tactics? These are the people you should be following.

Written by: Vivek Jaiswal | 25 Jan 2015

Customer experience is still an emerging field of study and most business leaders are learning by doing. While there is a host of information out there, it is easier if you know what the experts are saying. Here is a list of seven customer experience experts you should follow on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay ahead on everything related to customer experience.

 
 

Fellow at Bain & Company, best selling author, speaker, and creator of the Net Promoter System®, Fred has been called the “high priest of loyalty” by The Economist. He is a leading voice and a strong advocate of employing the “Golden rule” to create customer and employee loyalty. According to The New York Times, “[he] put loyalty economics on the map.”

 
 

Co-author of ‘The Ultimate Question 2.0’, Rob heads Bain & Company’s global Customer Strategy and Marketing Practice. He is a keynote speaker and through his NPS Loyalty Forum, he brought together, for the first time, business leaders from across the world to share best practices in creating a culture of customer advocacy.

 
 

Micah Solomon is a renowned keynote speaker on customer service and customer experience,. He has written 100+ articles on Forbes.com covering customer experience, customer service, and corporate culture that foster loyalty. Author of bestselling “Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization”, Micah is a leading voice in creating outstanding customer experience in the hospitality industry and has worked with some of the leading brands in creating the “Five-Star” experience.

 
 

An entrepreneur and customer experience consultant, Adam is a regular contributor on various customer experience and customer feedback forums on LinkedIn. His blog on www.genroe.com is a gold mine of information covering customer experience, customer feedback management, and research on key customer loyalty trends. Adam is a keynote speaker at industry forums and conferences in Australia. He works with global B2B and B2C organization to build a customer centric corporate culture.

 
 

John is an “Ex-Disney Guy” and Customer Experience Coach. He has been successful in showing businesses, teams and communities how to create a Disney-like experience and culture. He is a leading contributor to Tourism, Hospitality and Service Industries alike. He brings a wealth of knowledge and hands-on experiences to his keynotes and seminars. John is consistently helping his clients create a magical customer experience like Disney.

 
 

As erstwhile Global Head of Customer Experience and Insights at Aviva, Rod brings with him a strong track record in driving systematic improvements in the customer experience. He is recognized as a customer experience leader and his roundups on www.rodsroundup.com provide great insights on creating a rewarding customer focused culture.

 
 

Learning his way through experience, Michel is a renowned customer and employee experience keynote speaker. He has worked with and coached senior managers at leading brands in North America. Michel’s energy is infectious and his views on customer experience an eye opener. He has been featured and has contributed on Time Magazine, Yahoo Small Business Advisors, Yahoo Finance, Forbes, Digiday.com, BC Business, Business Talk Radio, Business2Community, and 1to1 Media.

Do you follow any other customer experience evangelists and like what they say? Let us know in your comments below!

How to improve your customer feedback response rate?

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Have you been asked to fill in a feedback survey at a fine dining restaurant on the food/experience/service etc and you either did not bother to reply or indiscriminately marked everything as “good” or whatever took your fancy? You may have done it for the following reasons

• You wish to finish you dinner and get out asap. Definitely not interested in answering a long, boring survey of zero value to you
• You are not bothered as you are not sure if any action is taken on this feedback
• You don’t want to be rude! Maybe speaking out your mind will only lead to mindless follow-ups (i.e. “if” they read your response ;))

So if your customers are not giving you enough response. Frankly they are pretty much thinking the same. A low response rate only means low stickiness with them. Its quite likely that your non responsive customers are like those fence sitters who will jump to your competition without much consideration.

How do you rectify it?

• Keep it simple – Each question you add to your survey is going to increase the drop off rate from start to finish. Hence in order to reach out to a wide customer base restrict your customer feedback surveys to as few questions as possible. The Net Promoter Score® questions along with a follow up question is what we recommend.
• Allow your customers to get back to you easily. Make your surveys easy to answer. With more and more traffic driven (almost 50% response of our customers is from mobile) from the Mobile its important to make your survey mobile friendly. Click here to see how
• Make your customers believe that their feedback matters to you and you will definitely look into what they have to say and resolve their issues. This belief can only be instilled when customers see your commitment and know that you mean every word of what you say. One of our technology partner’s client liveouthere.com used a very creative video to communicate this to its customers and got amazing results!
• Take action ….. Consistently!! – Its important to deliver what you have promised. Don’t just deliver consistent customer service but also look into every customers feedback and resolve their issues……consistently. It is better to be consistent with what you promise to your customer than promising a lot and not delivering it. Unpredictable service is liked by none. On gathering customer feedback its important to analyse this data, identify what matters to your customers and take corrective action. On taking this action analyse its impact on customer loyalty, this goes on and on in a cycle. In order to do this consistently and successfully its important to have the right systems and processes in place. Click here to read details on how to implement NPS successfully.
• One step at a time – Imagine taking massive actions on customer feedback reports generated after lot of “research”. The research approach is time consuming and makes it difficult to analyse the impact quickly and in case you observe a negative impact of your actions, the changes are so massive, backtracking on them is near impossible. The idea is to make small incremental changes based on the insights from your customer feedback and measure their impact before making bigger decisions. This helps to revert your changes easily if required. These small changes accumulate over time and create a positive impact on your customer loyalty. A right technology solution like CustomerGauge helps you automate your system to gain insights real time and deliver good customer experience consistently. Click here to schedule a demo.

Some best practices

• Set the expectation in the beginning – Tell customers its a shart survey which will take under 3 minutes to answer
• Don’t be a pain in the ass – Survey your customers too much and they are bound to ignore you.
• Be crisp and creative – refer the liveoutthere.com video
• Mobile optimised – 50% traffic driven through mobile. Consider a technology solution like CustomerGauge
• A well timed reminder works at times
• Keep your data clean. Ensure your customer information is correct/ updated.
• Say Thank you. Tell them what action you have taken

Reach Kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

NPS as a KPI – the good and bad!

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

One of the first few questions that organisations ask on adopting NPS is “should they set NPS as a KPI?”  While the intention could be right to ensure that the team is serious about NPS, it is equally important to ensure that the program has reached the maturity level of adopting NPS as a KPI. Do it too early and it will face a lot of resistance from the team. Do it too late and the program loses its value.

A few pointers to keep in mind while you are on the NPS journey

“We are in it with you”. The company should give out a clear message to its employees. Imagine the detractors reaching out to your front line employees. When they voice their concern, then other than acknowledging it if your team is clueless on the next steps it will only lead to repeat complains and further customer dissatisfaction. With no defined system in place the frontline feels helpless and this effects their morale. Any organisation would definitely not want to get in this vicious cycle of unhappy employees and customers. The solution here is to define a process for handling customer issues and equipping the team with the right tools to collect customer feedback, analyse this data and take necessary action to address these issues. The employees should get the message that the company is in it as much as the team and willing to equip them with the right processes and tools.

“Data is key”.  To create the finest quality product you need to use the best raw material. Similarly if you want to get the best result from your NPS program it is important that the data you are collecting and using to make key decisions is relevant, reliable and a good representation of your entire customer base. Initiatives based on non reliable data will face resistance from all the departments effected. This resistance will also be rightly justified as decisions on unreliable data will not be credible and yield minimum result. Some points to consider for data reliability

• The team must be trained and system should be put in place to avoid “gaming” (surveying only satisfied customers, colour coding score chart to suggest scores to customers, pleading customers for high scores indicting bonus for the team etc).
• Some geographies are culturally tuned to lower scores. Its should be accounted for while making key decisions
• Try to get a good response rate. With more and more internet users on the mobile it could be your key to higher response rate
• Organisations with high NPS may want to focus on issues creating passives rather than the ones creating detractors.
• Focusing too much on the score may dilute the essence of the program to resolve customer issues.

Though it is advisable to set NPS as a KPI it is important to commit along with you team, support in their initiatives and in the process always be focused on the ultimate goal to WOW you customers.

Reach Kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

An Indian context to NPS

Written by: Vivek Jaiswal | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Since my return from Amsterdam, I have been repeatedly told that it’s great to have the experience of helping European organisations implement NPS, but I’ll have to keep the ‘Indian context’ in mind while implementing the same in India. Some even cast doubt on whether NPS is applicable in India because Indians rarely respond to surveys. It got me thinking if it’s actually true, if there really is an ‘Indian context’ to NPS. With respect to the same, I would discuss three major questions.

1. Is the NPS question relevant to the Indian community?

2. Do Indians have a relatively low response rate to surveys vis-à-vis people of other nationalities?

3. Can NPS be skewed because Indians are culturally inclined to give low scores?

I started by conducting small experiments locally. Whenever I went out to purchase anything of value – a new mobile connection, an Internet dongle, or new earphones for my iPhone, I would always ask the NPS question to the salesman:

Would you recommend this product to your friends and family?

And

Why?

It was a fun experiment because almost always it made the salesmen think for a while. It was different from asking ‘Is this product good?’ to which they instantly responded ‘Yes! It is one of the best set of earphones we have.’ But when asked the NPS question, I was given an honest answer – ‘you should buy this one instead because it has so and so advantages over the other one’ OR ‘absolutely, in fact a friend of mine has the same product and is very happy with it.’ Having run this simple experiment across several small and big purchases, I received the same level of engagement from the sales people. It reinforced my faith in the NPS question and it is safe to extrapolate the observation across all Indian organisations.

Now comes the question of whether we Indians have an inherently low response rate? That is to say that we rarely respond to surveys. I believe that culturally we are very enthusiastic about sharing our product knowledge with others. Like the rest of the world, we regularly seek and offer opinion about products/services we would like to or have used, often volunteering to help with purchasing decisions. Though offline, these are manifestations of customer feedback. Then why is it that companies fail to capture them? In a recent call with a prospective client, I was told – “Customers don’t have the time to respond to surveys.” it prompted me to think “Yes, as long as they are sent 10 page long questionnaires, the response rate will remain abysmal.” Traditionally customer surveys have been extremely lengthy. And, along with corporates, customers have come to believe that if it’s a customer survey; it will be lengthy. However, does the length of a survey really affect response rate? Well, our dear old Surveymonkey guys have the answer to that. As one of the most widely used survey platform, Surveymonkey studied around 100,000 customer surveys for a correlation between respondent dropout rate and length of the survey. The results are depicted in the following chart:

C, Brent. “Does Adding One More Question Impact Survey Completion Rate?” SurveyMonkey Blog. https://www.surveymonkey.com/blog/en/blog/2010/12/08/survey_questions_and_completion_rates/ (accessed July 20, 2014)

So, if you are a company that really wants to improve customer response rate, you have to cut down the number of questions. It’s that simple! Again, since NPS relies on asking just the two questions I mentioned earlier, its response rates are phenomenally higher than traditional customer satisfaction surveys. To give you some perspective, CustomerGauge, our technology partner, gets NPS response rate of  >60% in B2B and >25% in B2C. This is across more than 130 countries that CustomerGauge receives responses from, India included.

Finally, some would also point that NPS could be skewed because of cultural bias: that Indians do not have a tendency to rate an organization very highly. However, in contrast to the notion, I believe Indians are more generous in that regards compared to their European counterparts. On a global scale if India scores lower than other markets, it should not be assumed to be because of a cultural bias, rather the service quality in India should be closely observed. As long as service levels are delightful, companies can be assured of receiving a 10 from Indian customers. Adam Dorrel’s (CEO CustomerGauge) blog – “Net Promoter: is there a ‘Dutch effect’?” corroborates this view.

It is important to understand that NPS is a way to measure customer delight and is a must have for every organisation. What Indian organisations really need to implement are the processes that make it easier for customers to share feedback and NPS facilitates that process most effectively.

What is Net Promoter Score® or NPS®?

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Net Promoter Score® is a loyalty metric developed by Fred Reichheld, a fellow at Bain and Co. In 2003. It is a management tool widely replacing the traditional customer satisfaction (CSAT) research and is being used by global brands to gauge the loyalty of their client relationships.

It is based on the fundamental construct that by asking one simple question –

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

Measured on a scale of 0 to 10 every company’s customers can be divided into three categories

1. Promoter (Score 9 and 10) These are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and referring others thus fuelling organic growth
2. Passives (Score 7 and 8) These are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who would easily switch for better offering
3. Detractor (Score 0 to 6) These are vocally unsatisfied customers who damage your brand and impede growth through negative word of mouth

NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors

Net promoter provides easy and quick customer feedback. The power of NPS however is not driven from data collection but from using this data effectively. Its easy to collect data using any of the survey tools available online but can effective data collection alone lead to NPS success? The real value is in evaluating this data effectively and deriving actionable insights so you exactly know the actions you need to take to delight your customers. An organisation striving for NPS success needs to realize that NPS is not just about measuring customer loyalty but also a way of doing business. NPS should be seen as a change agent that transforms an organization into a customer centric one.

Disclaimer: Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, Net Promoter System, and NPS are trademark of Satmetrix Inc., Bain and Co., and Fred Reichheld.