Use NPS® alongside Customer Experience Management to Create Actionable Conclusions

While it is not a perfect metric, figuring out your brand’s Net Promoter Score® can be a vital step in establishing an industry-leading Customer Experience. Standing alone, NPS® is a great way to measure customer loyalty, but there needs to be additional information sourced in order to make realistic claims regarding customer satisfaction. One way to optimize measuring your brand’s NPS® is to make it a part of a larger Customer Experience campaign. This will allow you to add loyalty as an aspect of Customer Experience, instead of relying solely on NPS® to make conclusions. You can read more about this in Ganesh Mukundan’s piece for CustomerThink. You can access the article here, or by reading below. 

This piece was originally published on CustomerThink on November 15, 2016.

“The hype surrounding Net Promoter Score® is justifiably real. More and more companies have taken a liking towards NPS®, hoping that it would fetch better results in terms of higher customer satisfaction scores, greater loyalty and retention rates, and so on. While it’s encouraging to see a lot of brands buckle down to understand customers and their needs, a one-eyed focused on your Net Promoter Score® program is as ineffective as anything.

We hate to dispel the popular dogma, but it is highly necessary that we do it: succumbing to the NPS® trend, and instituting a program centred on it doesn’t, in any way, create happy and delighted customers. It is a sure shot means to gauge customer loyalty – how loyal is each and every customer to your brand – but that’s about it. But if your ultimate aim is delivering amazing customer experiences and building customer centricity, think of NPS® as a springboard and nothing more!

In fact, even Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter System®, was quoted as saying:

“It’s not the score that matters, it’s what you do with it to make Promoters that really count”.

How many of you have taken the initiative to look beyond the ultimate number, see through the scores, and discover insights that educate you thoroughly about your customer?

To draw this deeper understanding of your consumer base, NPS® as a standalone model will not suffice. The long-term benefits we mentioned at the start – greater loyalty, higher retention rates and more – start showing only when you deliver amazing Customer Experiences consistently. Because hey, we all know – customer experience is the present and the future!

NPS® as part of Customer Experience Management

If you are measuring NPS®, chances are that you care for your customers and want to make a positive impact on their lives.

But NPS® is a part of a larger spectrum – Customer Experience Management. While NPS® only sticks to customer loyalty, customer experience involves every single aspect of the customer journey – right from how the customer feels at your entrance to how much the customer likes your ambience, service, music and even the staff uniform, engulfing every minute detail that the customer experiences and feels.

Therefore, brands can effectively leverage their Net Promoter Score® programs only if they are cognizant as to how this score impacts the overall customer experience.

Let’s say you have an overall NPS® of 30. But what can you do with this score as such? It tells you where you stand in the market, amongst your other competitors, but beyond that, knowing your NPS® doesn’t really make a difference, does it? Instead, knowing the ‘WHY’ behind your NPS®, the ‘WHY’ behind your promoters, detractors and passives is what can truly propel your brand to understand customer aspirations, which in turn allows for you to create customer-centric strategies and policies.

What do Detractors hate about your Business? Is it the ambience or the staff service or anything else? At the same time, what is the precise reason you have ‘X’ % of promoters? And what differentiates you as a brand – is it your product or the ambience or your frontline employees?

You can’t find answers to these questions by simply tracking NPS®. With a Customer Experience Management platform, however, you have the opportunity to broaden the wings of your NPS® program, obtain deep and relevant insights based on the customer’s feedback and not feel inhibited by one-off numbers and scores.

Hold on though.. NPS® is here to stay!

All of this isn’t to say that the Net Promoter Score® has become redundant today. It was, is, and will be (we hope) the most convenient means to track customer loyalty, due to its simplicity and versatile applicability.

The point we want you, as a business, to take home is that measuring NPS® translates to customer centricity only when it is made actionable, insight-driven and mapped with a larger customer experience program that involves other aspects and attributes that determine the customer’s affinity towards a brand.

How is your Business using the Net Promoter Score®? Are you maximizing its potential or is it reduced to a tool that simply displays a namesake number?”

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

NPS FAQs

How can Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Experience Management (CEM) be used together?

NPS and CEM work together by providing both quantitative and qualitative insights into customer satisfaction, allowing businesses to take actionable steps for improvement based on customer feedback.

Why is NPS important for customer experience?

NPS helps gauge customer loyalty and identifies areas where the experience can be enhanced.

How does CEM complement NPS?

CEM provides a broader view of customer interactions, helping to turn NPS insights into concrete actions.

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