The Corporate Woman

In the next part of our series, we’re going to talk about how what to with the results you get back from NPS.  You’ve completed your survey design and fielded it to your customer and/or partner base.  At last, you have your data.  Now what do you do with the results?  If you are anything like me, you could spend a lot of time reading the open ended responses and analyzing them.  And don’t get me wrong, this is important but in my experience, it’s not the next step.

The next step is connecting NPS results to customer data to determine lifetime values.  Our data showed conclusively that the more likely a customer is to recommend, the longer they tend to stay with us.  Showing this proves the value of NPS.  It ties the results to dollars, which is key in determining which improvement issue to go after first. 

A simple ranking of the number of customer mentions without an attachment to dollars makes it very difficult for your key stakeholders in the business to develop ROI scenarios.  But ranking them with the addition of lifetime value makes a significant difference.  If you can also add in the reasons why customers cancel and the reasons why customers choose not to buy, you have a powerful business case for change that is built in lifetime value (dollars of potential revenue) and is anchored in NPS results.   How many of you are connecting your NPS results to customer lifetime value?

Tags: customer loyalty, Net Promoter Score, NPS

I had a call with a colleague in the customer experience field today.  He had some very good questions about how to decide the focus of your NPS survey.  It was an interesting discussion and I thought it worthwhile to share with you in my blog, perhaps as a series.  I’m going to tackle the survey design questions in this blog.

First subject – how detailed do you focus the survey?  A key decision early on in the program.  There are three levels you can measure NPS and each has varying degrees of impact. 

• At the top level, you have the brand NPS.  If your brand has strong recognition and powerful ties to decision making this can tie NPS.  This can be valuable to get a sense for your share of word of mouth but may not get you sufficient detail by itself to help you drive improvements. 
• The mid-level view or as I like to call it, the actionable level is the product NPS.  This is specific to the product they own and would they recommend it.  This helps a great deal because it can get you several why’s down in five why analysis within the survey itself and helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of each product.  It also ensures that the data is not skewed by a strong influencer (negative or positive), which can happen in the top level measure.
• The tactical level or operational view is really about areas such as service or training.  If you sell this in addition to the product, it can be quite valuable to measure at this level, in conjunction with what product the service or training was delivered on.  Because these are heavily customer facing, they are strong driver elements.

It’s important to look across the business you serve in from the view of customer.  This helps immensely when designing what levels to survey and how frequently to survey.  At the heart of any NPS program, in my opinion, is driving improvements in your customer’s experience, which results in a stronger company from a longevity and revenue perspective.  Ensuring that each survey point is purpose designed and driven towards gaining you actionable data is core to your survey design.  When you have that purposeful leveling structure, you know how detailed your survey needs to be, which means you get to keep it short and focused.  How do you structure your NPS survey?

Tags: customer loyalty, Net Promoter Score, NPS, Survey Design

I know that I am going to be in the midst of competing views here but I use NPS where I work and have built a previous NPS program as well – I like it and it works.  Say what you will of the method (and believe me, there is much that has been said/written/blogged on it, good and bad), the core of it comes down to really listening to your customers, taking action on what you learn and letting them know they are heard.  For me, that’s the key.

I’ve often said that the NPS question itself (and the resulting score) are the least important parts of an NPS program and survey.  Before I anger anyone, please note that I said least important, not that they aren’t valuable at all.  What is more important, in my view, is the “why” for the score given and “what would it take to improve”.  This is where the listening gets good.

Once you have all that great data from your customers, it’s time to turn it into actionable information.  That’s done by taking the NPS data and tying it to other key data.  That’s going to vary for your business but it could be market channel, customer value, number of customers, retention, country, product, brand… well, I think you see where this could go, right?

Customer feedback that’s just a number that everyone watches and argues about is not really all that helpful, is it?  The real power comes from the program you build around the NPS data you collect and the tools you develop as a result.  Taking action on customer feedback and letting your customers know they are heard.  And who doesn’t want to buy from a company like that?

Tags: action, customer loyalty, listening, Net Promoter Score, NPS

I’m going to try and avoid my soapbox here but I will warn you in advance that I may not be successful.  You be the judge…

In my experience, most surveys I’ve taken and seen (includes both those I’ve been asked to provide input on as well as those I couldn’t bear to actually complete), don’t really get actionable information as a result.  I get the sense that most people think surveys are easy to do and really, how hard can it be to come up with a bunch of questions?  In a way, they are right.  It’s not usually the questions that trip you up (although there are those and we’ll get to that in a bit).  The hard part, the tripping point, is really purposeful information.

1. If you had the answer to this survey question, what action would you take with it? 
2. Pretend you’re the opposite of a lawyer and don’t ask any questions when you already know the answer. 
3. Would you take this survey if you got it? Really?
4. Avoid conjunctions.  I don’t know why this comes up so often.  Conjunctions don’t conveniently shorten your survey by grouping concepts, they cloud your results.  (And, but, or, yet, for, nor, so).  “Please rate your satisfaction with the cleanliness and quality of our bathroom.”  Really, is cleanliness the same as quality?  Perhaps it was clean but the toilet paper was of poor quality… but I digress to another potential blog here.
5. Don’t be so wordy.  Overdone corporate speak, really long questions and acronyms are the usual culprits here.  Keep it short and simple to get the best results.
6. Have at least one open text/feedback question.  Instead of trying to cover every possible base, leave the customer the chance to share what they want to share, the way they want to share it.

And my last thoughts on the manner – keep the whole survey short and focused on your point.  Tell me how long the survey is or will take in the invite.  There’s always more but these are the things that always seem to come up in one form or another.  Now you tell me – how many times have you seen these simple rules violated?

Tags: best practices, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, design, suggestions, survey