Brand – Product – Service

At the brand level, loyalty is more about attachment to a name and what that name means to me (good or bad).  It’s also about a promise – the brand makes promises (implied or intended or unintentional altogether).  Delivery of that promise is judged in the mind of the customer.  Asking loyalty questions at the brand are more about the company brand value and the company brand promise.  And that is where the improvements will need to play out.

Product is very specific.  Asking customer loyalty about a product will tell me a story.  That story is the one they tell other people in their circle (however large or small).  This can be a great tool for better developing a customer focused view of our products and what is most critical from a feature or functionality improvement perspective.  I think it is also important to remember that this won’t be able to give you unknown, unmet needs – that is a whole other discussion.

Service – if the customer is paying for service in addition to the product, then asking for loyalty on this front can be a great tool.  Particularly because it is possible that the buying cycle for the product is longer than the buying cycle for service and its accompanying touchpoints are more frequent.  The down side is that if the service is included somehow or not visible as a cost the customer pays for directly, then asking loyalty at this level is often hard.  Might be better to stick to customer satisfaction for this critical touchpoint.

Those are my thoughts on the level of the question.  What do you think?  How have you seen this applied?

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?