Voice of Customer – Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Want to know everything about the Net Promoter Score?

Then you’ve come to the right place! Read here everything about what NPS entails and how you can use it in practice so that you not only measure, but also improve:

• What is Net Promoter Score? A definition
• How do you measure NPS? The Net Promoter Score question
• How do you calculate NPS?
• What is a good NPS score?
• How to improve NPS?
• NPS Software
• Essential features for Net Promoter Score Software

What is Net Promoter Score? A definition

The Net Promoter Score is an important KPI and management tool for measuring customer loyalty through the recommendation question.

How do you measure the net promoter score? The NPS question

Within the NPS there is one ultimate question, namely customer loyalty. The central question is: ‘How likely is it that you would recommend product/service/company X to friends or family?’

How do you calculate NPS?

First you start with the NPS question; How likely is it that you would recommend our product to friends or family? The customer answers this question with a number on a scale from 0 to 10. Where 0 means he would not recommend it and 10 means he would definitely recommend it. Then a number of additional questions are asked to find out the reason for the score.

Based on the answers, you divide the customers into three groups: detractors, passives and promoters. To calculate the nps score, you take the percentage of promoters (that is, those who gave a 9 or a 10) and subtract the percentage of detractors from that. The result is an absolute score, not a percentage. This score is between -100 and +100.

Example Calculate NPS

A company conducted an NPS survey and asked 100 customers the NPS question: Would you recommend us? 50% of the customers give a 9 or a 10, 30% a 7 or an 8 and 20% give a number between 0 and 6. The NPS score then becomes 50% – 20% = 30.

What is a good NPS score?

How do you determine what an NPS score between -100 and +100 means for your organization? It is important that the objectives for your organization are realistic but also challenging. Blindly staring at benchmark figures makes little sense. Many factors influence the scores, so the absolute value will not always correspond to your own NPS calculation. It is also important that you do not only look at the score, but at the trend. That says a lot more than just a number as a snapshot.

Research results are also an extremely useful tool as input for formulating goals and targets. Be aware of which underlying processes are necessary for improvement. With the calculative metrics such as the NPS, an increase of 10 points per year is a relatively simple goal when your score is -50, but this becomes more difficult when you are already at +80, for example. First formulate an objective for your organization as a whole and also an NPS objective per, for example, employee, job level or department. This score can also be used as a KPI for your bonus system to reward your employees with fair bonuses.

How to improve NPS?

You do this by facilitating your employees based on the NPS measurements. Do not use scores to assess your employees, but rather to motivate them. Do not punish your employees, but support them with the score. Set up the processes and systems in such a way that your employees have continuous access to customer feedback linked to customer data. For example, via an app on their smartphone on which they can see their NPS results in real-time and the experiences described by the customers themselves.

Give your employees insight not only into the NPS results, but also into the stories and the emotion behind the grade (from an open answer field). Then they know why the customer gives a certain score.

That is where the emotion lies and with that you can literally read the customer’s experience in his own words. What lessons can they take from this to improve the Customer Experience even more? See NPS as a long-term strategy and don’t attach any hard consequences to it, such as rock-solid short-term targets for bonuses: Connect bonuses to a positive Net Promoter Score instead of just achieving certain sales or bringing in customers. Use the power of NPS or other metrics as a ‘system’ and not as a score per se. Only then can you improve the scores or the system.

NPS Software

A good system for improving Customer Experience automatically links the collected feedback to your internal customer and employee data so that this information can be directly translated into follow-up actions per department, per location or at individual employee level. Via automatic push reports, dashboards and trigger mails, your organization receives continuous insight into the NPS and the necessary follow-up actions. It then becomes a system with which you can adjust the organization based on the Voice of Customer in order to increase customer loyalty.

Essential features for NPS Software

• Automated and continuous
  As an organization, make the right decisions based on continuous insight into customer loyalty.
• As few questions as possible
  Don’t bother people with long questionnaires that could annoy them. Just ask a few questions, but make sure you can figure out why they give a certain score.
• Distribute information to the right target group as quickly as possible
  A Net Promoter System distributes information automatically, quickly and in the right way to the right organizational layers, so that feedback can be acted upon immediately, for example in the event of a low NPS score or a complaint.
• Correct data links
  A good Net Promoter System enriches NPS data with your company’s CRM data and is able to combine information from different systems and sources in one solution. Prevent manual, time-consuming and error-prone processes.
• Easily categorize open answers
  By asking respondents to categorize their answer, you can find out exactly why they gave a certain answer. This gives a broad insight into the ‘why’ of the given NPS.
• Let customers’ stories take center stage
  It is important that the score can be explained by customers with an open answer, so that employees understand why a customer has given a certain score. This gives them in-depth insight into the stories and the emotion behind the number. The customer feedback really comes to life in the organization.
• Priorities overview
  As an organization, ensure that you have a clear and well-arranged overview of priorities per department, location or employee. This allows you to implement structural improvements at a strategic, operational and individual level.
• Visualize data with real-time infographics
  A good NPS system automatically generates real-time infographics. This makes data visual in a manageable and informative way, customer feedback comes to life and you get the organization moving.