How Can I Improve My Net Promoter Score?
A Net Promoter Score quantifies the customer experience, making it one of the most important metrics for improving your business. Whether you’re simply curious about increasing your Net Promoter Score or desperate for a better number, Catalyst Group ECR can help.
Find out how you can improve your NPS, which goes hand in hand with optimizing operations and increasing customer satisfaction.
The Importance of Your Net Promoter Score
With so many valuable metrics and moving parts in a business, it’s easy for NPS to fall low on the to-do list. However, it’s time to move it to the top.
Net Promoter Scores offer tangible feedback on the customer experience, and CX drives company success or failure. Improving your NPS, even by just a few points, can lead to:
- Increased revenue
- Reduced cost-to-serve
- Lower cost to acquisition
- Mitigates revenue and retention risk
- increased customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Improved loyalty and retention
- Reduced customer effort
Establishing an NPS Baseline
Before anything, you must establish a reliable NPS baseline and goal. To do this, you need to know your current NPS as well as the standard in your industry. Determine your baseline and set your goals by:
- Creating and sending surveys
- Incentivizing for and collecting feedback
- Choosing an appropriate sample size
- Researching competition and industry NPS
You might have an excellent score, but odds are, it can still be improved!
8 Ways to Improve Your Net Promoter Score
Once you’re nice and familiar with your NPS and you set your NPS goals, you can create an action plan to improve your score.
Individually, all the methods to improve your Net Promoter Score below can be effective. But doing all these things as part of your NPS action plan is the best way to see positive results. While you can try one or two of these alone, we prefer to think of them as steps in your plan.
Make NPS a Company Priority
Your NPS improvement plan will not work if the entire company is not on board with the idea. Some people may not realize how valuable NPS is and put it on the back burner.
Ensure everyone understands NPS’s importance and is committed to the improvement plan. Below are a few ways to make NPS a company focus:
- Hold regular NPS-focused meetings
- Routinely discuss insights, new feedback, and data across the company
- Share specific NPS insights with relevant teams to help them improve
- Emphasize how everyone can contribute to NPS improvement
- Implement training based on NPS data
- Create an open-minded company culture of change
- Empower employees to prioritize customer satisfaction and participate in positive changes
Basically, don’t hide the numbers away in a locked cabinet, and try to fiddle with things behind the scenes to improve your Net Promoter Score. Be open with your team about your NPS and what everyone needs to do to make it even better.
Engage employees in the mission, welcoming new ideas, offering training and resources, and giving them reasonable autonomy to manage the customer experience.
Optimize Surveys
Without surveys, there is no NPS. You need to send out surveys that will elicit useful feedback and valuable data. You need to be sure that your surveys:
- Have the right questions
- Feel personalized
- Are incentivized
- Reach customers at the right time
- Reach the right customers
- Are frequent enough
- Have clear expectations for the customer
- Use cascading and open-text questions
- Are not too long
- Are user-friendly
- Are accessible via multiple channels
We promise crafting these surveys is simpler than it seems. You just need to make sure you hit all the right notes.
Analyze NPS Feedback and Analytics
Once you have a decent sample size of surveys and respondents, it’s time for analysis. This is one of the most intensive parts of the process but also the most insightful.
You must analyze NPS feedback against demographics, product usage, service usage, and other analytics. Look for patterns, trends, and themes to help you better understand why customers leave certain scores. This cross-reference analysis is crucial to determining what causes people to be detractors.
Along with the rating, analyze feedback from qualitative, open-text, and follow-up questions. Customers often answer these questions with their pain points, giving you incredibly valuable information.
Perform Root Cause Analysis
We can’t slap a band-aid on the issues that customers bring up. And doing things like apologizing to detractors and atoning with free services or products can only go so far.
Instead of addressing detractor dissatisfaction at the surface level, we need to dig deeper and determine the root cause of the problem. This way, we can remedy the problem at its source.
Determining the root cause requires the thoughtful analysis discussed above. Once you have that information, there are many strategies for distilling it into the root cause, such as the “Five Whys” approach or the Fault Tree Analysis concept.
Ultimately, finding the root cause is all about identifying and understanding detractor pain points and determining the drivers of those pain points.
For example:
- Paint Point: A customer is dissatisfied with their service
- Driver: They felt the company did not address their complaints
- Sub-Driver: No one monitored the feedback
- Root Cause: A lack of a designated feedback monitor
- Solution: Designate someone to monitor feedback
Diligently Track Company and Industry NPS
This one is simple but very important. Even if you have a great NPS or substantially improve it with some effort, you need to stay vigilant.
You should consistently assess your company’s current NPS against past scores and identify reasons for fluctuations.
At the same time, keeping up with NPS fluctuations within your industry is crucial. Sometimes, industry shifts, like new laws concerning insurance or a tax increase on certain products, can impact NPS.
Address Passives, Promoters, and Non-Respondents
Yes, much of improving your NPS improvement strategy will focus on detractors but don’t neglect other customers.
Make efforts to turn passives into promoters, nurture promoters, and determine why non-respondents don’t complete the survey. If you ignore passives, promoters, and non-respondents, they can become detractors.
Furthermore, engaging with these customers can provide more insight. Responses from passives can help highlight areas for improvement just like information from detractors. Feedback from promoters gives you insight into what you’re doing right and what customers want more of. Follow-ups with non-respondents can help you optimize your surveys.
There is useful information to gather from every single customer, so don’t get detractor tunnel-vision and ignore everyone else.
Close the Loop Every Time
“Closing the loop” means taking a customer’s feedback full circle:
- The customer voices a problem.
- The company listens and acknowledges the problem.
- The company analyzes the problem and determines the root cause.
- The company takes action to remedy the root cause.
- The company follows up with the customer, either demonstrating the solution or asking for updated feedback.
Make following up with customers a priority, as, without this step, the loop never closes.
Closing the loop makes customers feel heard and valued and helps businesses solve problems comprehensively. Ideally, you should close the feedback loop for every negative and neutral survey response.
It’s Time to Take Action
We know adding another priority to your long list is tough, but NPS is invaluable.
Improving your NPS can be a long road, but the experts at Catalyst Group ECR can make it easier. Working with an expert can ensure you strategically and sustainably improve your Net Promoter Score, offering an optimized customer experience. Contact Lori Moen at Catalyst Group ECR and see how your business can thrive when your Net Promoter Score improves!
