Frank McCusker, Director Client Management for Satmetrix EMEA, set us straight on the basics of running a successful NPS program. If NPS isn’t built on a solid foundation, it usually doesn’t lead to the desired results.
The first foundation is Program Design.
- Be clear about the results you want out of improving your customer loyalty. Typically, customer retention, more repurchases, and generating customer referrals.
- Be clear about the kinds of actions you are going to take to get those results – which are incremental operational improvements, and which are more radical strategic improvements.
- What infrastructure do you need to support customer centricity? Do you lack processes to align internal activities to customer value creation, or do your existing processes force people to focus inward and ignore the customer? Do your ICT systems support the customer? Processes and tools are only enablers, but having the right ones makes the overall goal of creating net promoters much easier.
- Does your executive team fully understand and support NPS? Is it fully integrated into your strategy and operations, across functions or is it a bolt-on activity that just sits in one department? This seems like common sense, but it’s easy for organizations to compartmentalize NPS …and then they think it doesn’t work because no improvements happen in the organization and there is no change in customer perceptions, or the bottom line….
- And finally you can worry about the questionnaire design. Short and relevant, reflecting the key pain points of your key stakeholders. Typically questionnaires are designed by committee and they end up to be too long and redundant. Here is the acid test for every question: what action can you take internally based on the answers to that question? If you’re not going to act on it, don’t ask it.
The second foundation is Sample Strategy.
- Get the right customers. Don’t just go and ask finance or sales which are the right customers. Dig everywhere and get a healthy sample from these segments: end users, influencers, decision-makers. Again the acid test for whether a stakeholder or customer should be included in the sample: Are you willing to make business decisions based on the data that comes from this group?
- B2C companies should take a representative sample of their targeted segments and extrapolate from there.
- B2B companies, you need to measure every single one of your key clients who drive 80% of your sales and profitability….because each one matters.
- Timing is also important – measuring at a logical time for the customer, but also at a time when you are prepared to quickly analyse the data, get back to customers and start acting on the data.
The third foundation is closing the loop.
- You have to follow up with your customers. Decide which situations require which kind of follow-up.
- Who internally should conduct the follow-up? Ideally, someone the customers believe has the power to make changes.
- When will the follow-up be done? (Best practice - within 48 hours if practical…whatever, stick to it and monitor it and make sure people do it).
- What should happen afterward? How should it be handled? For example, will you include in your annual report a section about customer feedback and what you’re doing to address it?
