How do you drive your NPS, the new customer relationship transformation KPI?

An essential indicator for large companies, the NPS (Net Promoter Score) has become the benchmark in terms of customer relationship, or even one of the pillars of the customer-centric strategy. Very simple tracking tool, but of unrivalled efficiency, it allows customer satisfaction to be measured with a single question: ” What is the probability that you would recommend this company/service/product?”. It allows the “recommendation rate” to be ascertained very quickly and in particular the margin of progression possible. This notion of “recommendation ” is essential in order to retain current customers and in parallel develop the commercial prospection field.

When the NPS is not used to measure customer satisfaction, the company has the choice between two other tools: the Customer Effort Score (CES), that evaluates how much effort was required from the customer to use the product or service: “how likely they are to continue using and paying for it”, and the Custormer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) which rates satisfaction in a single question: “How satisfied were you with your experience?”.

Today, companies are giving these indicators the key role of a management tool in their transformation. The NPS, CES and CSAT then become the driving force for change within organizations. But why such a craze for these KPIs today and, above all, what ressources do they have to make these indicators progress in a sustainable way? Let us take a concrete example of the NPS.

A real tool for managing and driving change

Companies have come to understand the true value of this indicator. Beyond measuring a simple satisfaction rate, the NPS appears to be a real tool for managing and driving the change of customer relationship, which has evolved significantly over the past ten years. There are several reasons for this: the change in consumer behavior, the emergence of new competitors, the major role of customer reviews made increasingly visible through social networks, etc… In general, the relationships between companies and their customers have been strongly impacted by technological developments and the advent of the internet (multiplication of contact points, increasing complexity of the notion of customer experience…). This rise in the digitalization of the customer relationship requires companies to fully control all the elements of their customer relationship process chain.

The real challenge: encouraging the NPS internally

Regularly measuring your NPS is necessary, but today it is not sufficient. Regularly taking the temperature of the patient does not cause it to go down. It is, therefore, necessary to set up an action plan in order to move the “Detractors” and “Passives” to be “Promoters” to sustainably increase the NPS. But what are the best practices to carry out this ambitious project?

As a first step, the company must have a very “process-oriented” approach and set up a series of internal “check-ins” in order to be able to respond very quickly to negative opinions, to reassure disappointed customers but also to reinforce the “Promoters” in their choices. A list of actions to be carried out for each of these different cases must be defined upstream by the company and it is then necessary to regularly check the proper execution of each of them by monitoring key indicators.

As a second step, it is necessary to focus on the human factor and include all employees in this NPS and customer satisfaction measurement strategy.

The company must then be able to create and encourage a community of committed employees to promote its image to its customers. In order to achieve this second objective, the implementation of tools that provide daily personalized and collective stimulation of the employees is strongly recommended (through a system of positive emulation, gamification, recommendation or training). The establishment of means to measure the outcome of the action plan is essential; a simple and attractive graphical representation, in the form of indicators and dashboards for example, can be used to monitor the increase in skills and provide a global and local vision to identify employees and departments with problems. Gamification is also a very good NPS animation lever as it offers the opportunity to leverage all internal resources by engaging dedicated teams via challenges based on predefined goals. It also allows employees and teams to be rewarded when managing to maintain a very good customer satisfaction rating thanks to a points system, for example.

In summary, the role of the NPS goes beyond that of a simple barometer of customer satisfaction. It challenges the traditional methods of customer relationship management by leveraging both the process and the human plan. The NPS thus becomes a driving force for change in large organizations and a real tool for strategic management for the success of transformation.