Why Customer Feedback Matters
First, the cold hard facts. Did you know that 100 percent of survey respondents say they trust the feedback of other people—even people they don’t know—over brand advertising? What’s more, people love telling others about their terrible brand experiences! Surveys show nearly 50 percent of people who have had a terrible experience told more than 10 people about it. And in the day of social media—when irate customers can reach hundreds of “friends” at the click of a button—that number is surely rising.
By 2020, it’s projected that customer experience will be the most important brand differentiator—even more than price and product quality. So, the real question is: which side of CX will you land on? The positive? The negative? With the tools you’re currently using, would you even know the difference? If not, you need the Net Promoter Score.
Creating a Benchmark with Net Promoter Score
When it’s all said and done, we all need loyal customers promoting our business. These promoters are out there spreading the word about our company and their experience with it, even when we’re low on ad dollars or struggling to create the next killer disruption. The Net Promoter Score helps you create a baseline of how many promoters you have so you can keep that number growing.
To create your Net Promotor Score baseline, you simply survey your customers asking, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”
- Those answering 9 and 10 are your promoters—those who will actively good-mouth your company
- Those answering 7 and 8 are your passives—those who probably won’t say much
- Those answering 0 to 6 are your detractors—those who will actively bad-mouth your company
The goal, as always, is to have more promoters than detractors. To find out where you lie, you subtract your percent of detractors from your promoters. For instance: if you have 40 percent promoters, 20 percent passives, and 40 percent detractors, your Net Promoter Score is 0. What??? With 40 percent of customers loving your socks off? Yes, because remember: bad-mouthers are big-mouthers. Their score counts. So much so that when it comes to net Promoter Score, anything above 0 is considered a win. And once you know where you stand, you can always work to improve it.
What Net Promoter Score Can Do for You
Research shows it’s 5-25 percent more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to hold on to the ones you have. Your Net Promoter Score shows you not just how many customers you’re likely to keep, but which ones you’re in danger of losing. When it comes to CX, those are the customers who could cost you big, not just in terms of negative social media but in terms of lost profit and turnover. How can you focus your efforts on understanding their issues and how to win them over? And how can you get your promoters to love you even more?
Net Promoter Score isn’t an end-all, be-all. It’s a starting point to better understanding where you fall on the customer satisfaction scale, and how likely your customers are to hang out or jump ship. While it should not replace the other data you’re gathering on customer and user experience, you should ultimately see an increase in Net Promoter Score the more you work on addressing your CX and UX issues. It’s just one more tool to keep your company running straight and smooth—in a forward direction—in digital transformation.
The original version of this article was first published on The Marketing Scope.