Net Promoter Score (NPS) is probably the most simple and effective method for measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction at different stages. Longer and more complicated surveys might help you dig deeper into the brains of your respondents, but they tend to make it more difficult to take actions on the results – which in my opinion is still the most important thing.
NPS is basically a two question survey: you ask how likely your customer is to recommend your product and follow up with asking why. Leaving out the why-question is the biggest mistake you can make. What do you do with a grade if you don’t know what affected the it? The NPS method gives you a rating (% of promoters and % detractors), which is standardized, but in my opinion not very important for most companies in the beginning (unless you want to compare your results with other companies or markets).
For many, the concept feels too simple to work (and that’s why you still see satisfaction surveys with 59 questions). But the beauty is that when a company starts asking those questions it opens up a whole new world for them. Imagine asking the questions in various lifecycle stages of your customer. If you’d have the information how loyal your customers are – and why – at every step of the way, you’d be able to identify the problems in your product or organization much better.
Another way to use NPS is to track each business function. Let’s take an example. The management of an airline wants to increase customer loyalty and they decide to track the whole customer experience starting from booking a flight and ending with the customer leaving the airport. An NPS program would be implemented so that there is a constant stream of customer responses coming in all the time. The Net Promoter Score is tracked per customer segment and per business function (e.g. online booking, check-in, airport services, in-flight service, baggage pick-up, etc.). Now, the management is able to spot where the lowest and highest NPS scores are – in which segments and at what stages of the customers’ trip. More importantly, the executives are able to see how the score is impacted when something is changed.
The simplicity of the NPS system is not a bad thing. The complexity and the actionable data comes from how you use it. Without measuring loyalty, customer experience, and satisfaction, how can business decision makers know how likely it is that the business is going in the right way? And if action isn’t taken immediately, why are customers bothered to respond?
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