NPS Best Practices

The stupidly simple secret to monumentally increase your profits

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Do you know why your customers like or dislike doing business with you?

The connected world has offered immense opportunities for all of us to grow. A key criterion for growth is customer acquisition, for which we spend a lot on marketing, discounts, loyalty programs, 24 hours sale…. it’s endless! But is this sufficient? Imagine a customer getting such poor experience that she defects even faster than she was lured through these “smart” customer acquisition strategies.

Customers should be given such stellar experience that they become loyal to you and stick around. Losing customers at a rate faster than acquiring new ones will only lead to a shrunk customer base and decline in profit.

Both Loyal (read “promoters” according to Net Promoter Score® philosophy) and not so loyal customers (read detractors) have their own lifecycle and impact the bottom line accordingly

Promoters

Detractors

They are happy doing business with you and hence buy more
Come back for repeat purchases
Recommend to their friends and family leading to more business
Willing to understand your genuine problems
Complain less which means service cost is low
Fewer complains means happier employees
Happier employees are more efficient and serve your customers better!!

Detractors buy less
Unless you dominate your market they will not come back. Will defect at the first opportunity though!
Spread negative word of mouth creating a –ve chain reaction
Enraged at minuscule issues
Escalate at every opportunity consuming more of your team’s bandwidth
Dent your employee’s morale.
Unsatisfied employees mean low efficiency, job dissatisfaction, higher attrition!!

Since loyal customers lead to lower costs, happier employees and repeat business, its imperative that companies focus on setting a customer-centric culture in their organization.

Like any other change this cultural shift may also face some resistance from within the company. To ensure its adoption is seamless a simple and easy to understand metric like Net Promoter Score® (NPS) goes a long way. NPS helps you quantify and measure customer loyalty.

As Peter Drucker rightly puts it

Source: http://www.strategicmanagementforum.org/

NPS with its simplicity shifts the focus from analyzing the score to the WHY! It makes it easy to question the reason behind this score and makes the different departments in your organization action-oriented rather than the research-oriented.

You can establish a flow of information across the organization creating a social environment around it. Individuals, teams, departments and different entities within an organization can use it as a mirror to evaluate and improve themselves.

When the teams understand how their actions directly impact customer loyalty they stop waiting for the higher management to show them the way and start thinking and taking action on how to improve customer loyalty themselves.

A detailed explanation on how to implement NPS successfully in an organization can be found here.

Reach Kushal at kushal@customerguru.in