Simple questions have the power to reveal some invaluable truths. Consider the question at the heart of every Net Promoter Score questionnaire: how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
The responses can help your brand to determine your overall customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. But how can you turn those insights into actions that increase CSAT and grow your revenue.
Your customer service strategy is a pivotal starting point. Whether you’re handling customer service in-house or working with an outsourced contact center, there are specific best practices that can help improve your Net Promoter Score in a measurable way. Here’s what you need to do:
Gather Quality Feedback
Whether they have complaints or compliments, most consumers won’t tell you what they really think. The majority will either continue buying or simply take their business elsewhere. Worse still, most efforts to coax feedback from customers flounder (response rates for customer surveys hover at an abysmal 1% to 2%). So when you finally do get customer feedback, don’t waste the opportunity to turn it into actionable insight!
Are you currently sending Net Promoter or customer satisfaction surveys? If not, now is a good time to start. Here are a few things to keep in mind. In addition to requesting a ranking of their likelihood to recommend your business, ask a few follow-up questions to qualify consumer responses. What aspects of your service influenced the rating? What could your business do to improve NPS by one point? Limit your questions so your customers can provide an answer in five minutes or less – anything longer might as well be customer repellent.
Outside of formalized feedback, keep your antennas fixed on social media. Some consumers will provide you straight feedback through direct messages or mentions on specific social media platforms. Others might complain under the radar if you’re not keeping tabs on subtle call outs.
Trust your social media customer service team to do some proactive sleuthing. It allows your brand to address obscured customer complaints and collect comments that can make an impact enterprise-wide. Just make sure your agents are monitoring the right keyword phrases associated with your brand (even brand misspellings) to cast as wide a net as possible.
Create a Formal Way to Leverage
What happens to all the responses you receive? Without a formalized change management process in your contact center, customer feedback can only enact change on an individual agent or localized basis. Lasting changes depend on a comprehensive process. At the customer service level, that involves collecting customer feedback and evaluating which comments have merit – and which amount to your customers letting off steam.
Once you’ve determined the feedback that’s worth sharing, you’ll need processes in place to circulate that insight to your customer service agents. For our programs, we have Quality Assurance Representatives who assess the strengths and learning opportunities of our teams, providing coaching and training that stimulate positive change across each program. That way, we can take the feedback to heart and act in ways that elevate your NPS.
Create Continuity across the Customer Experience
Examining the common traits of high-ranking NPS companies, Omoto noticed that most prioritize the personalization of customer connections. There’s continuity from one interaction to the next – regardless of channels. It’s through this omnichannel customer experience, where their interactions build upon one another, that brands convey the superiority of their service and improve their NPS.
A high-quality CRM is vital to tracking a customer’s omnichannel movements. Yet customer service agents who are untrained in your CRM’s best practices will only see an incomplete puzzle, not an intact, up-to-date picture. Whether your team is internal or outsourced, regular training on your CRM (among other trainings) will help elevate your standing in the eyes of promoters and passives on the cusp of promoting your business.
Get Hands-On with Coaching
Feedback is at its most effective when it’s fresh. That’s true whether you’re sharing customer feedback on an enterprise or individual level. In both cases, ongoing coaching is more impactful than the annual or biannual reviews performed in other industries.
Conducting regular training on big changes to your customer service strategy allows your agents to learn in a controlled environment and ask questions. Through this structured learning, your team can grow collectively, boosting your service excellence as a whole.
In the contact center space, we also have opportunities to review the performance of our agents in real-time. Through a side-by-side call, we can listen in on voice channel interactions or watch social/live chat interactions unfurl. Once the interaction is over, we can debrief, outlining the wins and learning opportunities for our team to incorporate NPS boosting strategies into their daily conversations.
