Why NPS is much better alongside Customer Experience Management

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Net Promoter Score

The hype surrounding Net Promoter Score® is justifiably real. More and more companies have taken a liking towards NPS®, hoping that it would fetch better results in terms of higher customer satisfaction scores, greater loyalty and retention rates, and so on. While it’s encouraging to see a lot of brands buckle down to understand customers and their needs, a one-eyed focused on your Net Promoter Score program is as ineffective as anything.

We hate to dispel the popular dogma, but it is highly necessary that we do it: succumbing to the NPS® trend, and instituting a program centred on it doesn’t, in any way, create happy and delighted customers. It is a sure shot means to gauge customer loyalty – how loyal is each and every customer to your brand – but that’s about it. But if your ultimate aim is delivering amazing customer experiences and building customer centricity, think of NPS® as a springboard and nothing more!

In fact, even Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter System®, was quoted as saying:

“It’s not the score that matters, it’s what you do with it to make Promoters that really count”.

How many of you have taken the initiative to look beyond the ultimate number, see through the scores, and discover insights that educate you thoroughly about your customer?

To draw this deeper understanding of your consumer base, NPS® as a standalone model will not suffice. The long-term benefits we mentioned at the start – greater loyalty, higher retention rates and more – start showing only when you deliver amazing Customer Experiences consistently. Because hey, we all know – customer experience is the present and the future!

NPS® as part of Customer Experience Management

If you are measuring NPS, chances are that you care for your customers and want to make a positive impact on their lives.

But NPS is a part of a larger spectrum – Customer Experience Management. While NPS only sticks to customer loyalty, customer experience involves every single aspect of the customer journey – right from how the customer feels at your entrance to how much the customer likes your ambience, service, music and even the staff uniform, engulfing every minute detail that the customer experiences and feels.

Therefore, brands can effectively leverage their Net Promoter Score programs only if they are cognizant as to how this score impacts the overall customer experience.

Let’s say you have an overall NPS of 30. But what can you do with this score as such? It tells you where you stand in the market, amongst your other competitors, but beyond that, knowing your NPS® doesn’t really make a difference, does it? Instead, knowing the ‘WHY’ behind your NPS®, the ‘WHY’ behind your promoters, detractors and passives is what can truly propel your brand to understand customer aspirations, which in turn allows for you to create customer-centric strategies and policies.

What do Detractors hate about your Business? Is it the ambience or the staff service or anything else? At the same time, what is the precise reason you have ‘X’ % of promoters? And what differentiates you as a brand – is it your product or the ambience or your frontline employees?

You can’t find answers to these questions by simply tracking NPS®. With a Customer Experience Management platform, however, you have the opportunity to broaden the wings of your NPS® program, obtain deep and relevant insights based on the customer’s feedback and not feel inhibited by one-off numbers and scores.

Hold on though.. NPS is here to stay!

All of this isn’t to say that the Net Promoter Score® has become redundant today. It was, is, and will be (we hope) the most convenient means to track customer loyalty, due to its simplicity and versatile applicability.

The point we want you, as a business, to take home is that measuring NPS® translates to customer centricity only when it is made actionable, insight-driven and mapped with a larger customer experience program that involves other aspects and attributes that determine the customer’s affinity towards a brand.

How is your Business using the Net Promoter Score? Are you maximizing its potential or is it reduced to a tool that simply displays a namesake number?

Ganesh Mukundan
Hiver
I'm a content marketer at Hiver. I've been writing about customer experience for the past 5 years. I'm passionate about narrating delightful customer stories, researching CX trends, and deep-diving into concepts such as VoC and Customer Journey Mapping.

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