The following post is part of a series that will help inform readers of the power that a company’s Net Promoter Score has on its long-term business goals.
Here at Alchemer, we practice what we preach. So with all of our recent discussion surrounding the importance of net promoter scores, you can bet your bottom dollar that we take pride in our NPS, and that we’re constantly working to leave our customers better satisfied, and more likely to refer us to their friends and colleagues. Alchemer practices open book management, and each week the entire company gets together and is briefed on our NPS, and why it might have changed from the last week’s score. This allows for a high-level of transparency, which enables everyone in the company to have their finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction.
We’ve found that tracking our NPS over time has given us the ability to identify areas where we can improve our service, and ultimately continue to grow our customer base by making data collection and analysis easier, and more fun, than it was yesterday.
But let’s take a step back from NPS. Why is it even important to track customer satisfaction and loyalty in the first place? If sales and revenue are steadily trending up for your business, that means that people must be happy with your products and services…right?
WRONG.
Consumerism has evolved to a point where customers hold more power than brands. If someone is dissatisfied with a business, finding the resolution to their problem can be as easy as tweeting 140 characters of disgust at the brand. Businesses that prioritize customer satisfaction will be eager to avoid anything that may tarnish a good-standing reputation, so oftentimes they will go the extra mile to fix the issue for the customer as quickly as possible. If they fail to do so, that customer can simply take their patronage to a competitor found through a simple online search – a luxury that didn’t exist until relatively recently.
It’s for these reasons that customers have grown to expect that brands be proactive when it comes to service, offering a seamless experience from start to finish. They demand individual attention, timely responsiveness, and even a sense of inclusion in a community larger than just themselves.
So, there’s a lot of moving pieces when it comes to measuring modern day customer satisfaction. Businesses looking to not only survive, but thrive, need to have strategies and processes in place that will allow them to benchmark, measure, and act off of a precise metric that tells the story of how their customers are feeling and thinking at that very moment.
That’s where NPS comes in…
NPS serves as a single metric that companies can use to define the progression (or regression) of their customer satisfaction and loyalty rates. By asking one simple question to their customers (“How likely are you to recommend [COMPANY] to a friend or colleague?”) companies can begin to aggregate longitudinal data that will essentially inform all high-level business decisions.
Research conducted by Satmetrics shows that NPS results in:
- Higher retention rates
- Increased cross sell/upsell opportunities
- Lower cost to serve
- Lower marketing costs thanks to word of mouth
Companies that have embedded NPS into their strategies have benefitted from the following results:
- 50% increase in customers over six months
- 98% retention rate
- 30% growth rate that outperformed the market by 30% over two years
- $183M increase in revenue in two years
Now those are some pretty powerful metrics that should inspire any decision maker at a company not currently measuring NPS to think twice about augmenting their strategy for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Click here to learn more about NPS, and to read about our Activated NPS Solution, click here.