I love reading comments about Net Promoter. I commonly see questions such as these: “Is NP really the best number?” “Is it the one number that tells you everything?” “Is it the perfect measure of customer loyalty?” The debate seems to focus on how accurately Net Promoter measures loyalty.
This is a statistician’s argument, which proves to me that many people don’t understand the full importance of Net Promoter. So I will go out on a limb here: there are most likely purer ways to measure loyalty, if we could all agree to what loyalty means. But is Net Promoter (NP) the best number for a business to focus on? The answer is a resounding yes. Let me explain.
What I love about Net Promoter is how easily it can be communicated to and understood by all members of an organization. I can hear the hallway conversations now. “Our Net Promoter score is up four percent!” That sort of sounds like, “My stock just went up four points!”
In other words, you do not need to be a statistician to understand the importance of the number. Employees can enthusiastically say, “Our Net Promoter score is up 60%!” It is precisely because this metric is so easily understood that the company can rally around the concept of customer recommending customers.
This same concept holds true for Enterprise CEM: it is most powerful when the data is relevant and understandable to those who are receiving it. If you can say, “My NP score is up 2% and my products score is up to 60%” – these aren’t just bragging rights. They also provide a common and meaningful language that a company can use to communicate customer loyalty at all levels of the organization. That is the ultimate goal of Net Promoter – to make loyalty measures understandable to everyone.
In my last blog, I talked about integrating customer experience management (CEM) data into business processes, such as account planning and customer recovery. I also discussed using CEM data to make better day-to-day business decisions. In this blog, I want to tell you another reason why CEM systems are so popular: because of their ability to deliver relevant, timely role-based feedback in a process-context in ways that effect change.
When I look at our own Net Promoter data, I am most interested in product feedback. What did the customer like or not like? I want feedback to make our products better. In this same vein, sales people want to know about their accounts, support agents want to know the details of their transactions, channel partners want to understand how to make their programs more effective, and e-commerce managers want to obtain feedback about on-line experiences. Aggregate details are fine, but what is more important to these constituencies is to know precisely what we are doing well and what areas need improvement.
The scores and the actions needed to improve them are what employees are truly interested in. Thus, from a systems point of view, it is necessary to collect CEM data in a way that enables the relevant parties to quickly obtain feedback about their products, customers, and processes.
The next important step involves issuing that data in a timely manner. Surprising as it may sound, many customer-loyalty solutions are based upon annual measures. Although that might make a good PowerPoint presentation, annual measures generally don’t effect real change within an organization. You need to be able to deliver feedback to appropriate employees immediately in order to make the best use of Enterprise CEM. The most efficient way to do this is within a process context.
Net Promoter data is useful to all employees in an organization, particularly when the scores are tied to corporate goals (see Dr. Laura Brooks’ related blog on Linking Your Net Promoter Metric to Personal and Corporate Goals). This same concept applies to regional scores, divisional scores, business unit scores, and even individual scores for some employees, such as those in sales, product support, and customer service.
So it is with Enterprise CEM: the goal is to make the customer’s experience a major part of the culture and language of a company, and to aid in the decision-making processes that determine the company’s future. That is the “enterprising” concept behind everything we do.
Perhaps you can tell us how you have made Net Promoter data actionable at the contributor level? If so I would love to hear from you.
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