If your Net Promoter Score survey program has stalled, you’re not alone. We often receive inquiries from companies frustrated at the lack of progress made when it comes to prompting leaders across the business to take the necessary actions that will ultimately increase customer loyalty and, with it, the company’s Net Promoter Score.
Many times, we find that these companies engage in the occasional “let’s talk about the Net Promoter survey results” instead of making it an ongoing, year-round push.
When this happens, employees are more likely to view the program as a sporadic undertaking that doesn’t require ongoing attention. This can be the death knell for any voice-of-customer endeavor.
Getting Your Net Promoter Program Back On Track
At the start of your Net Promoter journey, there was likely a lot of passion and excitement surrounding the program.
Hopefully, from the outset, senior leadership, department heads, and front-line personnel were all committed to listening, acting, and sharing. But over time, enthusiasm can wane or other initiatives garner more attention.
What happened? More importantly, what can you do to get the NPS program back on track?
All Departments Should Leverage Customer Insights
As part of your NPS improvement plan, it’s important that every department play a role.
In the survey design phase, invite opinions from business leaders about what kind of customer input would benefit them. You may be able to include a question or two in your survey that garners actionable insights for the development team, Marketing, Sales, etc. You may not be able to accommodate all requests, but undoubtedly your survey response data will include insights every function will find valuable.
After your survey is closed and the analysis is prepared, be sure to look for specific insights that will resonate with each department.
For example, find a way to deliver feedback on the features/functionality of your product with the development team. No doubt the heads of your Sales and Marketing organizations would love any competitive intelligence uncovered, or additional clarity on the ROI your customers experience.
Respondents often share specific feedback on what they like (or don’t) about the people they interact with at your company – useful information for HR and leaders of your service and support teams.
Customer feedback should be used by every department in your company as an input for decision-making. Taking steps to ensure this happens will go a long way to reviving your Net Promoter program.
Set Up an NPS Championship Team
This brings me to our next recommendation – recruit a cross-departmental group of people who are passionate about customer experience and start a Championship Team.
No one person can truly own the customer experience. And, one department shouldn’t own it as well.
Whether you call it an NPS champion team, feedback steering team, or something else entirely, the role of this group is to help you evaluate customer feedback, understand the root cause of customer pain points, and drive change management and process improvement initiatives across the organization.
Get everyone together once a month and work to identify improvements in specific areas that will move the needle on customer loyalty (and your Net Promoter Score).
If you invite the right people, thoughtfully set the agenda for each meeting, and arm them with the rich insights generously shared by your customers, you will be amazed how much can be accomplished.
The group will also help get the word out about the importance of the NPS program and can assist with communicating and educating others in the company.
Quantify the business impact of your Customer Feedback Program
Another way to gain traction for your NPS program is to show how it’s impacting your business. Take steps to quantify the revenue your voice-of-customer program helps to save or create. Show positive momentum in important metrics, such as customer retention or referrals.
If the Customer Success team acts swiftly to save an account identified as “at-risk” by your survey, share the story broadly so employees see the connection between action, customer retention, and revenue.
Be sure your marketing team is apprised of new Promoters so they can target those customers for testimonials or case studies. You should also share this information with sales so they can possibly expand the reference list used to help close new deals.
The more that employees recognize how the Net Promoter program drives revenue and profits, the greater appreciation they will have and the more they will want to help.
Brand the NPS Program Internally
Referring to your program internally as a Net Promoter Survey or Customer Satisfaction program does little to motivate people, which means it could fail to engender passion and inspire results.
For maximum impact, your Net Promoter program needs to be effectively marketed with a branding strategy that’s as thoughtful as the one for your products and services.
This article covers more ideas on the topic.
Cultivating Your Net Promoter Culture
For your Net Promoter program to be successful, the entire organization must row in the same direction. That’s because every employee – whether on the front line or not – plays a part in creating a positive customer experience.
That’s why we believe story-telling and socialization is so important. Ensure the voice of customers is always top-of-mind by discussing customer success during all-staff meetings, team huddles, strategy sessions, and off-sites.
To reinforce the importance of the customer in meetings, many companies have used the “empty chair” philosophy made popular by Amazon.
Essentially, the chair represents the most important person in the room – your customer. Before a decision is made, meeting participants look to the “customer” to consider how the resulting actions will impact the customer experience.
Gather Feedback from Employees
Finally, it’s important to gather input from employees.
Customer experience leaders have mechanisms for systematically collecting feedback from employees. In addition to a traditional employee satisfaction or eNPS survey, some companies also field an Employee Opinion survey. This short survey is intended to solicit very specific feedback, such as obstacles employees face that inhibit them from delivering a memorable service experience.
Providing a safe place for anyone at the company to identify practices or inefficiencies they believe get in their way can uncover quick wins that can really energize your customer experience efforts.
The Benefits of Improving Your NPS Culture
Breathing new life into your NPS program isn’t easy. But if can you shift the focus back on the importance of building a customer-centric culture, you’ll see improvements in customer retention, greater share-of-wallet, increased customer loyalty, and many other benefits in no time.
For a great refresher on NPS best practices, including how to calculate your score, I recommend you download our EBook. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter in the footer below so you can keep up to date on NPS topics and more.
