The Net Promoter Score (NPS) system is well-liked and preferred by researchers, for it translates numerous customer metrics into one to measure customer experience (CX) success. It is the answer to your question ‘Considering your complete experience with our organization, how likely are you to recommend our products or services to your friends and colleagues?’
The responses to above question determines your NPS score. Researchers use NPS surveys to calculate Net Promoter Score for organizations regularly.
Based on their answers, your customers are divided into three buckets – promoters, passives, and detractors.
Promoters: These are happy customers that rated you 9 or 10 for NPS. This customer base is loyal and is happy with your services. They are your brand advocates and will likely recommend your organization to family, friends, and colleagues.
Passives: These are the customers that rated you 7 or 8 for NPS. Essentially they like your brand and are satisfied but will switch to your competitors on the opportunity. They are neutral; they will not give negative feedback about bad customer experience but won’t promote it either.
Detractors: These are the customers that rated you 6 or below on the NPS question. They are not happy with your products or services and share bad experiences with others by word of mouth. They are most likely not to purchase from you again and discourage others as well.
Learn more: How to calculate NPS
What is a bad Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
A bad Net Promoter Score (NPS) indicates you have a higher number of detractors than promoters. Your customers are not happy with your brand as a whole, and customer experience, and customer satisfaction levels are low. They will switch to your competitors as soon as they find a better option.
Consider you are an organization working in the software industry, and the industry average NPS is 34+. If your NPS score is between 30 to 40, you have a good NPS score. You may be far away from the leaders with scores such as 55, 60, etc. But if your score is 25 or even below, it’s considered as bad NPS score.
You need to convert your detractors into promoters. Improving and benchmarking against a good Net Promoter Score should be a high priority for you.
Improve your Bad Net Promoter Score (NPS) with these simple steps
Improving your NPS is crucial to turn your detractors and passives into promoters. Companies with bad NPS scores should apply below tried and tested ways to boost your score.
1. Prompt follow-up
Following-up on customer feedback is crucial to address any concerns and boost your NPS score. Customer-centric organizations follow-up on customer feedback promptly to ensure a rich customer experience. Your swift responsiveness will help diffuse any concerns or grievances your customers may have. Closing the feedback loop is essential, and it shows your commitment to delivering a rich customer experience and ensuring your customers are satisfied. Gather insights from your closed-loop conversations and use it to address any recurring issues faced by customers.
Your customers will have many positive experiences interacting with your brand at several touchpoints in the customer journey. Find ways to let them share those experiences easily. Capitalize on that, or it will be a lost opportunity, for we know people can be lazy. Making it simple for them to share their experiences is part of the experience too. Encourage them to promote your brand, offer them incentives to do so on social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Also, look for other websites that your customers or potential customers like to visit and leverage those platforms. Having more engagements with your customers will result in more shares of their positive experiences. Keep them engaged via newsletters, fun contests, coupons, etc.
3. Discourage silos
Having to deal with multiple individuals or departments is off-putting and cumbersome for customers. Ensure your employees are well trained and equipped to solve customer queries outside of their department or expertise. Do this via training sessions, update their systems, and open communication channels dedicated to customer satisfaction and experience. Customers will appreciate not having been bounced from department to department in search of answers.
4. Exceed customer expectations
Focusing on your NPS score is fine but direct your attention and efforts towards exceeding your customers’ expectations. Use your NPS score to measure the gap between customer expectations, customer service, and customer experience. Exceeding customer expectations will help deliver positive experiences, which will help boost your NPS scores, garner advocates for your brand and boost customer loyalty.
5. Build communities
Customer feedback, good or bad, is essential for brands to improve their processes, operations, and offerings. Setting up communities or feedback panels will help you gather feedback necessary to improve your NPS score and CX. Even if your customers are happy with you, you can still ask for inputs to do things better or differently.
6. Build NPS champions
Rich customer experience and customer satisfaction are not the responsibility of customer-facing teams only. It is imperative that all employees are on the same page, and everybody has access to your NPS reports and scores. You would not want your NPS score to be hampered by a bad interaction with somebody in the accounts department, and everybody else is oblivious to that fact. Build internal NPS champions in your departments, let them oversee and be responsible for processes and training pertaining to NPS.
7. Monitor your NPS
Getting a good score is not enough. Your efforts might be paying off, your strategies might be getting you results, but you cannot stop there. You have to work towards improving your score continually. Keep checking up on your percentage of promoters, detractors, and passives and find ways to keep your promoters happy and convert your passives and detractors.
