Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your
Net Promoter® Program A CEO’s Guide
Avoiding Rookie Mistakes
So you have decided the Net
Promoter® program is the tool
for you, but as you move into
uncharted territory for you
and your company, you are
afraid of what kind of
headaches this may bring and
how it may fail to deliver the
results you expected.
There are still many “sand-traps”
that companies consistently fall
into, even after running an NPS
program for years. So with 10
years experience in helping
companies get better results
from customer feedback we’d
like to share some actionable
tips to help you prevent these
pitfalls.
#1 Very low response rate
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Problem: You are not getting enough feedback to
give sensible answers (statistical significance!). This
gives NPS naysayers an easy reason to shoot you
down.
Low response rates should not be the case with Net
Promoter, with NPS users typically aiming for response
rates of 25 – 50% of your customers. This is not
unrealistic, even with the use of email (email is definitely
not dead). If you follow the right steps, this is what you
can expect.
Actively survey all your clients at least once a year,
maybe more. Make it part of the way you do business.
However, beware that you are not sending the same
customer too many surveys. Once or twice a year is
enough.
B2C Solution:
In order to gather continual data throughout the
year, survey immediately after a interaction (support
call, purchase, etc.). Don’t wait too long. Customers
are much more likely to engage because you are still
at the forefront of their mind and they still care
about the transaction that just took place. To give
yourself a break, find a way to automate this process
- it will kill you otherwise.
B2B Solution:
Not every one of your clients is the same. Use the
80/20 rule to figure out which big clients you
especially need to focus on (which 20% of clients
bring in 80% of revenue?). These clients are the
heart that keeps the blood pumping through your
business, so make sure you get +80% of them to
respond (at least one response in each of these). You
can get your account managers to recruit key
influencers to take part in the survey.
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Don't forget to send out reminder emails. Two
reminders often work very well. Lastly, thank them for
the help, share the results and the actions you will
take based on the feedback. This lets them know their
feedback is valued and will improve response rates in
the future.
Although a low response rate can be seen as an NPS
issue - it is more often than not a “CRM problem”.
Ensure that your customer database is up to date with
the correct email address. You’d be surprised how
outdated customer data is at most companies.
Next, set yourself up for a high response rate by
letting your customers know that you will survey them.
In this invitation email, make it clear why you'd like to
receive feedback and what’s in it for them.
When you actually send the survey, you can also
include an invitation video of your CEO explaining
how much feedback is appreciated. Be creative here.
Plus, if your survey is short (see rookie mistake #2),
your customer will be happy to respond.
Side note: Make your survey mobile compatible - 45%
of your customers will fill out the survey on a mobile
device.
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
#2 Too many questions in the survey
Problem: “Wow – it’s great to get customer feedback
but I want to know much more! What does the customer
think about X, Y, Z? How much can one extra question
hurt right?”
Well, every question you add to the survey makes it more
complex to understand the answers. Example: You ask
customers to rate “overall service”, “customer service”,
“after sales support” etc. on a scale of 0 to 10. Customers
not only struggle to answer these honestly but you are
also left with the task of having to interpret them. How do
you decide which one needs your priority, the “10” on
question 1 or the “2” on question 3?
Each page you add to a survey makes response drop off
10 – 20%, while many that start will not finish due to the
length. This all ties back as well to Rookie Mistake #1.
Solution:
Just use one question for rating. The Net Promoter scale
“Would you recommend” is a very good proxy for
everything else (Fred Reichheld writes about the science
of this in his book “The Ultimate Question”). Tell everyone
else in the business you need nothing else (and get them
to read the book!)
Include a simple follow-up question, like “What is the reason
for giving that score?” and provide a handful of possible
reasons. As such, categorize answers manually if you can (or
use some simple techniques like CustomerGauge L1-L2
boxes to help tag issues “what you most liked/disliked”).
By taking this approach, you look past the averages and
look for the highs and lows. This will help identify the key
drivers to your customer’s (dis)satisfaction and prioritize your
next improvements.
Spread these reasons around the business for the relevant
people to read. Also, provide a single comment box so
customers can answer freely. Read all the comments –
don’t get a machine to analyze them.
Remember, most people respond on a mobile. So
make it simple for them to answer, with thumb-friendly
buttons and selections.
Don’t forget to add an opportunity to follow up: ask
customers if they need more help. Get on the phone
and ask follow up questions, this way you can keep
your surveys extremely short and leave the more
probing questions for the phone. Don’t leave relation-
ship issues to a survey.
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
#3 Making NPS just one person’s responsibility
Problem: You put one person in charge of NPS. It’s that
person’s project to address the issues, and their metric to
improve!
One person? If the program would be only about the logistics
– making sure surveys go out, response is adequate,
close-loops, and organizing metrics - you could leave it up to
that one person. And we do recommend one person having
the responsibility of doing all this (let’s call him/her the
“Customer Success” or “Customer Retention” officer).
But NPS is a company project. Carrying out the survey and
organizing metrics can be the job of one person, but using
those findings for customer experience improvement has to
be a company wide focus.
Net Promoter only works if both managers and staff buy-in to
it. You need to direct issues to managers that are responsi-
ble to change things. And they can best do it by giving
comments to front-line workers and empowering them to fix
customer issues.
Solution:
The best way to get the whole company behind it, is
engaging more people in the project, do this then by
creating a few NPS champions in each team. Make a
cross-functional team (a great opportunity to recognize
junior team members) and meet regularly
(ideally every 2 weeks) to report what has been learnt.
While getting the whole company involved is critical, a focus
from top-level executives is paramount. At least once a
month, look at NPS from the CXO level. Your Customer
Success officer will be the customer’s advocate in these
meetings.
Since NPS really is about making continual improvements
across the company, without top-level buy-in, not much will
change. Have a look at “Kaizen”, or Six-Sigma to get some
inspiration on how to actually implement the changes.
Spreading the word also helps to engage people. Make sure
you invest in a tool that can send out regular reports, and
use digital displays to show customer comments and scores
throughout the business. Put some posters up. Consider it a
good milestone for the project.
Remember your goal is to make the company customer
focused!
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
#4 Not following up
Problem: You have a mountain of customer feedback.
You just analyzed it. It’s now a month old, and you have
real customer issues that need to be solved. What to do?
We find this quite often in first-time NPS campaigns:
Companies have not done a survey in while, so to
compensate they survey all their customers in one go.
Expectantly, the response is too much for the salespeople or
other account managers to follow up. By the time they get
around to responding to the feedback, it’s too stale to deal
with. Speed is of the essence here.
When time passes, it usually gets quietly
forgotten by the salespeople and the company - but not by
customers. While added to this is that in many cases, the
company does exactly the same thing again in 12 months.
That’s the cause of some poor customer experience right
there!
Solution:
The first step is easy. Don’t send all the surveys at once.
Stagger them throughout the year. With the right tools you
can send out continually, randomize the sending, or have
it sent out after an interaction such as a purchase or call
center enquiry – that way you can manage the input each
week.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Step number two (see Mistake #3): Make sure you have a
team assigned to deal with responding to customers – do
not create it as a job that will be addressed by a team “when
they have the time.” Also, imagine the implications on com-
pany strategy when VP’s and directors call customers back
and hear about customer’s pain directly from the source.
In the third step you measure the time it takes to respond to
a customer issue (and close it). We call this closing the loop.
While in this technological age it is a must to take
advantage of the wealth of data you possess about your
customers, and have your NPS program integrated in your
CRM system – that will help salespeople or agents refer to
feedback (positive or negative) in future calls.
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
#5 Forgetting what you learned last time
Problem: You can’t find the results of last years survey – it
was on an Excel spreadsheet that you can’t find – and
which version was it anyway? So now you can’t tell what
the respondents said, who answered, or what the score
was.
Unless you have a robust system to measure
continuously, it’s easy to lose track. But the best improve-
ments are made by continually tracking metrics and feed-
back – each month and quarter. Tracking the score of the
customer over time and checking if feedback holds you
accountable to actually improve on what was suggested.
Solution:
Invest in a system that keeps track of responses, and
can show you trends – your NPS score and time to
solve. Make sure you understand what the drivers of
pain are – do they change over time?
Use what you have learnt to decide which part of the
business has seen improved scores and how this can be
turned into best practice. We have clients that have 5
years of data, and they use this to understand the ROI
impact of changes. Also, whatever you do, value your
historical data - if you change systems, make sure you
can import data from one to another.
Last but not least: be consistent. Don’t change the
structure of the survey too much, keep it simple, and
again this is a great reason to use a very slim Net
Promoter survey.
201520132012
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
#6 Not remembering your manners
Problem: After diligently surveying customers, chasing
them and reminding them, from the customer point of
view: crickets chirping in the night - nothing happens.
Customers await a response on what you learned but you
have no plan or resources to do this.
99% of the time companies neglect customers after a survey.
Even when customers spend 20 minutes filling in a form, it’s
very rare for a “thank you” to be sent. But if you value your
customers’ time, think about this as $50 worth of
consultancy given from them to you, for free. So a thank you
is the least you can do!
Solution:
After collecting responses (say once a month) sit with your
NPS team and agree what the key points are that you
learned from customers in this period. Take this
information and summarize what you will do with it. Once
that is done, you communicate back to the customers who
responded (find a tool to do that in an easy way).
First thank them for their input and explain how useful it is.
Especially thank your “top promoters” – and see what you
can do to get them to promote you or to continue to buy
(and to buy more from you). Think of incentives that actually
would make them want to refer your company or product to
other people. Nobody likes to feel pressured into doing
something.
Secondly, give some detail about what you learned to actu-
ally show and share what changes you have made. This
shows you really value their feedback and are
working hard to serve the customer better. Pick about three
bullet points: usually something you have already
implemented as a result of feedback, something you will do,
and something to consider.
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Finally, say that you are looking forward to hearing
from them again. Here is an example:
Hi {Customer Name},
Thank you for sharing your feedback with us.
Your feedback really helps us to structure our business
around serving you better.
What did we learn from all the feedback we received?
We found that some packages arrived damaged (as you
mentioned too). So starting next month, we are replacing
the material currently used with a stronger material.
We are looking forward to receiving more feedback from
you in the future!
Kind regards,
{Your name}
CEO of {Company Name}
The result is that you’ll improve your response rate the
next time you send out your survey (see mistake #1).
But more importantly, you make your customers feel
that their time was valued and could potentially turn
some of those detractors into promoters over time.
So please, don’t forget your manners!
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Summary
- Low response rates, fix this with just a few short tweaks.
- Short surveys are the key to boosting response-rates.
- Share the load of NPS, putting the weight of NPS on just one person’s shoulders will bring about disaster.
- Not responding quickly – show you care by doing just the opposite through a well managed feedback system.
- Not remembering what you learnt means you have nothing to launch off from next time.
- Don’t forget to show your customers you appreciate them by sending them your thanks.
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.
#6
#5
#4
#3
#2
#1
CustomerGauge helps clients improve customer
experiences. The system automatically collects,
measures and analyses customer feedback and has
close-loop tools to retain customers better and
reduce churn. All based on the industry standard
metric Net Promoter System.
Want to learn more?
Connect with us and visit CustomerGauge.com for
more related content.
Six Rookie Mistakes to avoid in your Net Promoter® Program - A CEO’S Guide
About CustomerGauge
https://twitter.com/customergauge
https://www.linkedin.com/customergauge
https://customergauge.com