How to measure your business’s net promoter score
The net promoter score is a key measure of how well a business is performing. There are many different metrics that business owners use to gauge how well their business is performing in certain key areas. In the case of the net promoter score, the area being assessed is the number of loyal and long-term customers.
This means that the net promoter score is an invaluable indication of the quality of the experience that your customers are having. Obviously, a more loyal customer is going to be a more satisfied one. You aren’t going to score repeat business from those who don’t dig your business. This information is usually gathered from a survey, although this isn’t necessarily going to be the case.
The essence of a net promoter score boils down to how likely a customer is to recommend your business to others? By aggregating this information from a large number of customers, you can gain valuable insight into how many loyal and lifelong customers you have accumulated.
Although the data that you gather will ultimately be boiled down to this single digit figure, simply asking that one question tends to produce some very unreliable results. It, therefore, helps to know what it is that the pros do to calculate a net promoter score that is reflective of the actual health of a business.
Designing a survey
When establishing a net promoter score, the survey that you use to gather the raw data will have a big impact on the reliability of the final figure you obtain. It can be tempting to spend a tremendous amount of time beforehand examining all the different options for survey types in detail. Many times, in business it is prudent to be diligent and to take things slowly, making certain of the course of action you are considering before you commit yourself to it.
However, for a business that is uncertain about how successful they are at retaining customers, or for a business that is undertaking this exercise in response to a crisis in performance, speed is of the essence. The slower you move in crafting and conducting your survey, the more money you will be spending and losing.
This doesn’t mean that planning is a waste of time. You always want to enter into business decisions having done your due diligence and being certain of yourself. The middle ground here is to get a survey out as quickly as you can, then refine and improve it as you progress through the process.
Relationship vs transactional
Broadly speaking, the types of survey used to collect data for determining an employee net promoter score falls into two types. The first of these is the relationship survey. This is the survey used to gauge how the customer feels about a company or brand. Customers are asked a series of questions, which are designed to provide the surveyor with a well-rounded picture of how the customer feels, what their general level of satisfaction with the business is, and whether they are likely to continue to maintain a relationship with the company in the future. To be most effective, relationship surveys need to be conducted at regular intervals.
Transactional surveys, on the other hand, are designed to instead ascertain how the customer feels about a specific transaction or interaction they have had with the company. Rather than measuring customer loyalty, this is designed to gauge the customer’s satisfaction with a very specific element of the business operations.
The most successful net promoter campaigns make use of both types of survey, and with time and experience, you will find yourself able to instinctively choose the right tool for the task at hand. By making use of both survey types, you will be able to ascertain both the general perception and loyalty that customers feel towards your brand and how effective individual processes are at fostering long-term loyalty in customers.
What should you ask?
Asking your customers to provide you with a score, on a scale of 0 to 10, of how they feel about your business and specific aspects of it will give you plenty of data to work with. By asking lots of customers and aggregating the information, you can build a complete picture. However, this number alone isn’t going to be of much use to you. You need to know not only how your customers feel, but why they feel that way. As well as asking them for their score, also ask them a series of questions which will get to the bottom of why they scored you the way they did.
A net promoter score is a valuable metric for any business that is looking to accurately judge how their customers feel about them. In designing a survey to ascertain this information, consider what questions you can ask to really get to the heart of how they feel and why.
