Going Beyond Net Promoter Score
The promise of Net Promoter Score (NPS) is great: A single metric that can both evaluate the success of your brand AND predict growth! It's no wonder that so many brands use it.
On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?
But NPS alone can’t tell you the full story of how your brand is perceived. Much has been written about its limitations. In fact, a sidekick metric was introduced in 2021 called Earned Growth Rate, which seeks to help companies go a step deeper by quantifying the value of customers recommending your brand.
What neither of these numbers tell you is why people would recommend your brand. Do your customers love how your brand makes them feel? Are they grateful that you had their favorite brand of coffee on-hand? Did your customer service team go above and beyond? Or were you the most convenient option that day? The answers to these questions could point you in very different directions when identifying opportunities and pursuing growth.
Tracking a brand health metric is important, but understanding what’s driving (or detracting) from that health is what will ultimately determine brand success. Here are few ways to dimensionalize your NPS and make better decisions about brand health:
Customer Interviews - The quickest way to find out what your customers really think is to ask them. Surveys are good, but conversations are better. Great customer experience programs incorporate a qualitative element on a cyclical basis. Not only does this humanize the data, but it gives internal teams the opportunity to learn more about the mindsets of their customers.
Targeted Surveys - One of the magical things about listening to customers tell you about their experiences is that sometimes – with the right questions – you uncover opportunities that you didn’t know existed. So if you’re doing customer interviews and you’re hearing new needs or pain points starting to emerge, you might want to find out how many other people feel the same way. A short survey to the right audience sample can help you determine how big this new opportunity might be.
Journey Mapping - Every touchpoint a customer has with your brand is an opportunity to influence brand perception - evaluating the customer journey(s) could reveal a weak link in your customer experience. If you haven’t evaluated the paths that customers are taking when engaging with your brand since before COVID, it’s time to take another look. The accelerated rate of behavior change brought on by the pandemic may have made certain touchpoints more important.
Knowing where you stand with customers is important. Investing in research that goes beyond a simple NPS metric can help you make better decisions. We can help.
