Your Net Promoter Score or NPS is the "one number you need to grow". It's a super simple survey that asks customers just one question: on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the company to a friend or colleague. That's it.
Yet the NPS is a powerful metric. With it, your whole team can improve your customers' experience and find new customers just like your most loyal one. Back when I was working at a marketing agency, I learned a saying for that: Your next best customer is just like your current best customer.
Below, learn how everyone on your team can take action on that Net Promoter score, curtesy of a free eBook from Promoter.io:
One of the biggest misconceptions about NPS is that it is the sole responsibility of the customer success/customer service department. However, EVERY single employee in any given company has an impact on the customer’s experience and can ultimately benefit from their feedback.
Here’s what I mean:
Marketing
For marketers, it’s critical to understand who are the most loyal customers and what about the brand/product drives their advocacy. NPS helps identify market position as well as the key message behind the product, what resonates with prospects, where they win and what messaging they should possibly shy away from to reduce detractors before they even touch the product.
In addition, with enough customer data, marketers can get a very clear picture of what an "ideal" or best customer looks like. NPS will help surface what customer stories or personas should be targeted and focused on. This can be a massive win for many marketing teams who aren’t always sure. It will help them spend more effectively, focus their message and convert at much higher rates (not to mention having customers they know are going to likely be Promoters from the start).
Sales
Promoters are a sales rep’s best friend. They provide insight into the key motivations of future buyers. They help identify the top drivers of their product/service and how best to leverage them. Not to mention their ability to make solid introductions and serve as convincing references for future prospects.
Imagine for a moment the benefit of lead scoring if you can easily take into consideration similar attributes that a lead has in common with existing promoters of your brand/product. Gone are the days of "industry" and "number of employees" being the main data points there.
Sales staff can get a ton of value from detractors as well. They help to prepare for any potential objections and product shortcomings that may be surfaced on sales calls. Additionally, detractors can provide insight into which type of prospect is most likely to drive down life time value and absorb ongoing support resources.
Customer Support/Success
For this department, NPS is all about routine account engagement and proactive identification of issues that may be related to churn, reduction in usage, etc. NPS allows the support/success team to triage issues before they become more significant. In the process, they benefit by often reducing the volume of future support needed. NPS also provides the why in most cases behind a user’s behavior, something pure data analytics do not.
CEOs/Founders/Execs
Used as a KPI, NPS provides one simple metric that impacts the entire company and provides a clear picture to the health of the organization. It’s also highly predictive which gives the company the ability to have a reliable forward-looking metric (if measured and acted on correctly that is).
Product/Engineering
NPS provides feedback that can be associated to brand/product sentiment and broken down clearly into different categories. Since one individual customer can’t necessarily speak louder than others, categorization normalizes the data and removes the issue of the vocal minority driving product direction. More passive users/customers that may not go out of their way to leave feedback, tend to become more engaged with NPS as well.
The insights gained from NPS can provide individual trends/ feedback themes which can be looked at alongside usage and revenue impact to help weigh product decisions. This will often times lead to some very clear drivers of detractors and promoters within the product which helps to identify new opportunities.
Data Science
NPS can drastically enhance data-driven analysis by applying the ‘voice of customer’ into the model. When matched with the verbatim feedback from the customer, data scientists can better align the numbers with the human personas that exist within any given customer database.
With Promoter.io’s integration with Segment, loading NPS data into Redshift or any customer data warehouse for that matter is incredibly simple.
Finance
When tied to an LTV (Lifetime Value), NPS is a great indicator of both future growth and churn. In fact, the in-dashboard calculator provided within Promoter.io can be used to quantify your short and long-term revenue at risk, as well as any potential new revenue.
Simply put, your finance department can drastically improve financial forecasts based on your NPS profile.
HR
If you weren’t already aware, NPS can be used to measure employee satisfaction as well. It’s called eNPS (Employee NPS) and it’s a tool that’s available to any Promoter.io customer. While the wording of the question is changed slightly, the methodology remains the same. HR can use utilize the framework of NPS to measure the satisfaction of their employees, determine the likelihood to recruit new hires and make departmental or company-wide improvements based on candid feedback.
Learn more about the Net Promoter Score or register to download the rest of the free eBook to get started with NPS today.
This was a guest post from Promoter.io. Want to see your work on the Zapier Blog?
