The NPS is out, Voice of Customer is In.
Since 2003, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has helped businesses measure customer loyalty and satisfaction through one simple question — how likely it is that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague? That insight used to be helpful. As the world rapidly changes, your business benchmarks and customer feedback programs need to change with it. People today are not like people 14 years ago when the NPS was first introduced. These days’ consumers have a lot more options, direct access to more products and services, multiple social platforms to provide public complaints, and most importantly, an endless supply of innovative new technology that is highly efficient and cheaper. Understanding the WHY behind a customer’s attitude and behavior towards your company is much more important than understanding how loyal or satisfied a customer is.
The real problem with the Net Promoter Score is that it is situation-focused. It is monitoring very specific business objectives about a point in time. As a result, the feedback fit neatly into a box of what you know you want to learn and line up with your company’s pre-determined metrics. If you’re only collecting data about what you know you want to hear and measure, you miss all of the gaps and opportunities in your customers experience you don’t know exist. You miss the ability to truly understand why and how your customers’ think and behave.
In today’s business environment, any customer feedback strategy that only focuses on key performance indicators or tracks situational success metrics is backwards looking and outdated. The Net Promoter Score, by itself, is irrelevant in a marketplace where superior products and valuable services are everywhere. If you want to remain competitive, your feedback data should make you smarter and help you actively improve your products and services. To do this, you need large volumes of customer experience data.
At Wyzerr, we focus on collecting and analyzing customer experience data through a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. While the NPS has 1 standard question, Wyzerr’s Voice of the Customer index has 17 standard questions, can be completed in under 60 seconds, and generates a wide range of actionable insights for marketing, product development, and sales teams. Some things we incorporate into Wyzerr’s VoC program can be applied to other VoC programs as well:
- It’s always on. Customers can provide you feedback regardless of whether or not they made a purchase from you. The survey is ongoing and engages customers at different points of their customer journey, not just post-sale.
- Consisting of fluid objectives. While there are specific objectives that you may want to learn about, you should be able to uncover other objectives you didn’t anticipate.
- Flexible enough to allow customers to tell you what they want to tell you, versus what you want to hear, which creates a range of high-level insights.
