Net Promoter Score (NPS) management doesn’t have to be daunting. With time and in incremental phases, it can be a framework for change. What starts as a simple method for collecting feedback can evolve into a process that allows you to provide stakeholders with actionable insights. By sticking to the 8 principles below, you can create an NPS management plan that fits your needs and garners the quality feedback required to improve a brand.
NPS Management Step 1: Understand the Customer Journey
Take the time to understand your own customer journey, key touchpoints, or moments of truth. Use this as a framework for determining how to measure the overall experience and where it is appropriate and most effective to assess the likelihood to recommend.
NPS Management Step 2: Design the Right Feedback Collection Strategy
This requires attention to things like audience segmentation, customer maturity, and market segmentation. It’s also important to consider the effectiveness of the delivery channel, which impacts response rates. One recommendation is to employ frequent collection cycles with suppression rules to avoid respondent fatigue. This is where having real-time or in-app feedback collection methods can be extremely beneficial.
NPS Management Step 3: Make the Feedback Actionable
The insights should not only be insightful at the front lines but also for senior leadership who can influence changes in policies and procedures. Determine the best method for pushing the feedback into respective channels. This will enable you to get the desired outcomes such as service recovery for transactional engagements or changes in products, programs, or processes for more strategic improvements.
NPS Management Step 4: Respond to Customers
There are many different approaches to this, which is why it’s also a great place to get fun and creative about how you follow up on customer feedback whether that’s directly with the respondent or en masse through newsletters, social media, or the like. This lets your customers know their feedback is being listened to and acted on and increases the likelihood they’ll continue to share it. It’s also an excellent way to improve customer empathy in the business by getting everyone involved in the activity, from senior leadership through front-line employees.
NPS Management Step 5: Strive for Real Insights
In the early stages of rolling out an NPS management, closing the loop and disseminating verbatim comments can build customer empathy and awareness. This is a great start if it isn’t already part of the culture. To avoid internal NPS fatigue and disinterest over time, the goal of analysis should be to uncover key customer experience drivers, response and behavior patterns and themes, and links to profitability. The analysis should also mirror program maturity. The depth of insights will likely be pretty basic early on, but over time the analysis can become more robust. Many customer experience management platforms have analysis capabilities built in. For those not using those platforms, beg, borrow, steal, or outsource the analyst resources.
NPS Management Step 6: Develop an Action Plan
Once you’ve determined key issues and themes shaping the customer experience, engage managers and subject matter experts in a cross-functional dialogue to determine the root cause of the issues and determine strategies for improvement. This activity alone helps to break down departmental silos, increases organizational awareness, and creates customer experience advocates across the business. What’s just as important is having varying perspectives weighing in on the discussion. It adds depth and breadth to understanding the issues and resulting recommendations.
NPS Management Step 7: Commit to a Plan
Driving real improvements often requires some level of investment in the form of resources and/or funding. While changes to policy or process don’t always involve additional people or budget, they do require a change management effort to ensure they are effectively adopted throughout the business. Executive sponsorship for such a change effort is critical. Leverage the power of the cross-functional process to make your case to leadership for the necessary investments, and get leadership bought in and supporting the plan however necessary.
NPS Management Step 8: Measure and Adjust
Establish a way to keep track of improvement targets, and regularly measure progress. One point of caution here: It’s not always possible to find a direct linkage between improvement X and resulting changes in the NPS score. It would be great if that were the case, but this is where it’s essential to focus on the system over the score. In the end, the goal is to improve customer engagement and experience. Just because that’s not showing up in the score doesn’t mean it’s not impactful or essential. Cycle through steps 6 and 7 regularly and adjust improvement strategies as needed.
A Custom NPS Management Plan for Your Brand
While there are definitely fundamentals to adhere to, creating an NPS management structure is also a fun and powerful position to be in for anyone on your team. Treat the program as a space to get imaginative about increasing customer empathy, engaging your customers, and being a change agent.
