Good advice and experience for working with NPS

Most have quite a lot of focus on the work of reducing the number of dissatisfied customers, i.e. those who score 0-6 in the NPS measurements.

I regard this almost as a matter of course that one does. But it is actually at least as interesting to work on improving customer satisfaction at the high end of the scale, i.e. to lift the customers who today score 7-8 up to score 9-10, and this is what much of my advice focuses on.

There is a really good business case in this lift. Among other things studies done by the Temkins Group shows for e.g. the car industry, that when they ask how many times a customer HAS RECOMMENDED the company to others, then the customers who have scored 7-8 have recommended the company on average 2.9 times. Customers who have scored 9-10 have recommended the company 5.0 times, i.e. approx. 60% more recommendations when satisfaction is lifted from 7-8 to 9-10.

Introduce a common language

As a consequence of the above mentioned business case, and the big difference between whether the customers are satisfied or very satisfied, I recommend that you introduce a common language that can help describe what behavior employees should have when meeting with customers. The common language is:

• 3’s behavior = the behavior that leads to customers being dissatisfied and scores 0-6. And in this way, the unwanted behavior is described
• 8’s behavior = the behavior that leads to customers being satisfied and scoring 7-8
• 10’s behavior = the behavior that leads to customers being very satisfied and scoring 9-10.

The particularly important thing is to get the employees to be able to SEE the difference between an 8 behavior and a 10 behavior, and very often it is actually not that much that is needed for the customer experience to be lifted from an 8 experience to a 10 experience, with consequent higher satisfaction and a significantly higher level of ambassadorship with the customers.

Describe the difference between an 8's behavior and a 10's behavior in the entire "Customer journey"

You can advantageously describe the difference between an 8’s behavior and a 10’s behavior throughout the customer journey in all the contact points that customers have with the company, and in this way it is also much easier to both train existing employees and onboard new employees, to understand how little is actually needed to lift the customer experience from an 8 to a 10.

Be sure that you catch as many of the dissatisfied customers as possible

Although I recommend that you place a strong focus on lifting the satisfied customers up into the category of VERY SATISFIED CUSTOMERS, it is nevertheless important that you also really focus on getting input from the dissatisfied customers, including also having systems and measurements, that can help to capture the dissatisfied customers who may not have complained. One of the phrases and experiences I like is the following:

“Every time there is one customer who complains, there are 26 other customers who are ALSO dissatisfied but who DO NOT COMPLAIN”

After all, it is about getting general learning about what the customers are dissatisfied with, but the NPS measurements can also be used for 1:1 follow-up on the customers who are dissatisfied and thus you can do “operation customer rescue”.