NB The article is originally produced in Danish
What does it cost to retain a customer versus buying a new one? You already know the answer and understand the importance of customer surveys and having a focus on the customer experience to optimize your business. But you should not just measure on your customers. You need to understand them and meet them where they are. It makes your customers feel valued and their feedback makes you wiser about them and allows for recovery actions before you lose them. In customer service and contact centers, it is therefore essential that the service employees get closer to the customers and are trained in meeting their needs. Net Promoter Score® is a particularly effective tool for creating the best customer experience. Let’s focus on why you should use NPS for customer service.
Single scale or scram
Customer surveys are nothing new. There are many systems that can provide insight into customer satisfaction. But how should your customers respond to a large annual questionnaire they receive 10 months after the last contact with your company? How can you operationally apply a measurement where the customer has pressed a red, yellow or green smiley when you do not know why? And how do you compare smileys with measurements on a scale of 1 to 5?
To measure both loyalty (NPS), customer satisfaction (C-SAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES), you may think you need a comprehensive questionnaire. Or several different measurement methods to cover all areas. But the long questionnaires typically do not get first priority in the customer’s inbox, and it is unmanageable to deal with several measurement methods and scales. At the same time, it is difficult for you to implement different units of measurement in your company’s IT systems and to compare and take action on the feedback you receive. Therefore, you need to measure with single-scale.
Net Promoter Score is the most widely used method of measuring customer loyalty. You measure on one scale from 0-10 in your survey and ask your customer a follow-up question. Most people have time to answer one question and give a causal explanation. Especially when they receive the question right after a point of contact with your company and they are not already moving on in everyday life. You can customize the question according to what you want to measure. And you get concrete feedback on what is current and important. That insight enables customer service and contact centers to optimize the customer experience.
The gold lies in customer service
As a service employee, you are patiently and kindly equipped to encounter a little of everything, while trying to solve customers’ challenges. The problem is solved, but the customer has a negative experience and may never return. Solving a problem for a customer does not necessarily equate to a good customer experience. Maybe the wait in the phone queue was too long. Or maybe the customer had had a bad day and needed a listening ear. You do not know what the customer needs and where you can make improvements if you do not ask.
When you visualize the results of the NPS measurements for customer service, the service employees get an overview of the individual customer. It allows you to act proactively directly in customer contact by taking into account the customer’s previous experiences with your company. And correct any deficiencies. That way, employees can meet each customer’s needs and retain customers who were otherwise on their way away. In addition to the expected ‘churn risk’, the result of an NPS measurement can also be used as feedback to the company about additional sales potential and loyalty and to make happy customers even happier. NPS is an ingenious tool for prioritizing customer follow-up, whether it is about sales or recovery. And customer service becomes not just a device that solves customer problems, but an effective sales channel and the company’s guide to greater customer satisfaction.
Agent training increases your business
The great advantage of NPS for customer service is that it can be used as a tool to train employees to provide not just good customer service, but the right customer service. By combining NPS with the unique method P-GAP, service employees get even closer to customers and can deliver better quality. Based on the NPS score, P-GAP measures and calculates the difference between a customer’s and an employee’s experience in a contact point. Often, bad customer experiences are driven by employee behavior, and data show that employees who are close to the customer, and thus have a low P-GAP, deliver significantly better customer experiences.
With P-GAP you can use the NPS measurements as a process tool. The results of the calculations give employees valuable insights so that they themselves can begin to understand what they are doing well and where they can put in with improvements. The individual agents become more skilled, and the entire department’s performance is optimized. Your company gets a higher NPS score from customers, and the well-being of your employees increases as they can take responsibility for their own development and experience that they are making a difference. It’s a development that will impact your entire business and that you will be able to see on the bottom line.
NPS - a sacred means to achieve the goal
It is not a question of whether you should measure on your customers if you have ambitions to improve the customer experience. The question is which method to use. The Net Promoter Score is the ultimate tool for making, implementing and working operationally with customer surveys. You get a total solution for measuring both NPS, C-SAT and CES across the entire customer journey and thus a tool for strategic business growth. It is a measurement method that is easy to understand and use for all employees, and which creates value for your entire company.
The value of NPS does not come from knowing your NPS score. It comes from knowing what your score really means to your business, understanding your customers and learning how to improve the customer experience. Gradually, more companies have realized that it pays to invest heavily in training the service staff rather than new salespeople. Do yourself the favor of letting contact center metrics be part of the customer experience, thereby creating scalable improvements for the entire business. You do it quickly, easily and efficiently for both you and your customers with NPS for customer service.
