NPS has proven to be the most common metric for measuring customer loyalty since its introduction in 2003 by Bain & Company and SatMetrix.  Once a company starts measuring it, the natural question is how to improve it – especially when compensation is tied to the measurement target.  Many companies try a variety of service improvement projects across multiple departments to impact their NPS and wait until the next annual cycle to see the result. 

Unfortunately, global satisfaction and loyalty scores have dropped across most industries, and three key reasons that lead to a lack of improvement include:

• Most NPS improvement programs aren’t designed to impact the factors that customers care about most – instead they are focused on the areas the company can address easily
• Most NPS improvement programs are not designed to impact the overall customer experience – just individual components
• Most NPS improvement programs are not coordinated across departments to drive the right impact and measure the result

When faced with the challenge to impact NPS scores – the real challenge is to improve the customer experience in such a way that customers are more likely to recommend the company.  That begins with customer discovery – and customer journey research & mapping is the best place to start this discovery.

3 key insights from Customer Journey research that will impact your NPS results:

• End-to-End Journey Visibility – knowing what the customer is experiencing from start to finish gives everyone in the company the visibility and context for every change needed to impact the experience. Each person can act as part of a coordinated team – instead of lone rangers – and impact the overall experience – not just a single touchpoint or transaction.

• Customer Pain Points and Priorities – Knowing the entire set of pain points that a customer experiences – and the priority of the different pain points in different situations – allows company leaders to make fast decisions on what to fix next – and empowers employees to make on-the-spot decisions easily.

• Customer Loyalty Tracking research – monitoring customer loyalty from one year to the next and accounting for the customer awareness of improvement program deployment and impact helps understand where progress is being made – or not made. This information allows for a direct linkage to NPS impact. 

Leading companies are identifying these types of impacts from their customer journey research – and turning them into real business results:

• NPS increases of 30-50 points
• Revenue growth of 30% – 50%
• Retention improvements of 30 points
• Customer acquisition and customer servicing cost reductions of 40% or more

Call 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com for a free consultation on this topic.

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Management firm with extensive experience in B2C and B2B journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.