What are the common pitfalls to avoid when communicating NPS results and action plans?

1 Lack of context

When communicating NPS results and action plans, it is essential to provide context in order to explain why your NPS score is what it is, how it compares to your industry or competitors, and what factors influenced it. To ensure that your NPS score is not misleading, confusing, or irrelevant, you should include the following elements in your NPS communication: the sample size and response rate of your survey, the time period and frequency of your survey, the segmentation and distribution of your respondents, the benchmarks and trends of your NPS score, and the drivers and root causes of your NPS score.

2 Lack of clarity

When communicating NPS results and action plans, it’s important to provide clarity. Without it, your NPS communication can be overwhelming, vague, or ambiguous. To ensure clarity, use clear and consistent terminology and definitions. Visual aids and charts can also be used to illustrate your data. Additionally, highlight the main takeaways and action items while avoiding jargon, acronyms, and technical details. Use plain and simple language to communicate your key messages, insights, and recommendations in a concise way.

3 Lack of alignment

When communicating NPS results and action plans, it is important to provide alignment in order to ensure that the communication is relevant, meaningful, and actionable for the audience. Without alignment, your NPS communication may be ignored, misunderstood, or resisted. To provide alignment, consider the purpose and objective of your communication, the audience and stakeholders of your communication, the channel and format of your communication, the tone and style of your communication, as well as any feedback or follow-up needed.

4 Lack of engagement

When communicating NPS results and action plans, it’s essential to include engagement. Without engagement, your NPS communication can be dull, uninviting, or ineffective. To provide engagement, weave stories and examples into your communication, ask questions and invite feedback, praise and recognize your audience, use emotions and humor to create a connection, and include calls to action and incentives. This will help you create a dialogue, relationship, and commitment with your audience.

5 Lack of accountability

When communicating NPS results and action plans, it’s important to provide accountability. This helps you monitor, measure, and improve your performance and actions. Accountability should include the roles and responsibilities of your team and stakeholders, the goals and targets of your NPS actions, the metrics and indicators of your NPS outcomes, the timelines and milestones of your progress, and reviews and reports of your results. Without accountability, your communication can be futile, inconsistent, or untrustworthy.

6 Lack of improvement

A sixth common pitfall to avoid when communicating NPS results and action plans is to present them without any improvement. To provide improvement, you should leverage customer feedback and insights to inform your decisions and actions, use best practices and benchmarks to set your standards and aspirations, experiments and tests to validate assumptions and hypotheses, data and analytics to track performance, and learning and innovation to adapt to changing customer needs. Doing so will demonstrate your value, growth, and innovation to customers.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?