The 5 biggest NPS measurement mistakes
If you already measure the Net Promoter Score of your online store, then congratulations! You are in the best of company. Did you know that founder of Zalando, Robert Gentz, praises NPS in the highest terms? In his words: "When you do a very good job in the area of customer experience, a better job than others, then you have to do relatively little in marketing" (OMR Festival 2018).
But dealing with NPS surveys also has some lurking pitfalls. So that you don’t fall in to these and instead take advantage of your full NPS potential, I have compiled the 5 gravest NPS measuring mistakes:
#1 Asking a lot, but not learning anything
Error number 1 in dealing with NPS? Asking too many questions. The Net Promoter System is based on a single, simple question ("Would you recommend ABC to your friends, family and acquaintances?") and collecting a free text comment. This simplicity is key to its power. Such a survey is quick to answer and makes it easy to compare change over a longer period. Asking too many questions lowers response rates, stresses out customers, and therefore has a negative effect on both customer satisfaction and feedback ratio simultaneously.
#2 There is no quality feedback without free text
The secret of a good NPS strategy is not to use a lot of checkboxes, but rather to collect a lot of comments. Some NPS managers find this hard to deal with, as in their eyes, free text is difficult to evaluate. Analyzing 10,000 customer comments daily? At first that seems impossible. But long gone are the days in which comments have to be evaluated by hand. Thanks to progress in semantic analysis and artificial intelligence, even free text is easy to cluster in to topic areas. Using customer experience platforms e. g. zenloop fully automizes the analysis.
#3 Ignoring unhappy customers has consequences
Customer feedback is not something you can pick and choose - ignoring the feedback of unpleasant or unhappy customers only leads to more frustration. If you ask for opinions, you have to live with criticism - and respond appropriately. It is therefore important to respond to any criticism within 24 hours. If you choose to ignore criticism you can expect at best to lose a customer. At worst, the customer publicly expresses his negative experience about a company which asks for feedback, but then doesn’t take it seriously.
#4 Nobody’s perfect - not using customer comments as a chance to improve is a sign of arrogance
Often, customers have concrete ideas and suggestions on how products and services could be improved. Many companies collect this advice, but give no feedback if and when they make use of the suggested improvement. The reasons for this are manifold. From "The customer has no idea…" up to "That’s the way we’ve always done things around here…" - I’ve heard them all. Customers are right to be annoyed by such behavior — after all, they made the effort to think about specific changes. To be ignored makes at best a company uninterested or chaotic, at worst aloof and arrogant.
#5 NPS as a basis for employee compensation?
Customer satisfaction is team work and depends on many factors - and many of these are not in the power of the individual. Making compensation, Christmas money and bonuses dependent on reaching certain NPS targets is therefore counterproductive. Employees will not see NPS feedback as a positive source of suggestions for improvement, but as a threat to their own salary. Rather, it is important to regularly sit down with all the teams together and initiate changes. Clearly, success can be celebrated, but problems with the NPS should not be linked to sanctions.
These five errors are common causes of NPS not meeting expectations. What mistakes have you made in dealing with NPS? What challenges did you have to overcome? I look forward to discussing what went well (and what didn’t) - after all - no-one’s perfect!