9 Ways Businesses Are Screwing Up NPS
According to Bain & Company, leaders in customer loyalty achieve revenue growth of more than twice the market rate and enjoy, on average, a roughly 15% cost advantage over their competitors.
Sounds pretty good—but how do you get there?
I recently had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with Phil Sager from Bain & Company. Bain, as you know, invented the concept of Net Promoter® more than a decade ago to help business leaders gauge the loyalty of customer relationships. NPS has since evolved from a score to a management system, and has gained much-deserved popularity over the years.
Still, while many businesses start on the NPS journey, few of them actually succeed in becoming leaders in customer loyalty. Here are nine of the most common pitfalls, in no particular order, according to Bain:
1. The leadership team is not aligned and not committed.
It’s trendy to say you focus on customer experience, but often “implementation” is a fuzzy realm living in somebody else’s responsibility.
2. Metrics are not reliable, sufficient, nor trusted.
A whopping 88% of companies that are struggling to achieve success with their Net Promoter System do not have confidence in the reliability of their NPS data.
3. The case for change—head and heart—is missing.
The data will bring the “head,” but it’s up to you CX advocates to bring the “heart” by being able to tell compelling stories that inspire people to change and buy into NPS.
4. NPS is not tailored to day-to-day routines.
Beware of treating NPS as “more work” instead of “how we work.”
5. You focus on the score instead of behaviors.
This has been the anthem of Pearl-Plaza for years.
6. Incentives are linked to customer feedback too early.
If you tie compensation directly to your NPS, you will start polluting the quality of your data. Focus instead on outcome metrics.
7. There is a failure to prioritize and focus on initiatives to “move the needle.”
Roughly 70% of companies struggling to succeed with NPS do not have a systematic process to identify and act on initiatives. Remember, it’s what you do with the data that counts.
8. There is insufficient early momentum.
It’s important to establish trust early through training, support, and quick wins.
9. You’re not measuring or managing critical experiences with a cross-functional episodic lens.
In order to effectively design end-to-end experiences, Bain suggests creating owners who can own a specific experience from the top of the purchase funnel down to the difficult problem-resolution call when something goes wrong.
The root causes of most of these pitfalls are broken data, frontline learning issues, not fixing the executive-level obstacles, or not planning sufficiently for the journey. If you really want to tackle NPS, start there.
Better yet, start with watching the full webinar here.
