How to Delight Customers with Touchpoint NPS?

Alyona Medelyan, Co-Founder and CEO, Thematic Ltd

Alyona Medelyan, Co-Founder and CEO, Thematic Ltd

Touchpoint NPS Innovations

Transactional Net Promoter Score surveys, also called TouchpointNPS, are becoming a popular practice for contact centers. Such surveys evaluate the work of the customer care team, measure the company's overall performance and collect valuable customer feedback. If you haven't implemented TouchpointNPS, this article will provide an introduction to what's possible. If you have, this article will help you get the most out of this practice.

Why NPS surveys are 'the new black'?

Net Promoter Score (or NPS), is a popular metric for measuring company performance. People answer a simple question: "On a zero-to-10 scale, how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or a colleague?" Their answers turn them into Promoters, people who actively promote the company; Detractors, people who may actively detract; and Passives, who don’t do either. NPS equals the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. While some criticize NPS, studies after studies show that customer loyalty and company revenue are tied to this one metric, and not surprisingly, NPS has become ‘the new black' in customer experience and market research. Here is the Google Trends graph for "net promoter score" showing its growing popularity.

How can a company improve its NPS?

There is no simple recipe about how to improve your NPS score. While small agile companies have the luxury of being able to call up each customer, large enterprises collect hundreds or thousands of responses weekly and simply do not have the luxury of personal attention. Typically they would ask: Why did you give us this score? What impressed you? What can we improve? Making sense of answers to these open-ended questions is not easy, but possible: through innovative technology and clever processes.

Touchpoint NPS: What not to do!

Often, a customer care team simply pulls the responses from the survey tool and contacts as many Detractors as they can, in an attempt to ‘put out the fire’. But, is this really the best use of their time? We see many cases where a lack of strategy for Touchpoint NPS leads to wastage of time: a Detractor has already churned, the problem was resolved in the meantime, and a Detractor is actually a Promoter expressing disappointment (or the reverse), or the customer care team is the wrong point of contact. Want to make the most out of TouchpointNPS? Put together a strategy, measure its effectiveness over time, make tweaks, repeat.

Three areas of innovation in TouchpointNPS

We've worked with dozens of companies who use TouchpointNPS and found that these innovative ideas helped them to get the most out of NPS feedback.

1. Automatically share customer feedback with relevant parts of the business.

Customers will comment on different aspects of the service they received. For example, when making an insurance claim, a customer may have to deal with an automated system to send through the claim, the claim assessor, and various suppliers. In the survey, a customer will explain what they liked and what they didn't like. By using text analytics, themes related to each part of the business can be extracted, and the comments can be auto-forwarded to the right department.

2. Figure out which issues affect the NPS and what matters to core customers.

Rises and falls in NPS over time can be correlated with the rises and falls in frequencies of themes in people’s comments. People will always complain about some things, but only certain issues truly matter to the value your business provides. Once customers’ answers are coded with themes using text analytics, statistical analysis can find those themes that are highly correlated with NPS. These are the areas that are the most important to fix!

Taking this one step further, it is possible to look closely at NPS responses from specific customer segments. Not all customers are equal. If you look at loyal and high-value customers, which issues matter most to them? Themes in comments identified using text analytics and then represented using appropriate visualizations can help answer these questions.

Similarly, if you have multiple locations or multiple customer care representatives with particularly low or particularly high NPS, a combination of text analytics and statistics can help figure out what's so different about them.

3. Figure out which customers will benefit from personal attention most.

The ultimate goal is to turn Passives (if not Detractors) into Promoters. Immediate attention, showing them that you care, and positively surprising them in some way is the key, but which customers should you focus on? Here is what we found works as a general strategy:

First, focus on themes that you can easily fix
Next, focus on themes that are highly correlated with NPS
In addition, focus on customers that are the most unhappy, but instead of using the NPS category, look at their sentiment score which text analytics systems can determine automatically and which represents their emotional state

Remember, that collecting data is just the first step. Innovative technology is simply a component. Being clever about how you combine your data with technology is the real key.