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World-class athletes rely on it. Accomplished artists and musicians thrive on it. Your favorite brands are market leaders because of it. The “it” is feedback. And whether that feedback comes from coaches, critics, audience members or customers, it’s critical for positive change and growth. Businesses across the world are using the Net Promoter System (NPS) as the standard for gathering customer feedback. And many of your favorite leading companies are invited to join an exclusive circle, the NPS Loyalty Forum, led by Bain and Co., to knowledge-share and stay ahead of trends.
Having been a member since 2013, I’m always struck by how each of the member companies leverage NPS within their businesses. While we each represent different industries, there are key things we all do to in our quest to become loved by our customers.
- Polish How You Deliver Services
Holistic measurements of your relationship with a customer are critical. But it’s just as critical to get feedback at important moments in a customer’s lifecycle and on how you’re delivering services — from interactions a customer has to resolve a particular issue to how well a company can get a customer set up and running with their services.
Transactional and episodic NPS are important tools to incorporate into your overall NPS ecosystem. They provide you with details on how you’re doing during a particular time and enable you to improve your customer’s journey. At Genesys, our leadership teams for each transactional measured area meet up. During this time, they unpack and analyze where we can improve that part of the customer journey. Whether it calls for better training, improvements to basic soft skills or a need to justify additional head count, the feedback from transactional and episodic Net Promoter System is critical to designing how we deliver what you need — when you need us most.
- Product Innovation Tools
The products that customers consume are just as important as services. Business-to-business customers use products for a number of reasons — whether they’re seeking operational excellence, or they want to stay one step ahead of their competition. Using a Net Promoter Systems gives you feedback from the various business units. When a Net Promoter System score dips or you see more negative verbiage about a particular feature or product, your development team can act. And those actions not only improve the product to meet customer needs, they also can examine how the product was designed in the first place. By being able to look at a problem from where it misses customer expectations spurs teams to innovate according to what a customer wants or needs next.
- A Channel to Further Engage Customers
A hallmark of NPS is the ability for customers to not only provide direct feedback, but it also provides an avenue for companies to reach out to their customers. The closed-loop process becomes an integral tool you should incorporate into every NPS practice where employees reach out to the customer to not only let them know they’ve been heard, but also give specifics on actions the company is taking.
This creates an additional touchpoint with your customers. Being able to engage with a customer beyond a solicitation email for more business lets them know that they’re valued. Being in direct contact with a customer also humanizes them to your employees. And your employees can better understand the what and why of customer frustrations.
- Building a Customer-Centric Culture
I was recently invited to speak on a panel at an employee forum for another company. It was energizing to see that every employee was committed to their customers. This company was able to build a corporate culture that focused on the customer. They attributed this to how they have related customer Net Promoter System feedback to each employee’s job. It was no longer just the frontline employees’ sole purpose to make a positive experience for the customer; the back-office employees were just as integral in delivering the right experience for a customer. Going beyond the score to the verbatim allows the employee to build empathy for their customer — and it humanizes why we do what we do.
Demonstrate Your Dedication to Customers With Actions
Whatever measurement you use to collect customer feedback, it’s imperative that you act on it. It’s a balancing act to align your operations and processes to customers’ evolving expectations. But the best companies in the world can do it. And it’s a challenge that companies, like ours, are excited to accept.
Read the ebook to learn how to make every customer interaction count in your contact center.
