How to Improve NPS

“I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.”
Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

People love to complain and are loath to praise. Take ten minutes and read up on your favorite taco truck on Yelp and you’ll wonder what the heck happened, that’s not the business you know and crave fortnightly. When we consider client satisfaction on an enterprise level, we need a different set of tools for the task, which is where we find NPS.

Here’s how NPS works.

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score®, and is an industry-adopted measurement of customer satisfaction/ experience and a good predictor of future growth. The score ranges from 1–6 as a Detractor, 7 & 8 are Passive, while 9 & 10 are Promoters. If one subtracts the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, one has your NPS; which can range from -100 to +100.

Why is NPS important? The goal of NPS is to take a single survey question asking respondents to say, “rate the likelihood that they would recommend a company, product, or service to a friend or colleague”; and have what Fred Reichheld titled his 2002 Harvard Business Review article, The One Number You Need To Grow. Executives have jumped aboard the NPS train, and it now carries a great many bonuses and promotions. So, how do we increase our NPS, so we look good to our bosses and them to theirs?

Some stats about why Customer Experience (CX) will affect that golden single NPS and how customer experience drives business growth:

67% of clients churn if there’s no First Call Resolution (FCR).

84% of consumers are frustrated when the agent does not have information.

The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5–20%.

It costs 6–7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one.

A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9–15 people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people. Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4–6 people about their experience.

A 5% increase in customer retention increases profits by 25–95%.

How does one increase FCR and improve NPS? Be knowledgeable.

Before Sageflo Archiver is implemented, our clients generally aren’t tracking how many requests for resending an email occur in a day, the status of a client’s subscription permission, or how much time is spent fulfilling auditing requests. After implementation, the contact center team typically uses Archiver to lookup emails, SMS, and print collateral between 3,000 to 10,000 times a week! This is because Customer Care is generally incentivized by the number of “resolved” calls an hour, and Archiver makes it incredibly easy to address these types of inquiries swiftly.

On the flip side, if a call requires access to an individual’s email — which is usually not readily available to the contact center without a solution like Archiver — they send a request to the people with the emails: Marketing. If it takes Marketing five minutes to look up and send an email, SMS, or print piece back to Customer Care (or directly to the client) it can take days, or weeks, to resolve the issue because they have so many other priorities to attend to. If you’re sitting in an airport trying desperately to find an email with your flight information, that is an unacceptable amount of time. Aside from the unhappy client’s impact on your NPS and future revenue, this little exercise, at scale for a given enterprise business, costs $800K–$1.9M in people hours (or 9–21 X ROI) each year.

If we’re honest, most of these difficult-to-support issues fall by the wayside as customer care is struggling to keep up with the volume of inquiries. This results in all the above: unhappy customers, who are very likely to switch vendors in hopes of a more satisfactory customer experience in the future. So, one simple major step to improving your Net Promoter Score is to empower front-line Customer Care/ Retail employees to access one-to-one communication so they solve issues during the initial call in just a few minutes, and not days.

With the right tools to easily address these issues, your teams will be significantly more productive — and happier! — and your customers will reward you with greater loyalty and repeat business. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Learn more about Sageflo Archiver.