7 Steps to Best Practice Net Promoter Score® Implementation

You’ve heard about it, you’ve researched it, and you like what you hear.  Properly implementing Net Promoter Score in your organisation will yield very powerful business results. But between wanting and doing, there are key steps that need to happen for you to be successful.

The first critical thing you need to know is that NPS® is not a metric, it is a process.  Adding the Would Recommend question to your current customer survey or emailing a SurveyMonkey survey to all of your customers is not implementing Net Promoter Score. Just measuring NPS will not drive business value: you have to put in place a process to measure, understand and make change, to capture the benefits of NPS. These are the best practice steps you need to undertake to implement a successful NPS process [1].

1. Initiate

The Initiate phase of NPS implementation is all about getting senior management buy in and creating the company structures that you need to drive change. In this phase you should consider the corporate governance structure that you will need.

1. Will there be a Steering Committee to manage corporate oversight?
2. What will it’s charter be?
3. Will you have an NPS process team focused on carrying out the day to day task of using the feedback to improve the business or will you devolve that to the operating units?
4. How will these groups operate?
5. Who will be in them?

2. Customer Strategy and Context

Now you need to turn your focus to your customers.  When you set up your measurement and action process you must determine which customers you are contacting, when and why. Key questions are;

1. Which customers: all of them or just high value customers. What constitutes high value?
2. Which touch-points: when will you collect information from your customers and what are the key touch points in your business?
3. Where are your key opportunities: NPS implementation must be focused on driving business value so it makes sense to identify the high value opportunities for improvement in your business and then attack them first.Do you have a poorly performing product line or a contact centre that is constantly having issues?  Think about where you can take action for the maximum effect.

3. Listen and React

Only now do you get down to the business of survey design and implementing your data collection process. Of course with the Net Promoter Score process part of the survey design process is very straightforward: the NPS question.

However, you will still need to look at survey design to gain insights into what is important for your customers.  Understanding what drives the Net Promoter Score is as important as the score itself. If you just collect the NPS and do not collect any supporting data to understand what drives it you are mostly wasting your time.

The data collection process is not trivial either.  If you are running a transactional NPS process then you will need to be able to collect, analyse and act on feedback data every day, day and day out.  What system will you use and how will you get data in and insights out?

4. React

If you using transactional NPS then you have a very powerful customer loyalty opportunity from day one: Service Recovery.

Service recovery, or reaching out to unhappy customers and making them happy, is an incredibly powerful way to generate customer loyalty.  So you need to ensure that you have a solid service recovery system in place when you start your transactional survey process.

5. Quick Wins

Okay, so you have everything up and running and you’re collecting data, now what?

Now you need to show some quick wins to demonstrate some payback for all of the effort so far. Rather than trying for a big bang win that may be high risk or long term right up front, look for some quick wins that will get runs on the board right now.

Can you change a call centre script to give customers more of the information they need, can you change a website form to make it easier to understand?  If you can and you can show uplift in your NPS score you have the makings of a great quick win.

If you can link it to higher conversation rates, revenue, gross margin or profit, even better. Incidentally if you are using transactional NPS then you will find these quick wins very quickly.  Almost every one of our customers that have implemented transactional NPS have found quick wins within days of starting to collect data.

6. Big Bets

Now that you’ve proven the NPS process works, it’s time to move on to some big bets.  With the quick wins you should have developed the confidence and respect of management so when you take the next step and produce a bigger business case it will be approved more easily.

More Information

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement the Net Promoter Score process in your organisation for the long term.

By Adam Ramshaw

[1] Adapted from “Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter can Transform your Business”, Brooks, Lara, 2009

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Automating Net Promoter Score® Data Collection Transactional Net Promoter Score®: Which is the best way to collect data? Are you stuck on the delight the customer merry-go-round? How do you determine the value of Net Promoter Score®? New Insights: Net Promoter Score® Vs Customer Satisfaction