How to Choose a Net Promoter Score® Consultant in Australia

The first question I ask anyone who calls about Net Promoter Score® help is why they are looking outside the business.

The answer tells both of us what kind of help they need. “We have never run NPS and the board wants it” is a different job from “we have had NPS for three years and nothing has changed”. Most companies need an outside consultant for only part of the work, and the part decides who you should hire.

Decide Which Part of the Job You Need Help With

A Net Promoter Score programme has seven tasks. We list them in full on our Net Promoter Score consultants page, but in short:

1. Build the business case and secure a sponsor.
2. Set up governance and change management.
3. Choose which customers and touchpoints to survey.
4. Design the survey and how feedback is collected.
5. Select and implement the software.
6. Build reports that drive action.
7. Close the loop and fix root causes.

Few companies need help with all seven.

A business starting from scratch usually needs the first five done well, because everything after them depends on them. A programme that has stalled usually needs a review of steps 6 and 7, because that is where most programmes stop producing change.

Write down which tasks you need before you talk to anyone. It is the best protection against buying a bigger engagement than the problem.

The Three Kinds of Net Promoter Score Consultant

The firms that sell NPS help fall into three groups. They are good at different things.

Global Strategy Firms

Bain & Company created the Net Promoter Score with Fred Reichheld, and the large strategy firms are the natural choice for an enterprise-wide loyalty transformation driven from the board.

They are also priced for that.

If your company can afford Bain, you’re probably not reading a guide like this. For a mid-market business with revenue between $50 million and $500 million, the fees rarely match the size of the problem.

Software Vendors and Their Services Teams

Qualtrics, Medallia and CustomerGauge all offer implementation services alongside their platforms. They know their own software better than anyone.

The issue is scope.

A vendor’s services team is built to get its platform live, and the advice starts from the tool. That works when you already have a well-established programme and are only replacing the software.

It doesn’t work when you’re starting from scratch and need to build a new process across the organisation. You’ll get a survey and some reports, but that’s the easy part.

The hard part is getting teams to act on what customers tell them.

Specialist NPS and Customer Experience Consultancies

Specialist consultancies are smaller firms that do only customer feedback and Net Promoter Score work, often across several platforms. Genroe is one of them.

Their strength is focus and cost.

The risk is variable depth: some specialists are market research firms that run a survey and hand over a report, which is a different service from building a programme your teams use every week.

Six Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Net Promoter Score Consultant

1. How Many Programmes Like Ours Have You Run?

Ask for B2B examples if you sell to businesses. B2B Net Promoter Score works differently: fewer customers, multiple people per account, and, as the 80/20 rule predicts, a handful of accounts that matter far more than the rest.

A consultant with only consumer experience will make the error of assuming every response is worth the same, whether it comes from the CEO of your largest customer or a front-line worker at your smallest.

2. Will You Coach Us, or Do It for Us?

A consultant who runs the programme for you might get results this quarter, but leaves you dependent on them. And an outsider never knows your business as well as your own people do, so they can’t get the results your staff can.

A consultant who coaches your people builds a programme that keeps working after the consultant leaves.

Ask which model they use, and what your team will be able to do alone at the end.

3. What Would You Tell Us Not to Do?

A good consultant will talk you out of work: surveying shareholders, say, or a one-off survey when you plan to run an ongoing programme, or a training course nobody will use.

If they tell you that you need everything they sell, you may not need any of it.

4. How Do You Use Targets and Bonuses?

The answer you want to hear is that they don’t set individual Net Promoter Score targets and don’t tie the score to pay.

Tying it to bonuses rewards people for managing the number rather than the customer, and it is the fastest way to break a programme.

We cover why in how to set Net Promoter Score targets. At CyberCX, the COO agreed early not to give consulting teams individual NPS targets, and the programme has thrived because it stayed a learning tool.

5. Can You Compare Us to an External Benchmark?

Be cautious of a quick yes. Survey method changes the score so much that most cross-company comparisons are meaningless.

In one study, moving a company’s survey from phone to email changed its Net Promoter Score by 40 points, 58 to 18, for the same customers.

A consultant who offers a benchmark without asking how the comparison data was collected is selling you a number, not an insight. More on this in why external Net Promoter benchmarks waste your time.

6. Are You Tied to a Software Platform?

Many consultants are partners of a single vendor. That’s not a problem in itself, as long as they say so up front.

We are CustomerGauge’s exclusive Australian partner, and we tell every client that in the first meeting.

The problem is a consultant who presents a partner’s system as neutral advice. If you are still choosing software, read what to look for when you buy Net Promoter software first.

Red Flags That Should End the Conversation

• A guaranteed score increase. Nobody can promise a number. They can promise a process.
• Targets tied to pay as part of the design.
• A benchmark offered with no questions about how your survey is run.
• No B2B examples when you sell to businesses.
• A proposal that covers all seven tasks before anyone has asked what you already have.

What Good Looks Like

The results come from steady work, not a big launch.

AccessPay lifted its Net Promoter Score from 15 to 53 in two years, and reduced costs in the process, through consistent focus on individual and team action.

That is the test to apply to any consultant: ask them to show you a result like that, name the client, and explain what the client’s own team did to get there.

If you would like to talk through which parts of the job you need help with, book a meeting. If the answer is none, we will tell you.