Net Promoter Score

What we call Customer Experience (CX) is the total effect of each interaction between brand and customer over the course of the entire relationship (and it’s really all about how they feel). Positive feelings = effective CX, whether the interaction happens in a SaaS product, on a social media page, a website, over the phone, in person, or driving on the freeway.

This isn’t the same as User Experience – not at all.

Whereas UX is commonly concerned with evaluation of your product or website – a very limited scope – CX encompasses the entire experience of each customer from end-to-end, including touch points on your website, off your website, offline, on mobile, and person-to-person contact. You need both.

Fortunately, UX can be relatively easy to optimize.

Optimizing CX, on the other hand, can seem like an impossibly large task.

But keep in mind: CX is the sum total of specific, concrete, controllable occurrences. You know exactly when and how your customers interact with your brand, right? (No? You should – if it happens online, it’s all trackable). Your task then becomes understanding which CX metrics to track and how to use those metrics to create unbeatable – unforgettable – customer experiences for all.

Why is CXM so important?

Customer Experience Management (CXM or CEM) is a burgeoning field because CX heavily influences the likelihood of three very important actions:

• Repeat purchases
• Referrals
• Complaints

Repeat purchases and referrals are growth engines, decreasing the cost of acquiring new customers, decreasing churn, and increasing lifetime value.

Complaints – especially public ones on review sites – are damaging, influencing untold numbers of prospects to look elsewhere for solutions.

CX can also act as a powerful differentiator in a sea of similar products and services. It’s a key to not only increasing revenue, but also gaining lasting competitive advantage. Studies have shown that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for better CX.

And, in a study published in the Harvard Business Review, researchers found that “Customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.”

It should be a ‘no-brainer,’ but you know how the saying goes: What gets measured gets managed.

First, a summary of the CX measurements we will cover.

The Most Important CX Metrics to Track

• • 1. Net Promoter Score

    2. Customer Satisfaction

    3. Customer Effort Score

    4. First Response Time

    5. Problem Resolution Time

    6. Contact Volume by Channel

    7. Social Listening Stats

    8. Referral & Review Rates

Now, let’s dig into each one.

8 CX Metrics: Definitions (and What to Do with Them)

• • 1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

       Net Promoter Score is a simple survey that asks users to rate, on a scale from 1-10, how likely they are to refer the product/service to a friend or colleague. Those who score 9 and 10 are your promoters – they are delighted with your work and are more likely to buy more and bring their friends. People who score below a 6 are detractors. They are not having a good experience, not at all, and are very likely to tell other people about it!

       NPS is a classic “brand metric” but product teams, like those at IBM, are using NPS to improve customer experience.

       

    • How to use NPS for CX: We’ve written a whole book on this topic, but here is a new, innovative approach: Use an NPS threshold as a go/no-go milestone before launching a new product or feature out of beta.IBM is developing a new Slack-like communication product for their customers’ teams. Using IBM’s Watson machine learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities, this SaaS product can summarize channel conversations for those who don’t have time to wade through all the team chatter. The AI also aims to summon and post in-channel all relevant information about sales opportunities that are discussed by the team. When asked when the product will be on the market, Inhi Cho Suh, General Manager, Collaboration Solutions at IBM, proudly says, “There is no launch date.” She is measuring Net Promoter Score in this new SaaS application to capture real-time feedback, and says the product will only be released when it earns a satisfactory NPS from beta users. 

• • 2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

       A CSAT survey asks a customer how satisfied they are with a recent interaction – often a purchase or customer service call – on a rating scale.

       

    • How to use CSAT for CX: This is an incredibly valuable metric to track when you’re trying to optimize for CX, because this metric will show you which specific interactions are most in need of improvement. It is most often used after an interaction with Customer Support. Use it as a compass to point you in the direction of where your attentions are most needed. Depending on your survey program, you can deliver these surveys in-app, and choose various survey formats – even an emoticon scale. Using CSAT at journey points is a new way of leveraging this time-honored metric.  For more information on CSAT, check out our previous post.

    3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

       A CES survey asks the customer “How much effort did you have to expend to handle your request?” and is, perhaps, the most telling metric of how positive your customer’s experience has been. The harder it was for them to get an answer, the worse their experience, and the lower your CX. Some say “effortlessness” is the most relevant attribute of customer satisfaction. “If I had to choose only one KPI, I would use Customer Effort Score (CES). While the relative importance of effort as a driver of satisfaction differs depending on your company’s business model — e.g., selling shoes online vs. providing legal advice — it is a measure of one thing that all customers have in common: using your products and services should be as easy as possible. Nobody wants to expend more effort if given the choice.” – Mark Mollet, Customer Experience Manager at Helpling (source).

    • How to use CES for CX: Typically, you’ll deploy a CES survey after a customer support interaction. But, more and more SaaS companies are using these to gauge the effort required during the onboarding process (the point at which users are most likely to churn). The results of the survey will tell you how easy your onboarding process is, and you should see your numbers improve as you work to simplify the process.

    4. First Response Time

       This is the amount of time it takes a company to respond to a customer query. Customers expect very fast response times, and when brands don’t meet their high expectations, they become frustrated and CX drops. How fast is fast? Studies show that 53% of customers find 3 minutes to be a reasonable response time while waiting for a support agent – by telephone. Email is a bit longer at 24 to 48 hours, but the best companies, like Buffer, work on replying within one hour. And then there’s Live Chat – which requires a nearly instant response.

    • How to use First Response Time for CX: The faster the responses, the happier the customers – that’s a correlation that nearly always holds true. But, of course, if it were easy, everyone would do it! So how can we make faster response times easier? One way is by creating a Slack community for customers. ProdPad’s Director of Customer Success observed that email and Twitter weren’t creating the levels of customer engagement they were hoping for (which they knew because they were tracking those metrics). So they created a Slack community specifically for their customers to get instant, direct help, both from the brand and from other customers. Customers don’t even have to participate to get value – they can learn from everyone else. The results speak for themselves: 99% of their churn is from customers who are not part of the Slack community.

    5. Problem Resolution Time

       How fast can you solve a customer’s problem? Or, let’s put it another way: How many people does the customer speak with before the issue is solved? As a customer, there are few experiences more frustrating than speaking to someone who is incapable of solving your problem, then being bounced around to several other people who also are not equipped (not knowledgeable, not permitted, not empowered enough) to offer a solution. This is what Problem Resolution Time measures. You can get the answer with a simple survey, sent after a customer support interaction is completed, asking how long it took to solve the problem.

    • How to use Problem Resolution Time for CX: This metric serves to alert you to problems that affect the efficacy of your customer support program. You’ll probably need to do additional digging to get to the root of the problem (insufficient training? Are agents not empowered to handle issues without managerial oversight? Is it difficult to transfer customers to the appropriate person quickly?). You may not be able to find a quick fix, but once you solve these issues, your CX will improve drastically.

    6. Contact Volume by Channel

       Paying attention to volumes of calls and the number of inquiries you receive may not seem like the key to increasing customer happiness, but Buffer says it is. (Note: A high volume of service tickets isn’t necessarily a bad sign – it means customers want to be successful with your product. It’s the quiet customers you should worry about!)

    • How to use Contact Volume by Channel for CX: Buffer checks for spikes that indicate rushes in support traffic at certain times of day, which they then use to allocate service employees and resources so they are ready to meet demand. Of course, they always have a “buffer” to handle sudden support demands also. Not only does Buffer look for patterns in volume – they also track which channels their customers use most (emails, chat), and which questions are most frequently asked. That way, they know how cost effective it is to create a self-serve knowledge base, or find other methods to quickly and efficiently answer questions.

    7. Social Listening Stats

       Listening to the conversations happening about you via mention.com, or some other tool, and jumping into the conversation can create a community-like, welcoming customer experience that reaches very early in the sales funnel, all the way down to the Customer Success stage. Buffer is really good at this.
       

    • How to use Social Listening for CX: By monitoring your mentions in real-time, and allotting the human-power to respond in real-time, you’re creating an additional touchpoint with your brand – and another opportunity for positive, interactive, engaging experiences. The best part is: You’re doing it in public. Some potential metrics to use to help with social listening include how many people are talking about you, how many comments hashtag your brand, support reach-outs, Twitter chat participation, and of course, mentions.

    8. Referral & Review Rates

       Perhaps the most accurate measure of customer experience is the oldest: word-of-mouth recommendations (aka. referrals and reviews). NPS measures the willingness to refer, but only tracking actual referrals and reviews will give you the genuine numbers.

    • How to use Referral & Review Rates for CX: Tracking referrals and reviews requires a combination of social listening and a trackable customer advocacy program (which works hand-in-hand with tracking NPS to identify promoters early and encourage them to act). Referrals and reviews not only measure how successful your customer experience efforts are, they can also encourage a sense of personalization and interactivity – but only if you respond and reward these highly valuable behaviors!

Customer Experience is truly the key to retention and growth at its most fundamental levels. When customers love your products, enjoy working with you, feel good about asking questions (and getting prompt answers), and come out of each interaction feeling good about you and themselves, growth and profit are natural byproducts.

However, as natural as this is, when you need to create these positive experiences at scale, you have to track your successes and failures, understand which metrics have the most impact, and come up with creative ways to make your target customers smile at each touchpoint. It’s a tall order, true. But doable.

Wootric (now InMoment) uses CX metrics—Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Score—to monitor customer experience for high-growth companies. We take a customer-centric approach to survey design. For example, our modern 2-question Net Promoter Score survey invites customers to elaborate freely on the reason for their score. We deliver millions of surveys that achieve response rates of 30-40%, generating thousands of pieces of unstructured customer survey feedback each week.

Why Is Survey Feedback Important?

Because when you communicate directly with your customers, they can identify exactly what works, what doesn’t work, and where the pain points are that may be detracting from their experience. Honest feedback gives you the insights you need to make improved business decisions and optimize the customer experience. As such, the right customer survey can play a significant role in increasing customer retention and helping your organization reach its goals.

Customer feedback comments are a treasure trove of information that can help a company shape their product and service for success. Until now it has been difficult for a Customer Insights Manager or customer experience management (CXM) teams to mine and aggregate qualitative data for insights that can guide business decisions.  

Auto-Tagging with Sentiment Analysis

We recently announced early access to a new product feature: auto-tagging. For auto-tagging, we use our homegrown machine learning system along with Google Cloud Natural Language API to automatically categorize open-ended customer-survey feedback that our customers get as part of their NPS, CSAT and CES programs. The goal is to help companies put some structure to all of this qualitative data. We have a long list of customers eagerly waiting to get their hands on this feature. It’s a good problem to have.

In addition, we are developing the ability to identify the sentiment of the feedback. The goal is to determine not only what the customer was talking about, but to say whether the feedback is positive, neutral or negative. It is particularly complex to decipher multiple “sentiments” within a single comment.  

Here is an example feedback comment that we received in response to a Net Promoter Score survey on our own production application (we practice what we preach):

“Setup guide for customizing social sharing on iOS SDK was confusing. Diego reached out with sample code which helped a lot.”

Wootric (now InMoment) is a SaaS product, so our auto-tagger uses a SaaS data training model and applies three tags to this survey response (Documentation, SDK, People), and assigns a NEUTRAL sentiment for the feedback as a whole. This obviously is pretty good, but we want to do more.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could dig deeper into survey feedback and apply sentiment for each tag as well? In the above example, the customer was not happy with the SDK Set-up Guide, but was pleased with Diego’s assistance.  This nuance is buried under the overall NEUTRAL sentiment. Ideally, the Documentation and SDK tags would be identified as having negative sentiment, while the People tag would be positive.  

We Can Identify Sentiment Associated with People, Team, Organization or Location

Buried survey feedback is not a trivial problem to solve. However, using Google Cloud Natural Language API’s latest feature called “entity sentiment analysis” we have made progress. We can already get sentiment for entities referenced in feedback where an entity is defined as People, Team, Organization and Location. In this case, Diego is an entity of type People and positive sentiment is correctly attached to it.

Example of Auto-tagging an InMoment NPS Survey Response

CUSTOMER LANGUAGE	AUTO-TAGS	SENTIMENT
“Setup guide for customizing social sharing on iOS SDK was confusing. Diego reached out with sample code which helped a lot.”		NEUTRAL
“Setup guide”	Documentation	future
“iOS SDK”	SDK	future
“Diego”	People	POSITIVE

A Business Use Case

Our customers often trigger a CSAT survey using our incoming webhooks and workflows when a support case is closed in their CRM system like Salesforce or Zendesk.

We notice that survey-feedback responses often reference a team or specific person that the customer has engaged with. Auto-tagging this feedback as “People” with applicable sentiment will provide these companies with an easy way to measure and track how customers are feeling about the people aspect of a company’s Customer Success or Support program.

Net Promoter Score is the go-to CX metric for companies that want to measure and improve customer loyalty, a harbinger of growth. Thousands of companies use NPS, from the start-ups of  Silicon Valley to the Fortune 500.  One reason for this popularity is that Net Promoter Score programs have evolved in response to technology and the changing landscape of customer expectations. 

The core tenets of Net Promoter Score have stayed the same since NPS was created in 2003 by Bain & Company. “How likely are you to recommend this product or service to colleagues?” is the NPS survey question, and it is followed by an ask for open-ended feedback. Customers respond on a scale of 0-10 and are bucketed into promoters, passives and detractors based on their response. The formula for calculating the NPS metric is straightforward.

However, the world of customer experience management, or CXM, has changed dramatically. A few macro things have happened.

1. Social media has empowered our customers with a voice — the conversation is no longer expected to be only one way, and negative word of mouth can be amplified quickly. Every voice counts.

2. We as businesses have to work harder than ever to retain customers — customer experience is increasingly a differentiator and a battleground with more competition and low switching costs.

3. Companies have many more touchpoints to engage with customers than it did back in 2003.We now have sophisticated mobile devices, web platforms, customer facing point of sale systems. Meanwhile, our customer’s email boxes are overstressed with newsletters and promotions all vying for their attention.

When I ran NPS campaigns back in 2003, I was sending long form surveys to my customers in quarterly batches. Emails with links to long form surveys were considered the ‘innovative’ way to get feedback. Response rates were dismal. Sadly, I still receive some of those today!

This, of course, still is a valid way to collect NPS feedback — you will get some of your customers to go through the effort — but it doesn’t take advantage of any of the macro trends I mentioned above. And honestly, customers are getting smarter and less patient with spammy surveys.

How Net Promoter Score has evolved

Modern NPS leverages technology, closes the loop with customers and engages the whole company.  Here is what you should expect:

• Timely, ongoing feedback. You can keep a real-time pulse on your business. This alone is magical. Reading, sharing and responding to customer feedback as it happens — talk about raising the profile of the customer’s voice inside a company!
• Modern NPS survey is short and to the point — just the NPS rating and open-ended feedback. A 10 or even 5 question survey? No way.  Survey fatigue is a real issue. Keep it short and you will get many more customers to tell you what’s most important to them.
  
• Reaching customers where they want to give feedback, in a low-friction and lightweight way. For example, in-app surveys that take seconds to complete may a better experience for SaaS customers than dealing with another email survey in a crowded in-box. E-commerce companies may use a combination of in-app, email, or SMS to reach their customers depending on where they are in their journey.

• High response rates — your expectations should jump up from single digits to 30-40%. Customers are willing to give you feedback cycle after cycle because it’s easy. 

• Leverages intelligent NPS software. Software that is designed to get your business to action faster. It’s giving you analytics. It’s helping you comb through open-ended text and sentiment. And it’s making the process of closing the loop with customers easy and turnkey.

• Customer feedback is shared internally. It doesn’t get buried in spreadsheets and left unaddressed. It is shared in Slack, it is routed automatically to departments to take action in their systems of record such as Intercom, ZenDesk or Salesforce.

Net Promoter Score has come a long way, and the end result is better outcomes for companies and their customers.

Most customer success articles you’ll read talk about helping customers reach their ideal outcomes – ideal outcomes are the most important thing, the very job description of customer success. But there’s another job that comes before ideal outcomes, one which, if done poorly, will result in churn even if ideal outcomes are achieved.

Setting expectations.

Let’s begin with a cautionary tale – a true story – of a SaaS app that failed to set expectations that matched what the app did.

It’s a fitness app which shall remain nameless, but it’s much like its primary competitor, MyFitnessPal. Unlike MyFitnessPal, it offered a sleek, integrated user interface that seamlessly brought together exercise tracking via pedometer and nutrition tracking, but it also offered something more: A personal fitness coach. (I should also mention that this particular fitness app is one of the most expensive currently on the market – but for such personal attention? Totally worth it.)

Except.

While on the website copy and in the app itself, this company promised a customized approach to getting fit, complete with a personal wellness coach who would be accessible via private chat to offer encouragement at times of crisis and temptation, it didn’t deliver as described.

Within a few days, it became apparent that the “personal coach” is really only accessible via group chat. In fact, if you try to contact the coach via the in-app private chat box (which even has the coach’s picture on it), the coach will never actually see your message – you’ll get an automated reply from a bot.

When all of this was revealed – in the group chat room – every participant was taken aback, and several initiated their free trial cancellations within days.

Even though they liked the app.

Even though they were already seeing the results they’d hoped for.

Yes, even when customers were achieving their ideal outcomes, because of the mismatch between their expectations and the services delivered, they left.

But not before sending feedback – which went unanswered.

It was a customer success failure of a magnitude we don’t, frankly, see very often. And it’s almost painful when you realize that nearly all of their churn was completely, 100% avoidable.

If only they had matched customer expectations to what they were actually prepared to deliver.

What it felt like was a bait and switch.

Setting expectations is a foundational element of customer success

“There are three key tasks that challenge every Customer Success team in its initial phase of development. The first is to appropriately set and manage perceptions and expectations, both of the customers and of the rest of the company. The second is to establish a clear and necessary connection to significant revenue streams and profitability. The third is to gather, analyze and use the right data to fulfill the group’s mission.” – Mikael Blaisdell ED, Customer Success Association

The fitness app example above is a classic case of sales and marketing not being aligned with product development, customer service, and customer success. Clearly, none of these departments were speaking with each other, or customer service could have told marketing that customers were complaining about being misled. Or marketing could have spoken with produce development to see how they could better deliver on the promise that was bringing people in the doors.

None of these things happened, but an empowered customer success team could have bridged these gaps.

Customer success, of any department, has the power to bring people together. Because, at the end of the day, we’re all working for the customers’ success. We’re all trying to create a product and experience that works.

If you find yourself spending time trying to “adjust” customer expectations, check in with sales. Check with marketing. Check with customer service. See where the disconnects are, and what you can do to address them and bridge those gaps.

7 Rules to Set Customers up for Success with Expectation Management

Rule #1: Communicate

The key to setting expectations – and setting customers up for a successful experience – is really communication. Not only do you have to communicate clearly and accurately with the customers themselves, you also have to keep lines of communication open with all of the other departments who have a hand in creating the customer experience.

Rule #2: Don’t overpromise (and under-deliver)

That fitness app made promises it clearly never intended to keep – maybe that was intentional (a real bait and switch!), or maybe it was the unhappy result of teams failing to communicate what was possible to deliver. Either way, they committed the cardinal sin of expectation management – they created a high expectation and failed to reach it.

Rule #3: Know what you can and can’t do

To avoid overpromising, you have to know what you can afford to do for customers. Often, this isn’t easy because management and customers expect that you can do more than is realistically possible, which means you have to manage expectations on both sides. If it’s a time issue, start tracking how much time it takes you to do certain tasks, or to serve each customer. If it’s a funding issue, keep tabs on what it costs to deliver everything that is expected. Then you can build a case for getting more funding, or pairing down services.

Rule #4: Talk through obstacles

When working with customers to define their ideal outcomes and success benchmarks, discuss potential obstacles from the start. Discussing potential issues before they arise prevents  customers from getting nasty surprises, and prepares them to work with you to overcome these roadblocks.

Rule #5: Value your customers’ trust

Nothing upsets customers more than feeling like they’ve been duped – that you’ve violated their trust. Trust is easy to lose, and nearly impossible to win back. And once a customer stops trusting you, they stop being customers and become detractors, telling everyone who will listen their story about how you let them down. Customer loyalty, lifetime value and retention are rooted in trust. And without them, your SaaS business can’t survive.

Rule #6: Track user behavior & sentiment

It sounds like SaaS 101, but clearly not all SaaS companies are tracking when and why users are bailing out of the onboarding process. If you don’t have a system in place to send “red flag” notifications when users are exhibiting signs of distress, you’re losing customers and probably don’t even know why. It’s well worth the investment to purchase a good user survey system to keep your finger on the pulse of CX metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) for customer loyalty, or Customer Effort Score (CES) to keep tabs on how onboarding is going. 

Rule #7: Let them know when you’ve exceeded expectations

Okay, now for the fun one: When you’ve exceeded expectations (or when they’ve reached a milestone faster than expected), make sure they KNOW it! Celebrate with them. Point out their successes and you’ll help to reaffirm their high opinion of you.

Customer success teams are uniquely positioned to understand the whys behind the whats of user behavior. But if you keep all of your insights to yourself, without sharing them with other departments, you’ll continue having to “manage” mis-aligned expectations. Set yourself up for success (and your customers too), by addressing expectations early.

The challenge of open-ended feedback

Qualitative feedback in survey responses: Marketing, Product, Customer Insights, and Customer Success teams love it! There is nothing quite like hearing authentic, open-ended comments about your product or service directly from customers in their own words. Nothing is more powerful than hearing from the customer first hand: It drives action.

Individual anecdotes tell a story that can provide color and context to business metrics like Net Promoter Score, but how do you make it actionable? How do you aggregate qualitative data to see trends and get insights that can drive business decisions?  To a certain extent, this has always been an issue for voice of the customer feedback programs. However, two broad trends are driving an increase in qualitative data and creating more urgency. As a result, the problem of “metricizing” open-ended feedback is now more acute.

Customer experience survey trends that are driving the need for NLP

First trend: The shift to customer-centric surveys.

It has become more and more difficult to persuade customers to respond to traditional company-centric surveys — the multi-question monstrosities that ask customers to rate attribute after attribute on a 5 or 7 point scale.  Long, boring, tedious — and frustrating. Response rates in the single digits are common.

I recently visited the website of a major department store and was prompted to fill out a pop-up survey with over 30 (!) questions. I thought I’d get an opportunity to tell the retailer what was important to me — how much I loved their shoe selection and that I’d had a disappointing experience in one of their stores. I didn’t finish the survey.

In an effort to improve response rates, many companies are now thinking about the survey experience from the customer’s perspective. A Net Promoter Score survey that asks one question and lets a customer provide open-ended feedback is a better user experience — and customers are more likely to respond.

Wootric is modern customer feedback management software that allows businesses to gauge and quantify customer loyalty through proven feedback metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES). We are firm believers in the customer centric approach.

For example, here’s an NPS survey that Wootric presents in-app (we also support mobile, email and SMS) that usually takes a user less than 30 seconds to complete.

Second trend: Hearing from as many customers as possible.

Traditionally, customer research efforts were satisfied with feedback from a statistically significant sample of customers. Now that any customer has the potential to influence the trajectory of a business — whether taking their complaints public on Twitter or writing a glowing review on Yelp or G2Crowd — more companies are proactively asking all customers for feedback. This instantly opens a direct communication channel, and gives companies the opportunity to build, monitor and leverage  relationships with any and every customer.

These trends put the onus on companies to make sense of a firehose of open-ended feedback, and that is tough to do.  Dedicating resources to tagging and sorting hundreds, even thousands, of comments is expensive and just doesn’t scale.

Natural Language Processing to the rescue

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a type of machine learning that enables computers to understand human language. You can read how Wootric applies NLP to customer feedback like NPS and CSAT survey responses in this article.  And here are three familiar examples of NLP at work:

• Machine translation like Google Translate.
• Sentiment analysis — sifting through all those Twitter posts to analyze how people feel about the latest iPhone, for example.
• Chatbots — the customer support “agents” that have become the first line of interaction when you reach out for tech support online.

Unlocking the power of open-ended feedback

NLP is solving the unique challenges in the field of customer feedback management using text and sentiment analysis. Being on the forefront of this innovation means Wootric customers are seeing those benefits now. We work to free our customers from the time and expense required to manage this data. We use text and sentiment analysis to surface and aggregate insights for our customers, helping them to prioritize resources and route responses for follow up action. Read more about what we are up to here on the Google Cloud Platform blog.

Customer success teams measure and track many key metrics. From SaaS platform usage to NPS, they are always analyzing data to maintain a pulse of customer health and happiness. Many of these stats will also go into an overall account metric known as Customer Health Score.

Wootric recently hosted the San Francisco Customer Success Meetup and the focus of the evening was Customer Health Score (CHS). Three experts shared their techniques for constructing and measuring this metric.  Loni Brown from Entelo, Jeff Johnson from Splunk, and Jon Turri from Raise.me offered several tips and insights to setting up a Customer Health Score program and the intricacies involved.

What is Customer Health Score (CHS)?

Customer Health Score is a metric designed to predict a customer’s likelihood to stay a customer  – or churn. Loni started by providing her explanation of what CHS is, “a metric that provides insight into what is happening in your customer accounts early enough that you can be proactive.” Formulations of CHS can be simple, but are often complex.

That description works well, but there isn’t an industry standard for Customer Health Score, which may be confusing and overwhelming for some customer success teams. The panel agreed that variables and the weighting formula for CHS vary based on the company and industry. It depends on what is indicative of success for your customers.

What Goes Into a Customer Health Score?

Each of the panelists has had to identify and gather the metrics available to them, then single out the most indicative numbers to create a formula for their score. This means the first iterations are often messy and need regular adjustment until the method produces results that are consistent with how CSMs see their accounts.

When creating your score, it’s good to isolate 4-6 indicators for CHS. Loni mentioned that the Entelo CHS score card includes eight different numbers, though she allowed that her formula is very comprehensive. Among other things, the Entelo CHS includes Net Promoter Score (NPS), the number of support tickets per user, usage of the tools on her platform, and success milestones. Entelo is a recruiting platform so in their case, success milestones include personnel hires their clients have been with the help of Entelo.

Jeff added, “Support cases are important, but they don’t always mean something is wrong” so you’ll want to keep that in mind if you add them to your formula.

The panelists discussed the subjective components of their CSH formula, suggesting that only 1-2 of your included metrics should be subjective, but that they can be quite important. For instance, Jon adds “Relationship strength is the highest weighted metric for us.”

After initially setting up your Customer Health Score formula, it’s important to give it 6-10 months without changes, or you won’t be able to track it accurately over time.

Tracking Customer Health Scores

A favorite tool for tracking CHS is Gainsight, used by 2 of the panelists. It imports metrics you’ve indicated as important and allows you to weight each parameter, culminating in a unique formula for your each customer’s CHS.

In Gainsight, you’ll see accounts that are Green, indicating good health. They could be an opportunity for an upsell or additional revenue. Yellow, which are accounts that might be experiencing a problem. Red accounts are in poor health and are at risk of churning.

Loni uses Wootric to track Net Promoter Score. She imports this NPS data into Gainsight via Salesforce for the benefit of her success team and her CHS calculation. (Having her NPS data in Salesforce benefits the sales team, too. For instance, if a client could be a potential advocate, exporting that to account and contact records in Salesforce makes it easily accessible to the client’s sales manager.)

A good indicator that your formula is working is to check positive and negative accounts and be sure the metric matches what is happening with the client. For instance, if a customer hasn’t taken training, submits multiple support tickets, and hasn’t been successful with your product it makes sense they would be in poor standing.

Optimizing your CHS can be great for revenue opportunities. Loni stated “Sales can come to me and say ‘we are trying to make quota, do you have any accounts for us?’ and I can print out of a list of green accounts and hand them over knowing they are good prospects for upsells.”

When our host was asked by an audience member what impact panelists had seen on churn and expansion revenue, Jeff answered, “You’ll see an immediate impact when taking immediate action.”

Set Up Customer Health Alerts

Once you’ve chosen the metrics for your score, you’ll want to add alerts to your system that notify you if and when something happens. Jeff says “If anything should be a fire alarm, build it into your logic in Gainsight. Think about what those fire alarms are.”

Jon cautioned, “The CHS Scorecard won’t give you everything….you have to have an escalation process in place.”

For example, if your NPS for a particular account goes from promoter to detractor you’ll want to have a CSM address the account. This means the overall scorecard could be showing a positive account when there is a problem, so it’s still important to look at every metric on a client’s card to make sure it is in good standing.

Taking Action on Customer Health Scores

The next step after setting up your CHS alerts is to create playbooks to work from when there is an alert or an account drops from green to yellow or red. This gives CSMs valuable information to work through any problems and put the account in good standing when possible.

Jeff suggested that you focus efforts on getting yellow accounts to green. A healthy account is six times more likely to rebuy or upsell than one that is “okay, ” he says. The effort you put into getting an unhealthy red account to an “okay” yellow account may not be worth it.

As the company grows, your CHS program should as well. At Raise.me there are thousands of customers/students who use the program. Because of this Jon has learned to use segmentation. He tracks a CHS for new customers going through onboarding and a CHS for long term customers.

In one last bit of advice, Loni’s recommends to “Make sure the team and company are bought into the score or people won’t act on behalf of it.”

Thanks to our panelists, it’s clear how valuable and productive Customer Health Score can be for Customer Success teams. It can take effort to determine the right metric for your company, but the result can be an excellent program that decreases churn.

Wootric, the Net Promoter Score platform for boosting customer happiness, has launched the Wootric Net Promoter Customer Feedback survey application on the Salesforce AppExchange. Designed to bring the full power of Net Promoter Score (NPS) data to Salesforce users, the integration was created with input from Salesforce customers and NPS power-users like Zoom.us, Entelo and Percolate.  

Download the Wootric-Salesforce integration from the listing on the AppExchange.

With the Wootric-Salesforce integration, day-to-day users of Salesforce —  customer success, sales, marketing and service/support — can improve retention, upsells and customer experience from within Salesforce. The application enriches contact and account records with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric and Voice of the Customer (VOC) feedback comments in any language. Surveys can also be triggered from within Salesforce.

Highlights of the Wootric Net Promoter Score integration on the AppExchange

Features of the integration today include:

• Net Promoter Scores and feedback in Contact Records
• Account level Net Promoter Score and feedback roll-up
• Seven (7) Net Promoter Score Reports that auto-populate the Wootric Dashboard in Salesforce
• Ability to trigger NPS surveys from within Salesforce using workflows
• Direct install that takes minimal developer resources to configure.

Future plans include a similar integration for Wootric’s new Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys.

See more Screenshots on Wootric’s AppExchange listing.

Easy Installation, the Right Features

“As I spoke with customers about the features they wanted in a Wootric-Salesforce application, I quickly learned that it is a challenge for Salesforce users to find a customer feedback app that is genuinely easy to install and use,“ said Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric. “So we took time to build an integration that is both useful and painless to install.”

Wootric customers are already benefiting from sharing Wootric NPS data across the company through Salesforce. “The Wootric integration came with out-of-the-box reports that are great. Because the fields exist within Salesforce objects, we were able to setup automated alerts to account owners for easy follow-up. We’re able to view average scores at any scale: across company, industry, account size, etc,” said Caitlyn McCormick, Marketing Manager at Percolate. “If you’re looking for scalable NPS reporting and transparency across your organization, I recommend Wootric’s Salesforce integration.”

The real impact of customer feedback in Salesforce

When critical Voice of the Customer data collected by Wootric is accessible in Salesforce, it can align teams around boosting customer happiness.

Customer-centricity improves when customer experience data is available to Salesforce users

This year, 89% of marketers expect customer experience to be their primary differentiator. Now that CMOs are spending as much money on technology as CIOs, companies that use Salesforce are looking for the technology stack that will help them win on the customer experience battlefield.

Wootric’s sophisticated yet light-weight approach to customer experience feedback management is the choice of companies in over 70 countries around the globe. Now, by integrating Wootric with Salesforce, marketers can share customer insights and feedback across functions to improve CX.

An easy win for Sales & Success teams: Knowing exactly what the customer is thinking today

With the Wootric-Salesforce integration, Net Promoter Score data sits at the end-user record, buyer record and account level, so it is visible to sales and success teams that are having onboarding, upsell and renewal conversations. Did a user just rave about your new product, or are they disgruntled? How has account NPS been trending since the last call with the buyer? Business intelligence transforms the sales conversation.

Improve customer service and onboarding with triggered surveys

Asking for feedback after a support interaction or at a key journey point is now possible by triggering Wootric surveys based on events in Salesforce. This enables Customer Support or CX teams to assess and improve interactions with people and product.

Zapier vs. Salesforce Integration

Some Wootric customers currently utilize Zapier to move NPS data into Salesforce.  The advantages of using Wootric’s Salesforce integration instead of Zapier include: out of box VisualForce pages for Contacts and Accounts, Account level roll up of NPS, out of box reports and dashboard, workflow and survey triggers, and  historical data migration (which can be costly and difficult with Zapier.)  Using Zapier will continue to be a cost-effective option for companies that do not need these features.

For a more information and a free trial of the Salesforce integration, please contact sales to learn more

“Our conclusion: superior CX drives superior revenue growth.”
– Harley Manning, Forrester

“Customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experiences”
– Peter Kriss, Harvard Business Review

There is a lot of chatter happening in business circles about customer experience (CX) as a growth engine. It’s almost intuitive – you and I both understand how having a great experience affects us as customers. We all have businesses we love, products we’ll follow to the ends of the earth (in hopes they’ll finally go on sale), and websites we follow with almost religious fervor.

As CMO, VP of Success, or Head of Customer Support, you are constantly advocating for customer experience within your company. After all, from the very first moment the second blacksmith’s shop appeared in the village, creating competition for the first blacksmith’s shop, customer experience has been a deciding vote for who gets the business – just as much as price and quality. But as a business owner, or a professional marketer, you can’t afford to go with your gut. To win resources you need data to back up your argument that CX is the future (you know it is).

There is a correlation between CX and revenue growth, and we’ve compiled the research to back it up.

Why the effects of CX have been tricky to track

Customer experience has been treated as a ‘soft’ discipline, and I have a theory as to why. 

We’ve grown up with it. Whether watching Santa send Macy’s store shoppers to competitors in Miracle on 34th Street, or walking into Nordstrom’s shoe department to be followed around by suited young men carrying piles of boxes to the nearest padded chair. We recognize great CX when we experience it ourselves.

However, it’s inherently subjective. Subjective issues – anything based on opinion or emotion – tend to be hard to track. One person’s “helpful” is another person’s “pushy.” Your “attentive,” might be my “stalker.”

Modern tools now quantify CX

But online buyers’ journeys are different than the sales experiences most of us grew up with. With modern tracking and customer surveys, you can tell (often in real-time) whether your efforts are coming off as too much, or too little. You can identify problems and preferences, which allows you to fine tune the end experience for your target customer.

Most importantly, for the first time in human history, we have the tools to track the actual, absolute effect that positive customer experience has on a business’s bottom line. This is transforming the discipline of customer service into the science of CX.

It’s no longer just “the right thing to do,” it’s an engine for measurable growth.

“CX is no longer just a discipline; it is the basic ingredient for growth”
– Winning on the Battleground of CX, Forrester

Data that ties CX to Revenue

Transaction-based v. Subscription-based CX

“What we found: not only is it possible to quantify the impact of customer experience – but the effects are huge.” – “The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified,” Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review looked at the revenue data from two global $1B+ businesses – one was a transaction-based business, the other was a relationship-based subscription business.

“We looked at two companies with different revenue models — one transactional, the other subscription-based — using two common elements that are relevant to all industries: customer feedback, and future spending by individual customers. To see the effect of experience on future spending, we looked at experience data from individual customers at a point in time, and then looked at those individual customers’ spending behaviors over the subsequent year.”

Transactional business models rely on frequency of customer return and how much they spend per visit. Modcloth would be a good example – they want you to come back every day and buy (or at least Save to Wishlist), and come up with ingenious ways to incentivize that behavior.

Subscription-based businesses include Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or even those recipe kits from Blue Apron. No matter what they’re selling, the model is the same. It relies on retention, cross-sells and upsells.

The results?

After controlling for other factors that drive repeat purchases…

• Transaction-based: Customers with the best past experiences spend140% more than those with the poorest past experiences.

• Subscription-based: Customers with the best past experiences have a 74% chance of remaining a member for at least another year; customers with the worst experiences have a 43% chance of being a member one year later. In fact, those who gave the highest CX scores were likely to remain members for another six years.

CX Effects Across Multiple Industries

On Harley Manning’s Blog at Forrester, Manning (Forrester VP and research director) discusses two studies, conducted one year apart, that compared five pairs of publicly traded companies “where one company in each of the pairs had a significantly higher score than the other in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index during the period 2010 to 2015.”

The Customer Experience Index measures each brand on a scale from “Very Poor” to “Excellent” in these six categories:

• Effectiveness
• Ease of use
• Emotion
• Retention
• Enrichment
• Advocacy

Then, Forrester looked at the businesses’ revenue data and built models to calculate the compound annual growth rates for each of the ten companies over those five years.

The results:

The publicly traded companies studied ran the gamut of industry types, from cable to retail to airlines. But in terms of the CX effect, industry didn’t seem to matter as much as the reported CX scores each company received.

“In two industries, cable and retail, leaders outperformed laggards by 24 percentage and 26 percentage points, respectively. Even in the industry with the smallest spread, airlines, the CX leader enjoyed a healthy 5 percentage point advantage in global revenue. And when we compared the total growth rate of all CX leaders to that of all CX laggards we saw that the leaders collectively had a 14 percentage point advantage.” – Harley Manning, Forrester

Unlike the Harvard Business Review’s study, Forrester did not control for outside influences that could have driven revenue growth. But, they did conclusively determine that “customers who have a better experience with a company say they’re less likely to stop doing business with the company and more likely to recommend it.” They also observed that companies with superior CX saw increased growth in customers.

And, as Harley Manning points out, “Both of those factors should drive increased growth in customers and, in turn, increased growth of customer revenue.”

Essentially, as CX rises, so does revenue growth.

But there’s another interesting correlation that Forrester’s Customer Experience Index research uncovered. The top performing brands, including USAA, Barnes & Noble, Etsy, QVC and Zappos.com, “achieved a 17% compound average growth between 2010 and 2015 – which is no small feat with many of them already in the top revenue percentiles in their respective industries.” (Salemove.com)

Compared with the brands at the bottom, who only saw a compound average growth of 3%, that is a very wide gap.

To put a possible dollar amount on this, consider: “a one-point score improvement in the CX Index can lead to an increase of $65 million in revenue in the upscale hotel industry,” according to Forrester’s Harley Manning.  

CX spending is on the rise

You may think companies still seem to feel more comfortable spending money on things that do not have a direct impact on customer experience, or that Support and Customer Success teams can still be the last area to receive investment. Think again. Per Forrester research, 71% of business and technology decision-makers reported that improving CX will be a high priority for spending in the next year.

Ready to join the CX revolution?

Now with modern survey platforms, companies of all sizes can measure and improve customer experience at scale.  Forrester’s CX Index measured six attributes of experience and probably took months to collect, analyze and report. However, a lightweight approach to CX improvement using metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) can get you 90% of the way there and not break the bank. 

The key is to start small. Determine your “north star” metric. Get customer feedback, take action, repeat.  Consistently repeat this process. As your company’s customer experience improves, so will your bottomline. 

Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, interviewed Wootric CEO and cofounder Deepa Subramanian at Dreamforce 2016, getting her thoughts on best practices for Net Promoter Score for startups and learning how – in two short years – she grew the NPS platform she built herself into a runaway success with users in 75 countries around the world. Here are highlights from the interview!

How Deepa built Wootric from code to customers

Jason: Deepa, tell us about what Wootric does, how big you are, and any other core metrics.

Deepa: Well, to give you some context, I was a very early engineer at Salesforce, starting in 2003, and it’s been kind of a wild ride since. I went to law school. I practiced law for a bit. I ran Schmendricks bagels, my first foray into entrepreneurship.

But my true passion is technology so this is where we are. Wootric is a Net Promoter Score tracking platform that helps companies boost customer happiness. This is what we are today. But what we really want to bring to businesses is intelligent turn-key customer feedback management that helps them align the entire company around the customer and customer experience metrics. Like NPS.

Jason: Let’s talk a lot about that. But first, just because of your background, let’s go back in time. How is building software today different than it was when you were at Salesforce? And what surprised you about building software today?

Deepa: That I could do it. I mean, I built Wootric, just me.

Jason: Just you?

Deepa: In this universe, with AWS and Heroku, my first six months of MVP cost me nothing. I was able to manage the entire stack — whereas when I joined Salesforce, I think we were over a 100-person company. You needed 11 developers and a whole infrastructure team.

Jason: So you built the prototype, or even version one, all by yourself in six months?

Deepa: It had actually been about 10 years since I coded, so what I did was work for two weeks with a consulting company called Thoughtbot, where we peer programmed the MVP, and then I took it on.

Jason: So that de-rustified you. And then you brought on the rest of the founding team?

Deepa: Jessica Pfeifer is actually a very old friend of mine. She is a brand marketer, most recently at Clorox. But I knew that before Harvard Business School she had been a marketing consultant in China running what were basically customer experience survey programs.

I did a user interview with Jess at her kitchen table, and it was so productive and so exciting that I said, “Jess — you need to come work with me. How do I convince you?” She’s one of those people who goes by her gut, and she said, “I’m going to do this with you.”

Jason: When did you decide to expand the team? Was it when you got your first paying customers?

Deepa: I think it was after we raised our first round of financing.

Jason: Well that certainly helps, to pay their salaries. And how much did you raise?

Deepa: Jessica and I raised $2.5M from Cloud Apps Capital and others.

Jason:  Just the two of  you? That’s pretty badass. It’s certainly a testament to you. Did you have paying customers yet?

Deepa: We had in the range of 10 or 15 customers at the time who could be referenced. This was in April, 2015.

Jason: What did they say they loved about Wootric that helped convince your investors?

Deepa: Two things. First, the end-user survey experience. I think they thought this was so unique, since NPS products tended to focus on the experience of the person giving the survey.  The other thing was that it took them just a few minutes to install. Which for the enterprises we were talking to – they had never seen anything like that.

Jason: This makes me curious, and I’d like to back up for just a moment. How did you get the first 10 customers? Where did they come from?

Deepa: Hustle. The very first few important customers were basically my network, talking to CMOs, customer success. 

Jason:  If the first 10 customers were hustle, where did customers 11-100 come from?

Deepa: All inbound.  We have this viral component–people saw the survey. They loved it, and they were, like, “Who is this?” And they clicked on the “powered by Wootric” in the survey. So, the next big five customers came in virally. Today, we have over 100 paying customers. It’s been a third virality, a third content marketing, and a third partnerships.

Basically, what I’ve learned is if you want a repeatable, scalable outbound sales model you need to have sales professionals come in. We’ve now brought on two AE’s and these are very unique individuals. They’re good at what they do, but they’re very creative. They know that this is not something that’s been figured out already and they’re ready to listen, give me feedback, work on this model. One of them has a strong B2C Rolodex, and he understands brands really well. The other is much more experienced selling to SaaS companies, B2B organizations.

Net Promoter Score from vanity metric to KPI

Jason: Okay, let’s shift the conversation to talk a little bit about NPS. Let me start with the transformation in my thinking. I used to hate NPS, and here’s why. My experience working with NPS at a Fortune 500 company was that it was an excuse for mediocrity. You could have a stale product that was no longer competitive in the market, but your existing customers loved it because they were used to it. Thus, you could see very high scores in very mediocre products. That turned me off.

Then I started to work with a few dozen SaaS companies and they all tracked NPS early. At that point, I saw the magic, and now I am a big proponent. So, what’s changed NPS? Maybe I’m viewing it wrongly, but I think there’s almost been a revolution how people think about it.

Deepa: NPS used to be looked at a vanity metric, but now people have realized the power of using this as a period-to-period key performance indicator (KPI). That’s when it becomes really powerful. Companies have also come to realize that NPS is not a program that you run once a year, or once every six months. You want to incorporate it into your ongoing reporting. Also, people have realized that the data is applicable across the organization, beyond just Insights or Marketing. 

Jason: Should NPS be one of the top 5 or 6 metrics for the whole company?

Deepa: Absolutely. It should be a board metric. 

Jason: Everyone in the company should be responsible for NPS.

Don’t be spammy about NPS surveys

Jason: Some folks get worried, especially if they haven’t done NPS before, that they’ll annoy their customers if they ask them for too much too often. And I know if you use something like Wootric, the bar is very low. It only takes 60 seconds or 30 seconds. But should I be worried about asking for too much feedback from customers?

Deepa: Absolutely, you can’t be spammy about surveys. Wootric’s so end-user focused–very careful about right question, right time, right customer, right device. And all of this needs to be coordinated. If you have the resources to do it yourself by all means do it. But Wootric can do all that for you.

Jason: How often can I survey my customers, at least for NPS, without asking too often? What’s the right cadence?

Deepa: It really depends on the business. Let’s take a SaaS company for example. If your customers are engaging pretty frequently in your products, I would say once every three months. But what you want to do with that is get a statistical sample. You want to smooth out the collection so that you’re talking to everyone over the course of that three-six month period.

What about segmenting NPS by user group?

Jason: How much should I segment my NPS by customer base?

Deepa: It kind of depends on the size of your user base. That said, segmentation is really useful. If we’re talking about SaaS companies, you want to know how your enterprise base is doing, versus your plus level customers, and so on.

Jason: If you segment between small, medium and large you’re often going to see very different data in those segments, right?

Deepa: Absolutely. But if you don’t have statistical numbers in each of those groups, then your score is just going to be noise [focus instead on the qualitative feedback you are getting.] So you need to think about how big is each user base and whether the numbers are actually significant.

What if I have a low Net Promoter Score?

Jason: Here’s another high level NPS question. What if my NPS is low, say ten or worse?

Deepa: Do not fixate on a low score number. Just worry about moving it and worry about the trend. Your customers are giving you feedback. Take that input, and do everything you can to drive up your score.

Jason: Do you think there are certain industries or verticals that inherently have lower NPS than others?

Deepa: Providing a good user experience is definitely more challenging in some industries. Airlines come to mind. But I don’t want to demotivate any company at the outset. You have to start somewhere. If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Jason: If my NPS is lower than I like, how much can I change it in one period of time? What’s a reasonable expectation? Let’s say I’m at 20, and I want to be at 40. What’s the right goal, and how quickly can I expect results?

Deepa: I think the right goal is a couple of percentage points every period. You know, maybe one period is one quarter, maybe a period is six months.

But what you actually want to see more is different signifiers, not just the score moving up. For instance, how many passives, which are basically low hanging fruit, have I moved over to promoters. Or how many detractors have I gotten to be passives? How many have I rescued from churning? You do want to move the score a couple of points up, but you really want to dig in a little bit more and have tangible shifts that will lead to score increases.

Jason: Let me ask you one more tough question. What should my NPS goal be for the end of next year? For example, if I’m 20, should I aim for 50 percent improvement next year? If I’m already high – if I’m 60 or 70 – should I aim to maintain it, or go even higher?

Deepa: The goal is the same regardless of the number, to get those promoters to give you the referrals. Get those passives to love you. Get those detractors not to churn. That said, if you trust your program, a concrete goal to strive for would be to get it up every single period by a couple percentage points.

How can startups implement Net Promoter Score early?

Jason: Okay, here’s my last question. I want to implement NPS today. I’m busy, I’m tired, I have a lot going on, but I’m excited, and I want to get started. How do I do this with Wootric?

Deepa: If you’re a web application, you need to install one piece of Java Script, just like Google Analytics. If you have a mobile app, it’s a SDK. If you want to use email, you can do that with us as well.

Jason: Okay, so one line of code or some email addresses, and I can get started…Wootric helps me select the right cadence and the right amount of times to hit everybody?

Deepa: We come out with defaults and you can just go with that. But if you want, our customer success team will step in and advise you.

This interview was edited for space and clarity.  Special thanks to the team at Salesforce for Startups.

I’m biased – I like the Net Promoter Score system, and I’m going to tell you why (in a minute). But, I also think we need an unbiased perspective on NPS, one that airs the dirty laundry, so to speak. Net Promoter Score is both a customer loyalty metric and a system for improving loyalty over time. NPS isn’t a perfect metric. It’s also not a complete system. But, most of the people talking about NPS are the ones touting it, which means you’ll rarely find a genuine report of its pros and cons.

Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing here.

In the interests of transparency, I have to say that Wootric, an NPS SaaS platform, suggested I write this piece and requested that I don’t pull any punches. No punches have been pulled.  This is my take.

Net Promoter Score: Pros 

It’s fiercely honest feedback, identifies promoters, and boards love it

As I said, I like Net Promoter Score. In a world of marketing gray areas, biased Yelp reviews, and silent customers reticent to criticize, the NPS question itself is phrased to get the most honest possible response:

“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this product?”

Or, as I like to think of it “On a scale of 0-10, would you tell your best friend they should get this product?”

Because that’s what it’s really asking – are you willing to stake your name and reputation by recommending this product?

You’re not asking whether they like the product. That’s subjective, and they’ll just say “yes” to be nice anyway. You are asking whether they would subject their nearest and dearest to this product. And that brings out a whole other side of human character: Selflessness.

I might use a chipped teacup without thinking twice about it, but if I have a friend over, they get the teacup that’s in pristine condition. When it comes to our friends, we want nothing but the best.

Which is why, when you need a completely honest, unbiased report on how your audience perceives your company, an NPS survey is the single best way to get those answers.

Of course, the obvious reason to use NPS is to identify your promoters so you can encourage and amplify their loud, enthusiastic voices that are the real ambassadors of your brand. The less obvious reason is that it’s one of those board-level metrics everyone can easily understand and rally around.

It’s easy on your customers

But here’s the thing about NPS: It’s one question and an open-ended follow-up. The follow-up “Care to tell us why?” question lets customers elaborate on their score.

They get to cut to the chase and tell you what is important to them in their own words.  As surveys go, this is a great user experience. That’s why response rates are so much higher than the old school “This will only take 5 minutes of your time…” multi-question surveys. And, you get rich qualitative feedback out of it. So, really, the beauty of NPS is in its simplicity. Both for your customers and for you.  It does one thing, and does it very well.

The trouble starts when you expect it to do too much…

The Cons: What are disadvantages of Net Promoter Score?

It’s not a miracle solution

“Anytime anyone presents NPS as the “be all and end all,” they’re wrong.” – Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer, Wootric

Thanks to being ubiquitous — after all, Net Promoter Score is a metric measured by most of the Fortune 100 — many people expect NPS to do more than is realistic. This is often why “Net Promoter Score doesn’t work.” 

NPS works best within the context of a robust customer feedback & listening program.

For example, Melinda Gonzalez implemented salesforce.com’s first ever NPS program, and her process included:

• Using the entire customer journey as a framework against which to measure customer experience.
• Designing a feedback collection strategy with audience segmentation, market segmentation, and customer maturity.
• Taking action on feedback  – because feedback is only as useful as its follow-through.
• Responding to customers, so they know their feedback is valued.
• Measuring improvement targets and adjusting as needed.

I might also add incorporating a brand advocacy program to encourage and leverage promoters, as well as tracking other established metrics like the CSAT that lets customers give feedback on their interaction with your support representatives.

But whatever your recipe for creating and counting happy customers, you’ll need to do more than just send out a single survey.

When companies start paying bonuses on NPS

At Sprint, 20% of employee bonuses are tied to Net Promoter Score. On the surface, that doesn’t seem like the worst idea ever. But think of it this way: Is your goal to improve a score, or to improve your customers’ experiences? They are not one and the same. Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, also uses NPS, but has focused its call centers to give customers more efficient, more helpful service (and follow-up calls and personalized emails). After implementing these efforts, Telstra saw a 3 point rise in their NPS score, and reduced customer churn.

Harvard Business Review’s Rob Markey puts the issue succinctly: “With incentive compensation, you get exactly – and only – what you pay for. Once compensation depends on improving a particular score, people tend to focus on the metric rather than on what it tells you about what customers want or need.”

Another, related pitfall is that employees who receive compensation based on NPS scores tend to coach customers on how to respond, asking for top scores.

In short, use NPS as a compass to guide you to creating better customer service. Don’t treat the number as the end goal, or you’ll find people gaming the system.

When customers answer The Question, but don’t see follow-through

Aside from the best practice of acknowledging any survey response, whether they be good or bad, what customers really need to see is the company acting on their feedback. With NPS, you’re learning what customers struggle with – but without a process in place to use that feedback to inform your product roadmap, customer success efforts, customer service, etc., that feedback too often comes to nothing.

And your customers can tell.

It’s precisely because NPS is so “easy” that it gets abused in this way. But when you don’t take action based on results, NPS won’t magically move the needle for you. The key is to listen, and then proactively deliver what customers need to achieve their desired outcomes. This requires a Net Promoter cycle.

When you put Baby in a corner (ie. NPS isn’t just a one-department thing)

Don’t put Baby in the corner – if it’s one thing we learned from Patrick Swayze, it’s this. And, like Baby, NPS can’t do what it does best when confined. For example, it’s very useful for customer success, especially with identifying promoters and alerting customer service to potential problems, but it’s not just a customer success thing. NPS does its best work as a company-wide metric that has implications and value for just about every customer-facing department.

• Product Development uses NPS feedback to prioritize dev resources.
• Marketing uses NPS to find and ask happy clients to join their advocacy programs (or get valuable metrics to use for case studies).
• Customer Service/Support uses NPS as a signal for when clients need outreach and support.
• Sales uses NPS to identify accounts primed for upsells and referrals (NPS is a strong business intelligence tool).

Contending with a firehose of feedback

We’ve all gotten the survey that gives us one box to check, and offers no way for us to explain what has gone horribly wrong with the product, service or company. It’s so frustrating. If you could only explain it, maybe they could fix it, but the fact that they don’t give you a way to communicate just shows they clearly don’t care.

The beauty of an NPS survey is that it does include an open-ended response section, however, another problem can occur.

The open-ended response section of the NPS survey can become a repository for everything from venting, to how-to questions. This can create chaos for the poor chap trying to analyze NPS feedback, and even if the queries are passed on to appropriate customer service representatives, it’s not a system that scales easily. And if you fail to close the loop with these customers, they’ll be even more frustrated.

The beauty of NPS is that it has one job – don’t make it pull triple-duty as the primary communication outlet.

If people are asking questions via NPS survey, it might indicate that they don’t feel able to elsewhere. Do you have a strong FAQ or Knowledge Base available? Is it easy to contact Support?

Hearing from more customers is a good problem to have, but it can be a challenge. But even if you have multiple channels for communication, you’ll still need a good way to categorize the qualitative data you do get via the survey.  In fact, that is why NPS companies like Wootric offer sentiment and keyword analysis of the qualitative data that their customers receive.  Start by creating categories and tagging responses so you can see where most of the issues are.

So, let’s sum it up…

What are Net Promoter Score Pros and Cons?

Pros:

• Quantifies customer loyalty
• Rich qualitative feedback
• Identifies brand advocates
• Higher response rates than multi-question surveys

Cons:

• Not comprehensive. Complement NPS with other metrics, like CSAT
• Tying compensation to NPS may skew results
• Requires analysis of qualitative feedback

What limitations have you experienced with NPS?  How have you used NPS to create real positive change? Tell me in the comments below or share your thoughts @NikkiElizDemere on Twitter.

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré is a SaaS consultant & Customer Success evangelist. She is the founder of Authentic Curation, and serves as a moderator at @ProductHunt & @GrowthHackers.