Rene van Popering, Director of Solutions Architecture at Contexta360 looks at how businesses can take a more sophisticated and effective approach.
How useful is the Net Promoter Score today?
Can it help me to manage my service centre employees?
Is NPS a good way to measure success?
I do not think it is and, to be honest, I would judge it as a legacy rating. I believe there are better ways today to identify satisfaction and loyalty.
Human behaviour is complex, and is affected by a person’s character, hormones, childhood patterns and many, many other variables. Some people always seem to be relaxed, whereas others always appear to be on edge, ready to explode at a moment’s notice.
In a business sense, contact centre staff will be exposed to this full range of emotion from customers every day. Your staff need to judge the request and the level of emotion in the first 30 seconds of a conversation to be able to respond appropriately as the empathic, friendly helping hand. Looking at the engagement types, the voice channel rather than chat is where you handle the more sophisticated conversations, and this is where you need to make sure that you deal with clients in a satisfactory way.
Generally, understanding of NPL loyalty and satisfaction insights are poor. A typical response to questioning is “we have a bit of an impression of who are promoters or detractors” as post-survey processes manage this in some form. The challenge is balancing this out as some customers are irritated if they receive surveys after every type of engagement, even simple tasks.
A post-survey process can often catch the very angry and very happy feedback at either end of the emotional spectrum. However, it often misses the middle-ground opinions where you have achieved the appropriate balance, being a friendly, trustworthy company with the proper level of attention.
Observing survey results from a different angle, I would rather see a promoter scoring results by looking at human engagement and emotion-handling skills.
A conversation analysis approach can be a more detailed and sophisticated way to monitor success and establish a customer-friendly corporate culture. By analysing all engagements and measuring the factors that impact loyalty and satisfaction, you can ensure your staff are able to deal with every customer effectively, whatever the emotional state of that customer during their contact. This is far more effective than relying on low-bandwidth, post-submitted responses.
If you would like to get in touch, please contact Contexta360