The OSG Approach to NPS®, Net Promoter Score: OSG o360™ for CX

At OSG Analytics (OSG), we hear from our clients that they are excited to dive into NPS®, or “Net Promoter score,” so that they can get a tangible number, which gives them a clear picture of how they are doing with their customers. According to the Harvard Business Review, NPS “gauges how consistently a firm turns customers into advocates, by tracking and analyzing three segments: promoters, customers who are so pleased with their experience that they recommend your brand to others; passives, customers who feel they got what they paid for but nothing more and who are not loyal assets with lasting value; and detractors, customers who are disappointed with their experience and harm the firm’s growth and reputation.” This number has served as a great jumping-off point for businesses to understand their customers and how they decide to buy products and services. 

At OSG, however, we believe that one number doesn’t do enough to guide decision-making and that there are actually several steps that should be taken before starting an NPS measuring program, to make sure that your team can put this information into action.  One number alone isn’t enough to justify huge strategic decisions, but NPS alongside data analytics and customer insights can provide a stronger foundation for future planning.

Getting Started with NPS

First, we recommend that if you’re going to undertake an NPS initiative, you need to decide on the blinded versus unblinded approach.  If you decide to go with the blinded approach it means you are taking a traditional Primary Market Research approach.  In this way, customers won’t know who is asking the questions, and you won’t know which individuals are answering them.  This approach allows you to get completely unbiased feedback about your business as well as your competitors.  Also, because the participants are being compensated for their time and effort, you can go into greater depth and detail about what is driving their level of satisfaction, and the key areas you need to improve.  

By contrast, if you decide to go with the unblinded approach, you are reaching out to your own customers and openly requesting their feedback.  Typically this is uncompensated, so you have to be careful about the questions you ask to maximize the return on investment, both of your business’s time and money, and of your customers’ time.  The most important part of this type of feedback is that you need to demonstrate that this is for their benefit, not yours. By gathering customer feedback and clearly taking action upon it to improve customer experiences across the board, customers may feel a stronger sense of loyalty to the brand.  

Furthermore, the biggest key to undertaking an NPS initiative is having a robust closed-loop system that lets you promptly follow up with individuals if they give you any negative feedback.  This can show your customers that you are earnest about trying to improve their experience, not just win more business by keeping their attention.

Impacts of Understanding NPS

In the end, regardless of the approach you take, it’s good to think critically about what you want to measure as the drivers of NPS. Consider the entire customer journey, from discovery and the purchase process, through use and end of product life, all the way to repeat purchase and advocacy.  Ultimately, NPS is a rough benchmark that is easily swayed – you’ll get a very different answer with these two approaches.  If you understand the “why”, though, you can do something about it.

By understanding how customers make decisions and choices, the “why” behind the “what” of the traditional transactional customer data, businesses have a better chance of finding opportunities for increasing their sales. Through engaging inactive prospects with feedback surveys, upselling and cross-selling products, and driving home a value proposition, gathering data for NPS purposes and the data analytics can help show opportunities for easy and sustainable growth.  

OSG’s Solution for NPS Analytics: OSG o360™ for CX

The topic of understanding NPS has come up so frequently that we’ve built a platform to help our clients hit the ground running with closed-loop NPS feedback quickly. From pharmaceutical to retail companies, NPS has turned into a buzzword for understanding customers and business potential. But going beyond NPS to more actionable and effective analytics is the step that most businesses don’t take. By pairing our powerful analytics with the benchmarking qualities of NPS, OSG can help your business kickstart its customer experience management and improvement strategies. Please contact our experts if you’d like to learn more about getting a customer experience program started today!

Net Promoter^®, NPS^®, NPS Prism^®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.