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Would you or Will you? How to Make NPS a Profit Center

Customer Experience professionals have fully adopted the Net Promoter Score, invented by Fred Reichheld from Bain and Company.  To get an NPS score, a company asks a customer if they would recommend the product/service to a friend on a scale of 1-10.  Subtract the 0-6 responses from the 9 and 10's to get a NPS score.  Simple, comprehensible, implementable, measurable. Powerful.  There are few alternative approaches that can deliver what NPS does to measure customer satisfaction. But many practitioner  stop at NPS and leave valuable business on the table.

This is why I am suggesting a minor but important tweak to the NPS program.  Its time for customer focused companies to evolve from the subjunctive "Would you" recommend and increase focus on driving real recommendations. With this simple shift, businesses move from measuring hypothetical intent to real promotion.  With this shift, Voice of Customer can move from cost center to profit center.

NPS Scoring Bridges a Measurement Gap
When NPS was developed, both companies and the customers they served were new to the measure.  To avoid coming off too presumptuous, the creators took the polite approach to a personal question.  By posing the question in terms of "Would you" the respondent is not pressured into actually making a referral and a more accurate measure of customer sentiment can be captured.

This is one of the reasons why the measurement only considers 9+10 responders as "promoters".  Only 9 and 10's, the thinking goes, feel passionately enough to actually mention something to their family and friends. This ingenious approach bridges an obvious gap in being able to track a cusomter's actual promoter/detractor behavior.

Recommendations can now be measured
Customers and companies have both evolved since those early days, as has the technology to enable more immediate promotion actions.  Unlike an individual letter or phone call of the past, today customers are armed with likes, shares, tweets, yelps, amazon recommendations, and email shares with just a few clicks. These methods have great reach across a person's social graph while helping to close the gaps in tracking a customer's activity.  Whole new sources of information on recommendation behavior now exist, including details on the # of promotions made, to which demographic clusters, with what influence (Klout, BzzAgent, Amazon Recommendations).  Marketers make many decisions with all this information, and some companies like Amazon and NetFlix are aggressively capturing actual purchase behavior as a result of promotions and referrals, and recommendations.

Tips to Evolve your NPS from Would to Will
  1. Promote the Promoter 
    • Be Social: The first step fort a customer to be able to promote you is to build and maintain a presence in social channels like twitter and Facebook.  
    • Make it easy to promote you: Prominently post links the customer can follow to like your page.
    • Go beyond the Like: PURL's are personalized links that pre-populate status updates in the customers social account.  In this case, new policy holders can click through a welcome email to post an image of Snoopy with a "I just got life insurance with MetLife" message.  
  2. Got a Member Get Member program?   
    • Whats a new customer worth? If you could develop an organic lead generation engine, how much would a paying customer be worth? 
    • What can you give for free?  AT&T offers $25 for each service you refer.
    • Media buy goes 1 to 1: Consider the MGM program one more marketing media channel and allocate resources based on its performance against traditional TV, internet, and other channels. 
    • Create an engaging MGM experience: Be clear on the value proposition and make the experience enjoyable/easy for both the customer and the people they refer.  
  3. Every Survey is Sacred? A lot of practitioners believe that you shouldn't include promotion links in the actual NPS survey if you want to maintain score integrity.  That made sense when the NPS measure bridged the promoter behavior gap.  But we are now tracking actual recommendation behavior and more actively influencing tangible promotions when they are most relevant to a customer.
    • Consider a pop up message for respondents with a 7-10 score.  Thank them for their patronage and suggest they share the love with their social network.
    • Target MGM program offers for high score NPS  respondents.
  4. Measure to Manage
    • Do No Harm: Just like the doctor's oath, cultivating promoter behavior is intended to create a positive result. Be vigilant for potential negative reactions to satisfaction and profitability measures.
    • Understand your Sources:One thing any social media professional will tell you is to consider each media as its own entity, with pros and cons from a reach, impact, control and cost perspective.  Part of your measurement should be to evaluate the quality of promotions from each source and its ultimate impact on profit measures.  
    • The Pursuit of Purchase Behavior: One reason coupons have lasted so long is the valuable information marketers gather on customer buying behavior and price elasticity.  Make the investment to build the same rigor into tracking actual purchases back to the promoter source.
    • Optimize: use the data to make more intelligent offers to the right populations and drive increased program profitability.

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