What's best practice on relationship NPS - surveying as many contacts as possible or be selective?

Answers

  • Neal Hatton
    Neal Hatton Member | Enthusiast ✭

    Hi Kate. I was at a TSIA conference several years ago when the keynote speaker (from the TSIA) informed the audience that NPS was "dead" as a measure. That said, it continues to be used commonly and I will offer some suggestions here.

    1. Surveys tend to have low completion rates. For this reason you will need to lean towards a larger number of contacts being surveyed in order to get a meaningful number of completed surveys back.
    2. Consider how you want to segment your customers - industry, products used, gender, region, age, etc, etc. The more segmentation you have of your customer base will drive a need for a larger pool of people surveyed to ensure all of your segments get covered and you get enough responses from each to have a good, actionable, end-result.


  • Carlos Alves
    Carlos Alves TSIA Administrator, Moderator, Founding Member | admin

    NPS may be used, however the problem I found is that:

    1- people did not use it properly, without adequate method of data gathering and/or analysis.

    2- used and the one-and-only truthful KPI and creating action plans based solely on them.

    This TSIA Blog post may help you: https://www.tsia.com/blog/3-steps-to-more-insightful-value-from-net-promoter-scores

    In my opinion you should target who you expect to be answering, because your answers are going to be more precise. Sometimes shooting for everyone gives you a too low response rate and may . Define segments as @Neal Hatton recommends: it's a nice way to think about it.

  • Alexander Ziegler
    Alexander Ziegler Founding Member | Expert ✭✭✭

    Reading all available research the key is as indicated by Carlos not to take the number as the single key element. It is important to use the number plus additional input from the one giving the NPS with something like "Comment" or "Why did you give the NPS". And it is also important to not compare NPS between different areas (e.g. service against product or one geography against another...). This means you need to collect NPS, and then observe over time and read the comments and adapt based on the comments. Once you keep those rules in place using NPS is according to lots of research and lots of Fortune 100 companies still a very valuable approach to improve quality. If you need more information or details please feel free to ping me.

  • Thank you for all the feedback and lots of good ideas - I'm watching the webinars for additional insights.

    As context, we ran a relationship NPS pilot in 2020 with our client success managers and sales identifying contacts, so more hand-picked contacts versus our entire community - not all data was accurate so high bounce backs in some cases, and lower numbers of responses per accounts in other cases. We also found variation in the more senior the title, the more influence on loyalty and future business, and manager level who are closer to the work were stronger advocates. Our last finding was with all the security on external emails, our clients flag any emails with over 50 recipients, impacting response rates. Your feedback aligns with some of these findings (segment audience, target large enough of sample, ensure responses lead to actionable plans). Thanks again.