Most Customer Experience practitioners use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a measurement of customer loyalty and a predictor of business growth.
NPS is a simple, practical, and actionable (e.g. event-triggered NPS) key performance indicator, and an informative measurement because it reflects two aspects.
- The inspirational side of NPS
This is when the score tells us the extent to which a company has enriched people’s lives and realised its mission – or the purpose behind its existence – as perceived by its customers.
- The economical side of NPS
Viewing the score from this perspective reflects how ‘healthy’ an organization is – the higher the NPS, the healthier a company is.
In short, the inspirational and economical sides of NPS describe how a company is relevant to customers and healthy in terms of business growth.
Cultivating a culture of customer-centricity
Although the Net Promoter Score is a very reliable measure of business growth, it’s not enough alone to sustain it! Generating sustainable profits from loyal customers is not a one-off event – it’s a continuous process; it’s a way of doing business. From my experience in organizational development and change management, any sustainable change needs to be a system perspective, otherwise, a change effort/initiative would be just a “flavour of the month”.
Cultivating a culture of customer-centricity is the framework and foundation of delivering value-added Customer Experience. Yet, what exactly do we mean when we describe a “customer-focused culture”?
In a customer-focused culture, the top management treat the creation of happy customers, and having fewer detractors, as a critical mission for all levels of a company, not because it’s something noble, but because it’s profitable! A leadership development program and executive coaching could be the solutions for changing mindsets and building the right leadership for successful and sustainable change.
NPS as an element in a large system
In a customer-focused culture, treating Voice of the Customer (VoC) as a great learning opportunity is crucial. Supervisors continuously coach their team and regularly host cross-functional meetings for problem-solving and reaching a consensus.
Meanwhile, organizational development is a company-wide process of data collection, diagnosis, action planning, intervention, and evaluation. It’s a planned change based on behavioural science to unfreeze the current status, move forward, and reach the desired status.
NPS must be treated as just one element of a system; it’s a way of creating a true sense of urgency inside a company and stimulating change to the status quo and moving forward. NPS as a system is about the sustainable commitment of leadership to customer advocacy; it’s about having the right technological infrastructure for getting more insights into customer behaviour.
It’s about an engaged workforce for better strategy implementation, continuous learning, and improvement.
Simply put, it’s a way of doing business.
The Net Promoter System® developed by Bain & Company (as shown in the figure below) is a great framework for Customer Experience professionals and executives in guiding their change efforts and making sustainable business growth a success.
Mohammed Aziz is a judge at the 2020 Gulf Customer Experience Awards.