Syed Hasan, CEO, ResponseTek
In recent months, I have seen several articles written about customer advocacy and NPS as customer metrics. This is great; it means companies are thinking about the experiences that they deliver to their customers. But measuring NPS or advocacy isn’t enough. Without additional information behind the measurement and organizational commitment to use the information, companies won’t realize the promised benefits.
These metrics provide a simple, single measure to evaluate how customers feel about the interactions they have with a business. It’s easy to measure—“Would you recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” is widely referred to as the only question that companies need to ask their customers. It’s also easy to understand. It represents the customers who feel positively about a business; the higher the number, the better the business is delivering what customers want—and the more likely the business is to grow.
Yet, on its own, NPS or advocacy cannot reveal who a company’s advocates or opponents are, or why they fall into either category.
Early adopters, who have been successful in aligning their organizations around the metric, are beginning to ask “What next?” They have their scores, but are missing detail behind the scores to allow them to assign accountability within their organizations for improving the customer experience. To leverage the momentum that comes with implementing NPS, companies need to adopt an approach that incorporates the information into tangible improvement of their day-to-day processes.
Operationalizing NPS
As a practice, Advocacy Improvement is centered on increasing a company's advocates and reducing its opponents. It spans the organization to improve the customer experience and uses customers’ likelihood to recommend as a foundation from which to develop rich, customer-driven data that provides executives and front-line employees with information behind NPS, allowing them to make decisions to positively affect it.
There are two parts to Advocacy Improvement: change from the top down and from the bottom up. Most early adopters have achieved top-down improvement. An executive leads the organization toward improving overall NPS scores. The company has their own score as an internal target, and as measuring NPS becomes widely adopted, the company has a powerful industry benchmark.
What organizations are missing—and need to incorporate into their strategies—is bottom up improvement. This begins with improving advocacy scores by improving customer experience on a tactical level, one customer at-a-time. Front-line employees receive real-time customer-driven evaluations of the employee-customer interaction. Rather than executives dictating what to improve, front-line employees have the information that they need to make the behavioral changes necessary to improve the customer experience. Because these employees interact with customers on a daily basis, they have the most influence over the outcome of each customer interaction and therefore need relevant information on a timely—hourly or daily—basis.
Both the top-down and bottom-up views of customer advocacy are necessary to achieve continuous long-term change. From the bottom-up, the company gets a micro-level view of the experience, and from the top-down, they get a macro summary. Employees have access to information that is most relevant to their role in the organization: Executives are not bogged down by detail, and front-line employees know exactly where in the customer’s experience the company failed—and where to fix it.
Approaching change from the top-down and bottom-up leads organizations towards improving the delivered customer experience overall, and for each customer. As a result, companies that demonstrate a commitment to Advocacy Improvement see continuous performance improvement as employees see and understand how their behavior affects customers.
While it’s great that companies are thinking about their customers’ experiences, companies that don’t provide their employees with operational tools and information to use the customer experience information that they gather risk losing the momentum that they’ve gained.
Learn More
Learn more about Advocacy Improvement: email us, with Advocacy Improvement in the subject line.
NPS is a trademark of Bain & Company.
