Customer Experience

Measuring Customer Experience beyond NPS

The growing importance of understanding the “Voice of Customer” has put the NPS (Net Promoter Score) at the center of the stage. But does NPS really provide insights into your customer experience?

While the intent of NPS is to give an idea of the customer’s ‘likelihood to recommend’ the company, the challenge lies in understanding the reasoning behind the score. Some of the elements that can make NPS less accurate and representative of the current position of the company are:

•    Small sample size

The questionnaire response rate currently stands at 2% on average – in an ideal setting there should be enough data points to determine what the state is of the full picture, in order to generalize the results from the sample to all the cases.

•    Inability to drill down into the “why” and “how”

This limitation can’t be addressed by NPS alone because the survey question given to customers need to be short and crisp to get responses. Most of the time the survey questions are also not open ended which limits the information that can be provided. 

•    Customer bias

Customer bias can skew the NPS score. One of the main factors that contribute to the bias can be a result of timing, meaning that the customer recently went through a really good or really bad experience. In this case they might even go out of their way to voice their thoughts, which you don’t wanna miss!

•    An increasing number of alternatives

Having a number of alternatives available to customers leads to customers comparing the product instead of providing their thoughts on the customer experience of a recent interaction.

“Listening” Vs “Asking” Voice of Customer

When the NPS metric was introduced by Fred Reicheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix in 2003, the application of Artificial intelligence (AI) to understand customer experience was considered a concept far from reality. With the hype around autonomous cars and robots, marketing as a disciple was rather a laggard in exploration and adoption of use cases enabled by AI based approaches.

Fortunately, the digital revolution we are going through is transforming the collection & utilization of data that comes with it. For instance, what if there was no need to conduct surveys to understand how your customers feel? Well, there isn’t, anymore! One game-changer advancement in AI is the ability to gather insights from all customer interactions by listening and understanding the human language as it’s spoken. The fancier way of saying this is NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming).

Voice of Customer Decoded

Using AI to listen to the Voice of the Customer is not only cost effective, but also scalable – across 100% of customer interactions.

What makes it more interesting is that it lets you get insights on what the customer are saying and their satisfaction levels across all channels from call, to email, chat, text messages etc. – including inbound & outbound interactions. Most importantly, there is no bias in the answers you receive, as you might get when conducting surveys.

Here are our 3 key takeaways for today:

1. NPS doesn’t provide the details on how the customers’ experience was
2. A good experience doesn’t always mean that person will refer you – they may not like your product, but the experience was just fine
3. The solution is not in asking more questions or sending out surveys in different channels, it’s about using AI to really “listen” to the voice of the customer

Click here to book a quick demo and find out how we can enable you to listen to the real Voice of Customer.