Why Net Promoter Score Isn't Enough, Part 2

By Janet Jaiswal, Senior Director of Product Marketing —

In part one of this series on Net Promoter Score, I discussed some of the common complaints I heard from colleagues at the first-annual Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) conference. Surprisingly enough, these complaints came from companies that had implemented NPS and were disappointed that it didn't help them achieve their goals of creating satisfied customers that would become more loyal patrons and even advocates of their brands over time.



Enter Customer Experience Management

According to Wikipedia, Customer Experience Management is a strategy that focuses the operations and processes of a business around the needs of the individual customer. The term 'Customer Experience Management' also represents the discipline, methodology and/or process used to comprehensively manage a customer's cross-channel exposure, interaction and transaction with a company, product, brand or service." Customer experience management solutions provide strategies, process models, and information technology to design, manage and optimize the end-to-end customer experience process.

One of the key features of successful CEM implementations is their ability to manage multi-channel interactions. Customer experience solutions address the cross-channel (contact center, Internet, self service, mobile devices, brick and mortar stores), cross-touchpoint (phone, chat, email, Web, in-person), and cross-lifecycle (ordering, fulfillment, billing, support, etc.) nature of the customer experience process.

NPS and CEM: A Comparison

Now that we have a standard definition of CEM, let's compare it to Net Promoter Score to further our understanding their merits and how they complement each other. Because I know the Tealeaf CEM solution well, I will use to as a way to illustrate what a CEM solution can do and address some of the complaints about NPS in my earlier posts.

Real-time Insight vs. Lagging Indicator: The Tealeaf CEM solution is real-time so it's easy to understand what your customers are experiencing and their satisfaction level up-to-the-minute. No need to worry if the actions you are taking based on your customer's satisfaction from last year's or even last quarter's survey has changed and therefore invalid. Furthermore, if there are any changes to your processes, offering or service, you can measure its effects on your user's satisfaction in real time. No need to wait for the next annual NPS survey (relationship or transactional based) to find out, as many of the larger companies tend to do.

Every Customer vs. a Subset of Customers: Measuring only a subset of users could be subject to biases or changes in score depending on when the survey was implemented. Tealeaf's CEM solutions measure 100 percent of users so as to avoid any inaccuracies due to biases of the sample size or time of implementation. By the way, this also enables call centers to leverage this real-time CEM information, as the agents have complete confidence they'll have insight into the actions of any given caller who's spilled over from the website or mobile service.

Dashboards vs. Reviewing Every Comment: To obtain insights from the survey beyond the score, a CX professional has to read the comments and interpret them—be it a transactional or a relationship-focused NPS. This time-consuming task can be avoided with Tealeaf, thanks to decision-driving dashboards and ad hoc segmentation for business impact analysis. Tealeaf leverages algorithmic discovery to automatically surface the highest-impact customer-facing issues and display them in a real-time Top Movers & Drivers dashboard. This directs attention to exactly where users are struggling the most at any given moment, enabling businesses to respond to the issues their customers are encountering as they occur, rather than relying on after-the-fact analysis.

So does this mean that the NPS should be abandoned and replaced with a CEM solution? Certainly not. However, NPS can be made more effective by using a CEM solution such as Tealeaf to better understand the reason for the score and, ultimately, help you improve it. Tealeaf allows you to understand why a customer gave you a low rating by viewing that customer's sessions. In addition, by evaluating changes to your site or process in real time, you will be better prepared to provide an improved customer experience and ultimately, raise your NPS scores. We've seen this benefit with any number of our customers.