All organizations care about their Net Promoter Score (NPS). It’s a measure of if a customer would recommend your business to others and correlates to the customer experience. That endorsement carries much weight, so it’s often a priority for companies. Your company can use many tactics and strategies to improve these scores. Ideally, you want those to be effective and not cause extra strain on resources or systems.
Let’s look at some key ways to boost NPS scores by working smarter, not harder.
What is NPS, and why does it matter?
NPS measures customer experience and their propensity to recommend your business. It can also represent customer loyalty.
Its origins are from Frederick Reichheld and a team from Bain & Company. Reichheld claimed that NPS was “the best predictor of growth” for a business.
How It Works
Customers provide a score of 0-10 on the question, “How likely are you to recommend a company’s product or services?”
The formula for calculation is the percentage of promoters divided by the percentage of detractors. Here’s how those categories break down:
- Detractors (0-6): They are unlikely to recommend and have a negative sentiment.
- Passives (7-8): They like you but aren’t enthusiastic.
- Promoters (9-10): They love you and want to promote you.
An excellent score is 50 or higher. NPS scores can range from -100 to 100. To understand your sector, you can find benchmarks for NPS by industry on Statista. According to this data, the education and training sectors rank the highest, and healthcare companies rank the lowest.
Why NPS Matters
NPS is a unique and essential metric for businesses that you can work to improve. It’s simple because it’s only one question. It can also relate to any business.
You can also ask for a rating about the company as a whole or a specific experience, product, or service.
In addition to asking for the rating, you can add a follow-up question—“Why did you submit that score?”—for more context. That feedback can enable you to dig deeper when someone is a detractor or passive.
How can you improve your NPS score to make customer experiences memorable?
NPS scores do have a lot to do with the quality of your product or service. However, the response from a customer may be more tied to their interactions with your company. How you make them feel often influences customer thoughts about brands way more. In fact, many buyers prioritize customer experience over the actual product or service.
Knowing this, you have an opportunity to enhance these interactions by integrating technology rather than putting more strain on your employees. The critical piece of technology is conversational AI. It can help you work smarter, not harder, to increase NPS scores.
Self-Service Options Powered by Conversational AI
Customers prefer to help themselves, but it’s only positive when they find what they need.
Conversational AI returns more accurate responses because it understands both the intent and sentiment of human language. It analyzes the query, quickly searches through all available information, and delivers the answer.
In many cases, customers get what they need and never create a ticket. After their self-service session, you can present them with the NPS question. Odds are if they got what they needed, and it was convenient, they’ll score the experience high.
Agent Assistance with Conversational AI
Some customers will bypass self-service and submit a ticket. However, they still expect fast responses that resolve their challenge. Based on the information in the ticket, AI becomes a tool to assist agents. It can automatically capture knowledge base information, existing macros, and past ticket history. Agents can then use this to reply to the customer with the best answer. After such an interaction, you can ask the NPS question.
In both these scenarios, you can delight customers and alleviate burdens on support teams. With such an intelligent technology, you can impact NPS scores without disrupting team dynamics, investing lots of money, or reconfiguring your support ecosystem. Conversational AI can integrate seamlessly into your help desk.
Conversational AI is the smart answer for boosting NPS scores.
Improving your NPS score doesn’t have to be complicated or require lots of time and energy. You can do many things to transform the customer experience, and technology allows you to do this with relative ease. With conversational AI, you can improve self-service and agent interaction. Happier customers are more likely to recommend you and stay loyal.
Learn more about conversational AI by exploring, What Is Conversational AI, and Why Does It Matter?
