Play Book for Operational CX based on NPS
Best practices and recommendations!
Introduction
This is a document dedicated to organizations who want inspiration on how to set-up and drive a successful customer experience, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty program. The best practices and recommendations are based on years of experience from organizations running NPS based CX programs implemented by nps.today.
The document will suggest how traditional customer satisfaction surveys can be turned into a continuous program that is an integrated part of your daily business and your customer relationship management. The program is based on the NPS method. If you are not familiar with NPS, you should first learn about it here: https://nps.today/article/what-is-nps/
A few words about nps.today
nps.today makes it easy to measure, understand and act on customer experience to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. The unique plug-in solutions for your existing IT systems make it easy to implement a fully automated and operational CX solution. Measure experience and loyalty in all touchpoints, analyze results and take actions inside your existing IT systems.
Operational CX/NPS
nps.today help organizations move from analytical and project based CX to operational program based CX. This means moving away from measuring, understanding, and acting on customer feedback in projects occasionally. Instead, your customer experience radar should always be switched on, so bad experience and risk of extra costs or even losing customers can be handled with recovery and proactive actions before it is too late. Keeping your customer engagement on track based on feedback becomes part of the daily business instead of occasional workloads disturbing the daily business.
See this article for more inspiration on Operational CX https://nps.today/article/advice-operational-cx/
NPS based Customer Experience surveys
With a NPS based customer experience program, you can measure both customer experience, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty with the same simple method. All surveys start with a rating question on the scale of 0-10. Surveys should be short and precise and very easy to respond to. In e-mail surveys, it will increase your response rate, if the initial rating can be clicked and stored immediately from the e-mail.
Then a rating based follow up question is asked. Rating reason (categorization) can be added to the follow up question. With the nps.today Basic Module you can also ask up to 5 additional questions in the same survey.
The closing text can also be based on the initial rating and can include links to relevant further information or encouragement to do a public review on Trustpilot or other public ratings.
By adding rating reasons (categorization), you will be able to report on the rating reasons and identify pains or business drivers to be prioritized when you improve the customer experience.
nps.today is a dedicated customer experience platform and offers many features to help you perform survey excellence with easy implementation. These includes:
See more here: https://nps.today/platform/
How to listen to your customers across the customer journey
Having your customer radar turned on all the time will give your customers the opportunity to share their experiences and feedback when they have something to say and not only when you like to hear from them.
Likewise, you have the opportunity to check if everything is going well in the most critical customer transactions and you can take action to bring things back on track or generally improve your customers’ experience and satisfaction.
You should work with two major survey types. The rNPS (Relational) and the tNPS (Transactional). The rNPS is the overall customer satisfaction and loyalty survey measured with the classic NPS question.
The tNPS is the individual experience and satisfaction survey (also known as CSAT) you do in your customer touchpoints across the customer journey.
You can listen to your customers in many ways and through many channels. Your first priority should be to make sure the survey is relevant to the customer. This can be done by timing the survey correctly, for example should the rNPS never be asked too early in the relation as the customer probably won’t be able to rate your company until they have some experience as a customer. The tNPS surveys should be timed considering the type of experience. If you want to know if a customer parcel delivery went well and the trigger is “shipped”, you should consider a suitable delay to ensure the customer actually have received the parcel.
You can find examples on surveys across the customer journey here: https://nps.today/solutions/
With both an rNPS program and maybe several tNPS surveys running continuously, the survey program excellence becomes very important, especially to avoid survey fatigue. Your antispam rules and settings must be set across survey campaigns to make sure your customers are not over surveyed and get irritated.
Another way to listen to your customers without disturbing them too much is to offer passive feedback options. The e-mail survey, the SMS survey, the online pop-up survey etc. are all considered “active” or prompt surveys. But you can reach out and offer customers easy ways to share feedback in many other ways that will not disturb them. This could be a small “Click here to share your experience” button in a newsletter or on a website, it could be a QR code on a delivery note or by the self-service register in a supermarket. Used correctly, the QR code works very well. One of our customers is even using it successfully to collect feedback in a streaming service on TV.
Read this article to learn more about how to measure with NPS: https://nps.today/article/the-best-way-to-measure-nps/
Relational NPS program (rNPS)
Traditional surveys often include several questions about experiences which are not in fresh memory or maybe even not relevant to the respondent. Surveys with several questions will have much lower response rate and may even drive survey fatigue. Some have added the NPS recommendation question at the end of a survey with the likely effect that the NPS rating is influenced by other experiences than the overall impression.
In the ideal NPS survey, only the NPS question is asked. Other ratings and feedback should be collected separately.
If you still need to ask more than one specific question in a survey, especially in the relational survey, these should be asked after the primary survey question and the related follow up question, to make sure the primary question is not influenced by other experiences.
If you make your relational NPS program operational, you will gain many benefits. First, you should not only ask selected customers, and especially not only contacts selected by employees with close customer relations. This would most likely give you the wrong impression of the situation.
When designing your customer experience program, you need to be very sure what you expect to gain. Do you just want to adjust or improve occasionally to overall feedback, or do you want an operational program providing real time insights and the opportunity to react fast to bad experiences, both on an individual level, customer level and in general?
To gain maximum effect from your relational NPS program, you should ask all customers and all relevant contacts. If they are a customer, their opinion should matter. Else they should probably not be your customer.
Secondly you should not check your overall performance only once or twice a year, but all the time. If you have 2.000 customers, you could consider asking 10 every day instead. This way you will get constant feedback on changes in your company, product, services, and customer experience.
When running a continuous relational NPS program, you will be able to monitor, benchmark and take actions much faster as your NPS graph will be alive and give you input all the time.
Transactional NPS program (tNPS)
Measuring customer experience in transactions is something still more organizations think they need to do. And with good reason. First of all, if you do it correctly, the customer will feel appreciated and will be happy to share their experiences. Secondly you get an opportunity to turn a bad experience into a good experience, which will not only increase your customers’ loyalty (improve rNPS) but you can save huge costs of trying to solve issues too late or even win back the customer.
The most common transaction for continuous experience surveys is in customer service or support (the customer contact center). But customer feedback can be a valuable tool in almost any part of the customer journey. Imagine a salesperson getting objective feedback on a quote and maybe even an indicator of customers likeliness to buy or a delivery manager learning early about problems in a delivery before it gets hard and expensive to fix.
One example is one of our customers building private homes. They measure (check) the quality of the customer journey and delivery (building the house) 11 times during the whole process. Individual bad experiences and deviations are immediately taken care of in the right way and in addition the NPS score and history per touchpoint can be monitored for benchmarking and general improvements.
These are simulated data
Customer Pulse and proactive customer experience management
Most organizations focus their feedback management on the individual response. It makes perfectly good sense to set rules and automated alarms and actions for individual response follow up, based on the rating and individual reasons.
But you can do so much more. Imagine if you could see the individual response history back in time in the customer engagement systems you use every day. Like the example below where a delivery manager sees a 5 rating only a month ago directly in the Outlook e-mail from the customer. Maybe this would encourage him to put in a little extra effort to make sure the customers don’t get the same experience.
Survey results can be exposed to customer facing employees in many systems like the telephony/contact center system, service system and of course the CRM system.
Imagine adding up customer experience responses into a Customer Pulse in your CRM system instead of just looking at the individual ratings. You can also do this on account level and have a targeted account CX score that will help you act proactively, and trigger prioritized alarms based on not only the overall NPS score or rating, but also on other customer data like ABC categorization, revenue etc.
Automations and integrations
Making your CX program across rNPS and tNPS fully operational requires system integration and automation.
Triggers:
Sending out the rNPS survey can be done in many ways. In some set-up’s fully automated and in other semi-automated, depending on available data and system features. In some cases, a first order or customer start date could be used. If this is not available another possibility is to add a field with a yearly survey date for each existing and new customer. nps.today works with each of our customers to help them set up the best automation possible.
The easiest way to set up automated tNPS surveys in transactions is with a trigger push from the system handling the transaction. This requires the customer engagement system to have such a feature, either by configuring a script, flow, process, or other automation. Unfortunately, not all systems offer this capability. In these cases, the nps.today Connect Kit could be used to set up a pull service to check for new events and data changes that should trigger a survey. nps.today also offers support for middleware like Microsoft Power Automate and Zapier.
Response data back:
To drive proactive customer relationship management, all employees with customer facing activities should be able to easily see customers historic responses in the IT-systems they use to handle customer interactions. This could be a pop-up on an inbound call, or a response list on a case/ticket in your service system. In some cases, the actual CX feedback data is moved into the customer system and in other cases like with NPS for Outlook, the responses are just visualized in a window or frame.
Follow up:
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Automatic notifications and alarms for responsible employees, managers, shared inboxes and even Slack, Teams etc. can easily be set up with nps.today. But if response data is moved to your customer engagement system, more advanced follow up and recovery actions can be configured. This could be a new ticked or a re-opened ticket if there is a detractor or if a “Did you get the solution you needed” additional question is marked with a “no”. It could also be a warning on a customer dropping below your predefined average rating limit for your A segment customers. This should include reminders for employees not meeting follow-up deadlines or even internal escalation.
Plug-in’s and CX for CRM
All your customer feedback data should be available in your primary customer engagement system or CRM system, just like any other data related to the customer and the customer relationship management.
Some of your current IT-systems may have basic built-in survey capabilities. But these do rarely support the necessary features to understand reasons and drive the right actions. Furthermore, these are often silo solutions with limited channel support and will only show feedback collected with the particular system and not in other transactions and channels.
nps.today offer integration to the most common customer engagement systems. These are both Plug-in integrations, connectors, and templates. If an off-the-shelf integration is not offered, the nps.today Connect Kit will most likely still make your integration much easier rather than having to build it from scratch.
Some of the nps.today integration solutions are fully native featured plug-ins. These can include both a trigger feature, data back, calculated CX fields, CX/NPS graphs, reports, and dashboards and more.
The native integrations include for example Salesforce, Dynamics 365, SuperOffice, Lime CRM, Puzzel, Miralix, Zylinc and others.
NPS for Dynamics 365 Contact screen example
If response data is moved into the customer system, these can be used to drive the Customer Pulse with calculated average rating on customers (both on Contacts and Accounts), under rating limit warnings, follow up actions and customer satisfaction and loyalty plans.
With the customer feedback in your CRM system, your employees don’t have to start using a new system to work with customer experience and will complete their follow up in the systems they use every day.
Please read more about nps.today integrations and plug-in’s here: https://nps.today/integrations/
KPI’s, dashboarding, analytics and reporting
With the nps.today Live Web Dashboards included in the basic platform, you can easily set-up live dashboards showing incoming responses and the most common NPS data and graphs. With live dashboards on the walls in, for example, the contact center, delivery or in the sales department you will drive more customer focus in your organization. Promoter ratings dropping in will be celebrated and detractors will come into the radar zone and be subject for discussion about reasons and what to do.
More detailed response and CX data analysis should be done in a more advanced and interactive solution, where you can filter, slice, drill down etc. into your data, to identify reasons for good and bad ratings and prioritize actions with most effect.
With nps.today Connect Kit, you can connect nps.today to almost any BI tool. More and more organizations are using Microsoft Power BI or are planning to, and based on this, nps.today has developed a full blown CX analysis platform based on Power BI called Power Dashboards.
Power dashboards are delivered as a plug-and-play app for Power BI and require a Power BI license. It is easily connected to the nps.today platform with the API / Flow module.
All your survey response data can be exported into Excel reports either directly from nps.today or from Power Dashboards.
When you roll out your rNPS and tNPS survey campaigns, you should have decided how to use the feedback and data and which KPI’s you wish to report and monitor.
First, you should be able to break down the overall company rNPS into relevant measure points like regions, departments, teams and individual responsible. rNPS scores can also be reported on customer types and segments, on product types etc.
Your tNPS campaigns should be individually monitored and could for example be aggregated into customer journey scores across marketingNPS, salesNPS, deliveryNPS, serviceNPS etc. and finally into an overall tNPS.
Your reporting and feedback insight should start from the single response and responsible and aggregate all the way to the top management and board with easy to understand and live updated dashboards instead of traditional PowerPoint based static information. While probably having set-up frequent report digests, everybody should also be able to pull exactly the data they need and when they need it, without having to involve anyone to get the insights one needs.
You can customize and extend your Power Dashboards in any way you like and perhaps include customer data from other sources to get even deeper insights. Here is an example of a combined graph, where the NPS detractors, passives and promoters are combined with the customer revenue to easily spot high revenue customers with low NPS, that you should probably focus your recovery actions on immediately or a group of small customers with low NPS that might not be the right customers for your company.
Your transformation program
We highly recommend, that you make the CX response follow up part of your operational calendar to gain maximum value of your CX investment. Many of our customers set up monthly feedback walk over meetings in the relevant teams to discuss trends, specific responses, follow-up actions and customer experience improvements. Some also set-up frequent workshops in business development teams to drive longer term feedback-based transformation.
Implementation, adoption, and customer success
With the nps.today Quick Win Implementation Model, you will not end up in a long and expensive project before you get return on your CX investment.
With the nps.today ready-to-use plug-in’s or Connect Kit, your technical platform and automations for each survey campaign is quite easy to set-up.
If you do not have a baseline NPS survey, we recommend starting your new program with a rNPS survey to all or a representative sample of your customer base in a one-off survey. This way you can understand the overall customer experience and put out any immediate fires. If you have many customers and limited follow up capacity, you should consider asking fewer customers in the baseline or spread the survey over some weeks.
The feedback to the baseline survey will help you understand where to start your tNPS program and lead you to the survey set-up and questions you like to ask to reveal the right insights.
If you implement your new CX program with nps.today you can benefit from a proven and successful quick win implementation program based on a step by step roll out, where you learn, adjust, and expand your program gradually, while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The overall program can be defined with your nps.today CX advisor and if you choose to launch your CX program with nps.today, the first activity will be the kick-off and program planning.
Then the survey platform, plug-ins and integrations will be set-up to be ready for the first survey campaign to be launched.
Here is an illustration of the nps.today Quick Win implementation method:
After the first tNPS is live and evaluated, the next campaign set-up is planned. This could be the automated rNPS campaign or it could be the next tNPS campaign. The cycle continues with regular evaluations.
Your CX program success
To really succeed and bring real value from your CX program to both customers and your own organization, you need to make your CX program a strategic decision with full support from all employees to top management. Everybody needs to understand why you launch your program, what you expect to gain, how you will use responses and what is in it for both the customer as well as each employee. Good communication both internally and externally is key to a successful program.
You need the relevant business unit managers to take ownership of the closed loop across measure, understand and act in their part of the customer journey.
Also, you need the internal resources to implement and drive the program. You should have a program owner, who might also be the project manager.
Even though the plug-in solutions and technical implementation is easy to complete with nps.today, you need to make sure the right IT and system resources are available for the project when needed.
Finally, you need to make sure that everybody who must act on customer feedback is motivated and prepared to do so.
nps.today will be your trusted partner on your program. Both as your advisor when you decide about your program, and as your implementation partner when you implement it and when you extend it. We will support your program all the way and take responsibility for your success and value.
Here are the resources normally assigned from nps.today:
nps.today wish you good luck with your customer experience program and your journey towards a more customer focused culture with a closed loop customer feedback set-up, making customer experience management an integrated part of your daily business.
Here you can find more information about CX, NPS and Operational NPS as well as customer stories: https://nps.today/news/
Here are direct links to some recommended nps.today articles including all the ones above in the document:
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1yGod illustration of the combination of NPS steps and where to sign NPS up.
It’s great stuff Peter 😉👍🏼