Guest Post: Ditching NPS for Real Feedback–Which is Better For Your Customer Experience?

This week we feature an article from Su Kaygun Sayran, a content writer for JotForm. He writes about what specifically makes feedback effective in helping you improve your customer service.

Feedback, the one thing that businesses know that they need but dread to receive it at the same time. But at the end of the day, it’s the feedback that makes or breaks a company. Actually, it’s the reaction of the company to the feedback that defines the outcome.

So, before we delve into the main topic, first let’s have a look at what makes feedback effective and how it ties into a solid customer experience strategy.

To categorize feedback as effective, we simply should look at the purpose of feedback. Feedback is collected in order to get an external, constructive view on basically anything. In our case, we’ll be looking at feedback from customers.

In order for feedback to be effective, it should help businesses improve their services and overall customer experience.

So, feedback such as: “This is great!”, “This product sucks”, or even, “Bad customer support, won’t suggest to anyone” is considered useless feedback. You might understand the first two examples, but what about the third? It tells a lot more about the experience of a customer. It signals that the support they received was weak. But still, it doesn’t provide what part of the service they received was bad. Without knowing that, you can’t possibly know how you can improve your service.

How Does Feedback Tie Into Customer Experience

Companies usually try to take a shortcut while collecting feedback to improve their overall customer experience forgetting that an overall look means nothing. So, when collecting feedback, you should aim at getting feedback about each unique point of your overall customer experience processes.

Learning which parts of your customer service need improvement, which parts of your product need improvement, etc. Will help you improve those weaker parts to improve your customer experience as a whole.

So, by collecting feedback for each of your customer experience elements separately, you can patch up your customer experience quality. Now let’s have a look at which methods you can use to collect feedback.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a standard in measuring customer loyalty in almost any industry. It aims at quantifying how likely a customer is to suggest your services to a friend or colleague.

The NPS score is given out of 10 but the results are divided into 3 groups. Promoters, neutrals, and detractors. Promoters are people who are likely to suggest you to others and usually give a score between 9-10. Neutrals are people who are indifferent, these customers usually give a score between 7-8. Detractors are the most dangerous group. Not only are they reluctant to suggest your services or products to others but they pose a potential threat to you as they might sway other people away from your company.

Pros of NPS

There’s a reason why NPS is a gold standard for most businesses. First of all, it’s extremely easy to implement, collect, and make sense of. You simply ask people to rate the service they received on a scale from 0 to 10. Based on the results, you can easily see your average score and how many customers you have in each group. That simplicity and raw effectiveness have led it to be used so widely.

Cons of NPS

While it’s easy and convenient to collect feedback purely in the form of NPS, it’s nowhere near perfect. Easy implementation and evaluation come at a price. More often than not, feedback collected through NPS lacks substance. It can tell you that your customer service over the phone is more successful than emails but doesn’t tell you why.

Should You Ditch NPS for “Real Feedback”? 

Yes and no. Relying solely on NPS can be harmful to your overall customer experience strategy. As we have stated at the start of this article, effective feedback is the feedback that matters and in most cases, a simple score is not considered effective.

But ditching it entirely is not a great idea either. The great thing about NPS is that it can quickly identify pain points in your overall customer experience. And after that, you can start running a  more focused campaign to collect effective feedback. Let’s assume that the NPS of your customer service over email turned out to be weaker than other channels. So, you have an idea about where your service is failing, but you don’t know exactly why. Maybe it’s because the response times are slow, or maybe because the format of your email support is off.

The only way to find out is to dig deeper. That’s where effective feedback comes into play. Running a more detailed survey targeted at users who were dissatisfied with your email service will reveal why it received a lower NPS score and you can work on improving it to the betterment of your overall customer experience. You can ask what parts of the service they received were lacking and how you should improve it. The best way to go about that is to use a survey maker to create specific surveys to collect feedback about each place you need effective feedback to improve the customer experience.

The Bottom Line

All in all, using popular scoring systems such as NPS can help a great deal to quickly collect feedback about your customer experience. Despite its efficiency and easy implementation, such scoring systems lack depth. So, utilizing such methods to quickly identify and then do the in-depth analysis once you know where you lack will most probably save you tons of time while increasing the results you deliver.

Su Kaygun Sayran grew up in Melbourne and has lived in various corners of the world. Su loves writing about all things tech and his experience with various SaaS businesses has enabled him to carry his passion for writing into the tech industry. Currently working at JotForm, helping people become more productive, one blog post at a time. 

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: How To Eradicate Mediocrity