With the expanding use of Transactional Net Promoter Score by a range of organisations, there is a growing need to collect large volumes of survey responses with a smaller amount of feedback in each survey.
This is because the standard Transactional NPS (TNPS) survey is just two questions long:
a. How likely is it that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?
b. What is the main reason that you gave that score?
(For more information download our Introduction to Net Promoter Score)
There are currently four main approaches used to survey customers for TNPS:
1. Outbound telephone calls: Using call centre agents to call each (or a selected set of) customer(s) and perform the survey.
2. Inbound, agent diverted calls: At the end of a call the customer is asked if they mind answering a couple of questions on the transaction. If they agree they are immediately transferred to a contact centre agent to take their feedback.
3. Inbound IVR: Inbound callers are directed to an IVR based survey engine at the end of the call. The caller answers using the key pad and the system records their qualitative comments.
4. Email/Web surveys: A survey system sends an email to each customer with a link to a web based survey. The respondent then clicks on the link and fills out the survey on line.
Each has their advantages but which is the best?
Before we can answer that we need to look at the key requirements for a successful Transactional NPS survey process:
1. Timely: An effective TNPS process is one where the customer is contacted very soon after the service or transactional interaction. This ensures that the interaction is fresh in the respondent’s mind.
2. Efficiently gather qualitative feedback: The second of the two standard TNPS questions is qualitative in nature. It’s role is key as it helps the organisation to understand how to make changes to improve their business.
3. Drive closed loop action: More so than relationship NPS, transactional NPS is focused on closing the loop to immediate action. The cycle time for this process should be measured in hours not days or weeks.
4. Support live data analysis: As TNPS is an on-going survey process the organisation must have access to an on-going data analysis approach that allows it to understand and action the data received in a timely manner.
5. Deliver high volumes: TNPS is typified by a high volume of customer contacts each and every day. It is this high volume of customer contact that provides a constant stream of feedback to all employees.
So how does our list of requirements mesh with the different survey approaches?
1. Outbound telephone calls
While they can be timely, the ability to connect with a high volume of customers comes at a high cost to the organisation. To efficiently contact enough customers also requires relatively advanced contact centre technology and skills.
However, the agent is able to ask customers about their experience and gather a good volume and quality of qualitative feedback.
But, having collected the data it still requires additional systems to drive the closed loop action and data analysis.
Outbound calls also suffer from a unique issue in that that respondents may not feel comfortable providing honest feedback to another person from that company, particularly negative feedback about a specific person.
2. Inbound, agent diverted calls
In this approach the timeliness of the process is assured as the customer is connected immediately after the transaction has been performed. However, of course, there must be an operator available to take the call and the relative cost is high versus the fully automated approaches below.
Forwarding a customer to a holding queue will drive down the score for the survey and reduce the conversion rate. It is also a poor customer experience in it’s own right.
Also, using this method eliminates the ability to deal with a range of contact or transaction channels in an integrated manner. It only really works for contact centre transactions.
The ability to “game” this approach is also high with agents able to push happy customers to do the survey, or more often, to neglect to inform unhappy customers about the survey. This gives the operator the ability to affect their personal NPS.
Having collected the data it still requires additional systems to drive the closed loop action and data analysis.
3. Inbound IVR
The ability to be timely is high as the diversion to the IVR is immediate and there is no need to worry about an agent being available.
One key drawback is that the qualitative data is collected as recorded audio information. In order to turn that data into action it must first be listened to or transcribed. Both of these data collection approaches are expensive and time consuming, reducing the speed of response and increasing overall cost.
This technique also suffers from the ability of operators to game the system, similar to that noted above.
Anecdotally the survey completion rate is also lower than average as customers don’t want to wait on the phone more than necessary.
Having collected the data it still requires additional systems to drive the closed loop action and data analysis.
4. Email/Web surveys
This approach works well in all of the key requirements for a TNPS system.
The survey can be sent out the next day, or even sooner if required. Customers are familiar with the email survey approach and so response rates are generally high (20-40%).
When gathering qualitative feedback, the customer can tag their comment with the area of the business to which it relates. This greatly speeds up the analysis process and makes the whole approach much more action oriented.
It can also be rapidly scaled to very large volumes with little extra cost.
So long as the web survey engine has the right tools to rapidly analyse and report on the data in Net Promoter Score terms this can be a very effective approach.
Lastly, this approach can be used across all the channels in an organisation and is not limited to just contact centre transactions.
Summary
As you can see there is more than one way to approach the TPNS data collection question. Do you have a favourite approach? Leave a comment and let me know why you prefer it.
More Information
For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).
If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
I have enjoyed Adam’s write up on the choices faced by organisations in a multi channel environment as they stride to move the NPS score beyond the strategy metrics to an operational metrics embedded across the organisation.
The challenge for us is to align our close loop management with the channels utilisation by our client’s customers. This also enabled us to bring to alive the emotional and rational side of customer’s interactions.
We recently had the opportunity to run a pilot with a client in Europe, the challenges around business transformation, breaking silos and integrated KPIs just to mention a few. The benefits are quite significant and it created tangible advocacy amongst senior management across the subsidiaries.
Olumide,
Thank you for your comments. You are quite right the difficulties in using NPS are less about how to measure the score and much more about how to turn it into action. As is sometimes noted “you don’t make a pig fatter by weighing it”.
Adam