Can you predict NPS Scores? With my Big 3 Formula for Leading Indicators, you can. Just like economists, Customer Experience practitioners can use the concept of Leading Indicators as a way to predict future NPS scores. I recently paired with Cyara on a Webinar entitled NPS is Dead, Long Live NPS! and you can check out our slideshare version of this webinar. My associate on the webinar, Elizabeth Magill, likes to say that the rumors of the death of NPS are greatly exaggerated.
My position on NPS remains unchanged – it is an excellent way to get a KPI score for measurement purposes, but if it is not paired with usable data to improve the customer experience – it is worthless. So for me – Long Live NPS!
The key for me when I work with companies on NPS is the ‘usable data’. I use a Big Three formula to look at Delivery, Quality, and Interactions. These are the three pillars in which all Great Customer Experiences are created. Within every company I have worked with, I have been able to find measurable KPI’s in these three areas that can be linked to movement in NPS Scores, thus creating NPS Leading Indicators. Here are a few examples.
Delivery – This can be the delivery of the product or service and could become overwhelming to look at all of the variables: on-time delivery, number of reschedules, meeting customer’s actual requested date, number of partial shipments and more. The goal is to determine which metric your CUSTOMER cares about – when they think your delivery is excellent what does that mean to them. Then by tracking your performance on that metric, you begin to create your crystal ball.
Quality – this is the quality of your product or service. Although it can be viewed as subjective, it is an area rich with metrics and KPI’s that can be tracked. Many organizations follow lean techniques, which give them a wide variety of KPI’s to choose from: defects per unit or million opportunities, labor productivity, total cycle time and more. If you are providing services, you may be tracking the quality of delivery or the interaction provided, scope creep or on-budget project delivery. The catch is to see which metrics impact you CUSTOMER’s view of your company – what do they view as bad or good quality. Those gems become your leading indicators.
The final category is interactions. I leave this for last because of the size this can become based on your type of business. You can have digital interactions, mobile interactions, retail interactions, face-to-face and on and on – you get the picture. It is a little trickier to find the Leading Indicators here, but I find it easier to look across your Customer Journey map at the Customer Touch Points and determine at each touch point what satisfies your customer, then determine a way to track your performance there. For example if one of your touch points is at a Customer Call into the Call Center regarding a complaint, first call resolution might be a metric you could track that would be important in your business, to your customer. Cyara specializes in Customer Interactions and have a huge variety of tools to use around this area.
So, my crystal ball, honed over 20 years of experience is to determine your Leading Indicators across the Big Three (Delivery, Quality, Interactions). Use these to ‘predict’ your NPS changes.