NPS is Not Enough to Measure Today's Customer Experience
Updated: May 24
Firstly, what is NPS or Net Promote Score?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a company or product to others on a scale from 0 to 10. Respondents are categorized according to the scale: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6). The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, providing a score that ranges from -100 to 100.
How Do We Measure Customer Experience
For twenty years, businesses have benefited from conducting surveys with clients and customers to try to determine levels of brand loyalty. Net Promoter Score (NPS) brackets customers into one of three buckets:
Promoters
Passives
Detractors
In the digital age, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Now it’s all about customer experience (CX). The question now is how you make your customers feel while interacting with your company. NPS only gives surface-level insights and can’t predict revenue events like churn, upsell, and price erosion. It’s time to go deeper into the data.
NPS only gives surface-level insights and can’t predict revenue events like churn, upsell, and price erosion.
Why the Net Promoter Score is Not Important
In the past few years, the ‘smart folks in the room’ at McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Harvard Business School, and Gartner and Forrester have drawn a straight line between CX Metrics and profitability, revenue growth, and market positioning.
Many in the C-Suite are still drawn to NPS for its simplicity but evangelists of the growing CX revolution warn of the lack of insight into actual customer behavior. They routinely highlight the vast quantities of unutilized data that many companies are sitting on. When that data is deciphered, companies can be empowered with tangible effects on their bottom line that get executives to sit up and take notice.
Read more on our blog The Problem with Net Promote Score
So if NPS Isn’t the Answer, What Is?
In large-scale B2B relationships, two things are true:
A single customer/vendor contract can be worth large, make-or-break sums
Active engagement points are involved across organizations
Knowing whether that vendor would promote your business to a friend has little bearing on contract security amid (1) the heightened competition and (2) price fluctuation of a quickly changing world.
The statistics prove measuring client experience behavioral, psychographic, and fact-based data is worth it. Many Fortune 500 companies have already committed to developing robust CX data training. For many others, who may not have the human capital for extended periods of trial and error, technology can be the answer. CX measurement platforms like Encompass-CX can now measure and integrate customer data into actionable insights.
Measure the Right Data in B2B Customer Experience
Keep in mind, however, that not all CX technology is created equal. Some companies believe that CX should be run through a survey, despite a typical B2B survey event receiving a 40% response rate if you are lucky.
More and more, companies are realizing they need to embrace a continual process of fact-based (internal metrics) data collection. Here are some benefits of this method:
Strengthen relationship awareness
Enhance customer experience in a customer’s journey
Increase the efficacy and reach of your response (bringing that response percentage closer to 100%)
Achieve greater success with strategic planning, company implementation, and team accountability
See How Customer Loyalty Affects Your Annual Revenue
Need a tool to get start tracking the right metrics in CX? Encompass-CX has been through the trial-and-error period so you won’t have to. We have developed a tool that allows you to input your customer loyalty data and see how it affects your annual revenue. Check out our Impact Calculator.
Start your customer experience journey with the right data now!