Net promoter score? So long and thanks. We’ve got better ways now – ways that don’t annoy your customers, mislead you or paint only a fraction of the picture.
Let’s face it: nobody likes surveys. Not even single-question surveys. Like, did you know that the average net promoter survey answer rate is… 3%? Three. Percent.
That’s flabbergasting. We’re talking about a metric that drives business decisions here. With a 3% response rate, you’re in sample-size purgatory – and in case a reminder is in order, small sample sizes = you’re in trouble.
So no. If you’re trying to find the customer evangelists you have out there, you need a better way. (Putting an ad out in the local doesn’t count.) Let’s look into the two top ways.
Wait wait but what is a customer evangelist?
Okay let’s do this. An evangelist is a praise-singer that comes with to every sales meeting and sometimes joins in on conference calls.
Sorry. Wrong blog. A customer evangelist is, basically, a customer (shock) who acts as a brand evangelist (horror). We’re talking about those customers who love you so much they can’t help but… sing your praises.
Right. Now how do we identify these beautiful unicorn creatures?
Start using social sentiment analytics
Imagine having a team of people scouring social media to watch out for any mentions of your company. They’d report back weekly, nay, daily, nay, minutely on the feelz weather out there in the wide digital yonder.
Good grief that’d be the worst job ever. But thanks to machine learning, we don’t need to palm that work off on any unsuspecting souls who would frankly turn to alcoholism in five minutes. Phew.
Here at Zailab (shhhhh, secwets), we use Meltwater to monitor our social media and editorial landscape. (Full disclosure: we do not receive any kickbacks from Meltwater for giving them hot mentions.) We also get influencer reports that show us who is giving us shout-outs and how much reach they have.
This is neat – and if you aren’t on this bandwagon yet, best, uh, hire about 50 people to spend all day/night watching your Twooter feed. It’s dead helpful for engagement too. Once we know who’s talking about us, we can respond with clever witticisms that make us look even more awesome. Win.
Get in on interaction analytics
On the one-to-one, it’d be helpful to know after a call, email or SMS (or whatever) where your customer stands on the love–hate spectrum. One way to do this is the aforementioned net promoter survey, which seriously just don’t do that anymore people. Please.
Remember that 3% clanger from earlier? What if you could get a read on every single customer who interacts with your organization? And what if that read were, let’s thumb-suck here, say 1000% richer and more informative than a simple five-star rating on a single question?
This is interaction analytics, and it’s a game-changer.
With speech analysis, for example, you can a) transcribe a conversation, b) spot problems in real time, c) predict sales, d) assess sentiment, e) perform QA and e) generate rich, actionable reports. On. Every. Single. Conversation.
Obviously these benefits carry over to other channels – so basically you’re getting an omnichannel oracle that a vast team of people couldn’t hope to match.
In short? Drop net promoter
Net promoter is no longer relevant. Give it a miss and let technology do what it does best: crunch data at scale.
PS: You’ve heard that we’ll be at Customer Contact Week in Vegas from 18–22 June, right? We have a pretty amazing new feature to preview – so us-tour-continues-customer-contact-week-ccw!