How Businesses Around the World Leverage NPS

The last five chapters covered every inch of the NPS land with no remnant left unexplored.

So now, let’s refresh our understanding of NPS with real-world use cases. Here’s how businesses from diverse industries around the globe tailor and use Net Promoter Score to tip the scales in their direction.

Belron has two brands that have become synonymous with automobile windscreens: Safelite (in the USA) and Autoglass (in the UK). Windshield repair and replacement is not something about which customers typically feel good.

According to Stephen Payne, Customer Journey Improvement Manager at Belron, "The products that Belron sells are what I call 'grudge' purchases. Nobody wakes up and says, 'I just wonder how much it would cost to get my windshield replaced."

They have to deal with something that they don’t want. Every customer wants the easiest possible solution to their unexpected problem – a broken windshield has rendered their vehicle unfit to drive.

"The only way that we can continually provide [the easiest possible] experience is by understanding and internalizing what previous customers have told us." – Jamie Carter, Voice of the Customer Manager.

So, Belron implemented NPS management in their customer satisfaction processes to gather, process, and act on customer feedback. The happy result: they were able to maintain a high NPS while learning from the leaving customers what can be improved on the website.

GreatSchools is a non-profit organization focused on creating a quality rating system based on factors like school resources, ratings by school residents, etc. It wanted to collect insights about the community's educational needs and if they meet their expectations.

In the words of Ji Kim, Product and Design Lead at GreatSchools, -

GreatSchools deployed Qualaroo's NPS surveys on multiple website pages to gather as much diverse feedback as possible about the community's requirements.

Some of the questions they asked in the surveys were:

• Why are you on this particular page?
• What are your goals?
• Are you feeling confused, and if so, why?
• Why is this information important to you?
• Why are you looking at this particular section?
• What don't you like about this content?

What was the result?

The NGO collected 20,000 responses in a year, which helped them improve their website and secure funding.

USAA is a unique example because they use an internal NPS scale and customer NPS. It is one of the major reasons it achieved top ranks in Forrester's 2020 Net Promoter Benchmark study, which Forbes analyzed.

It concluded USAA's customer-centricity helped it outshine competitors in the (understandably) fiercely competitive banking & insurance industry.

Lea Sims, USAA's VP of Employee Innovation, said the initiative gives employees the tools needed to be innovators because "innovation is everyone's job."

The benefits of running both external and internal NPS programs are two-fold:

• The employees are free to share what they would like to change about the company's processes
• The customers can see their opinions and suggestions implemented, keeping them coming back for more.

Slack used the NPS program information shared by customers to improve their bestselling collaboration software and their finer aspects, including – a bit of a surprise – their legal terms of service! Other aspects they improved were their online ads and customer service.

Bill Macaitis, CMO of Slack, summed up his observations about using NPS surveys in this quite relatable way: Every CEO should know the reasons asked for by this very pertinent question:

"What are the top 3 reasons why people recommend and the top 3 reasons why people do not recommend your brand?"

Armed with these answers, CEOs of ambitious companies can retain their existing customers longer to increase their lifetime value (LTV) and add more customers by leveraging their NPS.

Entelo is a great example of a SaaS business managing to get existing subscribers to renew their subscriptions and attract more signups by highlighting their best benefits and acting as fast as possible to negative customer feedback gathered in response to NPS surveys.

They took it upon themselves to ensure that existing customers did not feel that their views did not matter. In fact, through unobtrusive in-the-moment surveys, they reacted in record times.

"Some of our customers are actually shocked at how fast we react when a negative comment comes in. We've definitely received comments of, "Whoa. I just did this an hour ago. Is this an automated thing?" They think it's really cool." – Loni Spratt, Director, Customer Success

If done correctly, leveraging Net Promoter Score can help your company cultivate a competitive advantage. More importantly, it can create happier, more loyal clients. If your customers have done you a favor by telling you what they really think, make sure to return it!

Implementing a strategic NPS program is the quickest route to uncovering the ‘why’ behind your users’ decisions. By asking them relevant follow-up questions, you will surely understand them better.

Backed by an intuitive tool like Qualaroo, your program can do even better as it not only lets you ask NPS questions contextually in the most unobtrusive way possible but also helps you understand feedback using one of the most advanced technologies.