Sheldon Anthony IO

Compelling total experiences are on the way and being able to measure and improve those experiences effectively will be to key keeping them relevant. NPS is being abandoned because of the challenges related to making its data actionable. Businesses are finding it difficult to identify what actions customer service should take to improve performance. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 75% of organizations will no longer use Net Promoter Score to measure customer satisfaction.^[1] The ability to ask a simple question, benchmark it and track responses is easy, but understanding those results and improving on them is more challenging.

NPS has become a popular customer loyalty measurement tool in many organizations and we can see its use incorporated into many services and technologies that interface with customers. Customer service and support leaders often have difficulty swaying executives from moving away from using this valuable metric because CEOs use it for talking points and competitive positioning with investors. The biggest issue with using NPS as your primary or singular customer experience measurement is that it doesn’t take a lot of other factors into account. This single dimension of loyalty usually shown by an NPS is not a good way to predict future growth or behavior.

Nicereply is a customer feedback platform that helps businesses collect and analyze feedback from their customers across different channels. Nicereply wanted to measure and improve their own customer service quality and efficiency. They needed a reliable and actionable metric that could capture the customer’s perception of the service interaction and predict their future behavior. They also wanted to benchmark their performance against the industry standards and identify areas for improvement. Nicereply wanted to measure and improve their own customer service quality and efficiency. They needed a reliable and actionable metric that could capture the customer’s perception of the service interaction and predict their future behavior. They also wanted to benchmark their performance against the industry standards and identify areas for improvement. Nicereply decided to use Customer Effort Score (CES) as their main customer service metric. CES is a single-item survey that measures how much effort a customer has to exert to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned or a question answered. CES surveys typically ask the question, “on a scale of ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’, how easy was it to interact with [company name]?” Nicereply implemented CES surveys across all their customer service channels, including email, chat, phone and social media. They used their own platform to collect and analyze the feedback data in real time. They also set up alerts and notifications to follow up with customers who gave low CES scores and address their issues. By using CES, Nicereply was able to benchmark their customer service quality and efficiency against the industry standards and identify areas for improvement. They found that their average CES score was 5.5, which is higher than the industry average of 4.1. They also found that their CES score correlated with other key metrics, such as customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS) and customer retention.Nicereply used the feedback data to improve their service processes and policies, such as reducing response time, providing proactive support, offering self-service options and personalizing communication. They also used the feedback data to train and coach their service agents on how to deliver low-effort experiences and prevent future issues.By improving their customer service quality and efficiency, Nicereply was able to increase their customer loyalty and retention, as well as reduce their service costs. They also gained a competitive advantage in the customer feedback market by showcasing their own success story and best practices. ^[2]

Many businesses rely on NPS inputs to gauge customer loyalty but overreliance on one measurement to determine performance and loyalty is not advisable because of the risk of data manipulation to achieve desired targets. Implementing an NPS survey to get feedback from your customer is not that expensive to implement but performing insightful actions based on your customer's input is precious. Analyzing NPS results from transactional surveys wastes time and resources since customer service lacks relevant insights. Temkin Group surveyed over 200 large companies about their customer experience efforts, finding that 84% of them report success from the voice of the customer programs (including those that use NPS). ^[3]

Shifting to more advanced customer service metrics for example value enhancement score (VES) will allow customer service and support leaders to demonstrate their ability to drive revenue and provide loyalty-building opportunities for the organization’s future. By improving the value that customers perceive through service interactions, you boost their loyalty by creating a sense of confidence in their purchase decisions, and they become more confident in their ability to achieve more with the company's offerings. You want to get a better understanding of how a customer service interaction is broken down due to process, people, or technology failures. By targeting customer pain points and correcting performance, customer service and support leaders can improve customer satisfaction. Leaders can prevent churn by proactively identifying customers with high effort and preventing them from leaving. Your business should focus on implementing customer service metrics that provide better actionability. The ultimate objective of abandonment is to provide your customer service and support leaders with better insight into how to improve the customer experience with more effective CX metrics.