Guest Post by: Simon Phillips
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix.
NPS is calculated by asking customers a single question, eg,”How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” and asking them to rate their answer between 1-10, where 10 is “extremely likely” and 0 is “not at all likely”.
Based on their response, customers are categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9–10 rating), Passives (7–8 rating), and Detractors (0–6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Promoter Score.
Here are a few ways in which social media could potentially improve your Net Promoter Score:
1. Customer Service
The obvious option – use social media channels as an additional opportunity to assist customers and thus increase satisfaction. Twitter is a “quick win” as a social media customer service channel and it should be manned, monitored and used by dedicated members of your customer service team.
2. Expectation management
Improve your chances of delivering against expectations by acquiring the ‘right’ customers and ensuring they are completely aware about what your product or services can do for them. Encouraging more and better (e.g. video) reviews will help this. For example, if you’re an e-commerce business you could help reduce the number of (costly) returned orders thanks to the better expectation setting that comes from unadulterated customer reviews.
3. Insight
NPS should not be just about the number; understanding what turns off detractors and what makes promoters rave about you is where the real value lies. Both social media monitoring and market research online communities (MROCs) can be useful for diving deeper into your perceived strengths and what you need to improve on. The more you can encourage feedback through an ongoing, two-way conversation, the better understanding you will have about how customers perceive your business and what you need to change.
4. Enhanced connection with an organisation
Social media gives customers an opportunity to feel directly connected to the heart of the business. With this in mind, you could consider running a closed community of promoters, with a high NPS, for your brand. This gives advocates the chance to hang out with other advocates and like-minded people in their own space. As a result, they’ll feel like insiders and could increase enthusiasm for your brand as well as potentially seeing an increase in their aggregate NPS score too.
5. Convert detractors into promoters
Use social media monitoring to pick out detractors and work to improve their perception of your brand. Develop a proper social media management plan to focus on this specific group and tailor procedures and content to help turn them from detractors into passives or promoters.
Image courtesy of Ag Knowlogy
Original Post: http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2011/09/how-social-media-could-improve-net-promoter-scores-nps/