Customer Experience Tools
Explore more insights from Bain's 2020 Customer Experience Tools and Trends survey: Let No Tool Stand Alone.
The Net Promoter System℠ is a management approach built on the Net Promoter Score℠. The Net Promoter Score allows companies to classify customers as promoters, passives and detractors, and ties individual customer behavior to these classifications. Using the score and the steady stream of customer feedback, the Net Promoter System fuels constant learning and improvement and helps companies monitor the health of customer relationships, embed customer advocacy throughout the business and create a foundation for customer-led growth.
Customer Experience Tools and Trends
Our insights share how the right CX tools make customers’ lives richer and more fulfilling and strengthen a company’s economics by holding down costs and securing new revenue streams.
How companies use the Net Promoter System
- Monitor and improve customer interactions. Much of the Net Promoter System’s feedback focuses on individual events, such as particular transactions or specific parts of the experience. The granularity of the system helps employees learn from recent interactions, allowing them to change their approach and observe outcomes.
- Facilitate learning and development of customer-facing agents. The system requires managers to regularly share and discuss feedback with frontline employees while an interaction remains fresh in their minds. Employees can then try new approaches and report results to coaches and fellow team members.
- Monitor advocacy for the brand. Companies use the Net Promoter Score to measure customer sentiment across products, regions and channels, allowing them to gauge the effectiveness of loyalty-building efforts and identify weaknesses. Many companies also conduct competitive benchmarking, comparing their Net Promoter Scores against those of potential competitors.
- Integrate the voice of the customer into ongoing improvements. Continuous learning starts when a company shares a customer’s feedback with a frontline employee, and ends when the employee closes the loop with the original customer. The process elevates feedback as a guide to larger structural improvements, empowering employees to provide better service.
Key considerations
- Sustain commitment from senior executives. Companies that create more promoters and fewer detractors have senior leaders who embed a customer perspective at every level of the organization.
- Create a reliable, trusted metric. Companies should develop, test and fine-tune their sampling and survey techniques so that everyone in the organization trusts the data and customer classifications.
- Focus on feedback, learning and improvement. The system has three mechanisms that turn feedback into action: the inner loop, which provides frontline employees with real-time customer feedback; huddles, short team meetings that provide a forum for support and knowledge sharing; and the outer loop, which helps senior leaders prioritize and support customer-friendly changes that employees cannot make on their own.
- Foster an environment that values loyalty. Employees need to see the connection between the work they do and its effect on customers. This requires thoughtful hiring, the right tools and environment, formal training and ongoing coaching, and a system of rewards and recognition.
- Develop a robust operational and analytic infrastructure. Implementing a short-cycle closed-loop feedback system requires support from an infrastructure that can trigger feedback requests, capture the responses, send them to the right employees in real time, track follow-up action, and support data mining and analysis.
Net Promoter®, NPS®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.