What’s an NPS and why does it matter?

We live in the age of instant gratification and social media - the power of word of mouth advertising is more critical than it has ever been. When a customer wants to complain they'll go directly to their Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to tell the whole world - that's why your NPS score matters and why you should give your customers a chance to tell you how they feel anonymously.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is used to gauge a customer's satisfaction with a company's products and services, as well as their loyalty to your brand. The Net Promoter Score was born in 2003 and is a methodology that was first written about in the Harvard Business Review.

Here's how it works: The NPS score is a global benchmark of customer service, measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty, based around the single question “How likely are you to recommend Company X’s products or services to a friend or colleague?” Responses range from 0 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely).

The NPS is calculated on the percentage of ‘Promoters’ (answering 9 or 10 – those who are loyal to and actively promote your brand) minus the percentage of ‘Detractors’ (answering 0-6 – those who reluctantly purchase from you or have suffered a bad experience), ignoring the ‘Passives’ (answering 7 or 8 – those who like your brand but not enough to promote it).

The overall score can be anything between -100 and +100. Finding out your NPS as part of a wider survey not only provides your company with a benchmark to improve upon, if the survey is anonymous it gives your customers a chance to tell you how they're feeling and highlight any problems they may have.

Recently, industry-leading systems company Liniar sent out an NPS survey to 300+ customers to gauge current feelings across its customer base, especially in the light of changes in the industry and a pending Brexit.

The survey asked the NPS question first, then covered a range of topics around customer support, products, value for money and service levels.

The survey gave Liniar some honest insights into how different departments could make adjustments to their day to day customer dealings in order to improve service for everyone and also gave some welcome positive feedback to boost the wider team.

The overall NPS for Liniar was an astounding 69.

To put that into context, in the UK B2B construction market an average score is between +5  and +20, with top performing companies achieving 40 plus.

On a global scale, anything over 50 is considered ‘Excellent’ and scores over 70 are ‘World Class’. Liniar’s score is even more impressive when lined up against the NPS scores of some of the biggest global brands (source: https://temkingroup.com/product/dataset-2017-uk-net-promoter-score-benchmark/ ):

• Netflix: 64 (2018)
• Amazon: 61 (2017)
• Vodafone UK: 60 (2017)
• John Lewis: 42 (2017)
• Apple: 28 (2017)

One of the most significant results to come out of Liniar’s survey was seeing that 93% of its fabricators rate the brand as ‘easy to work with’.

For a systems company which strives to put its customers at the heart of everything they do, this survey provided the proof that Liniar’s doing the right thing.

This doesn’t mean the team is resting on its laurels, however – there’s always room for improvement and Liniar continues to strive for excellence in all areas on a consistent basis.

Great customer service is arguably more critical now that it ever has been before. We live in a digital age, where your business can be reviewed instantly on a range of websites across the internet; and research shows people having a bad experience are more likely to take the time to write a bad reviews than anyone with good service.

Using an NPS survey to gain feedback from customers is an invaluable tool that will enhance your business and make it more customer focused – if you’re brave enough!