Beyond NPS & Surveys: Learn What Motivates Customers

Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Surveys provide value to countless organizations globally by issuing the tools to gauge customer satisfaction and gather customer feedback. However, while we may all prefer to live in a world where a simple question(s) could predict and make sense of your customers motivations; we all know that customers are complex. And ultimately, there is a danger in limiting your customer experiences and nuances into a single data point.

So, what is an NPS?

A Net promoter score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric developed by Bain & Co. It allows you to chart customer loyalty by asking a single question:

“How likely are you to recommend [company x] to a friend or a colleague?”

Depending on a score between 0-10, customers are segmented into three categories: ‘Detractors’ (0-6), ‘Passives’ (7-8) and ‘Promoters’ (9-10). NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters, providing you with a metric between -100 to +100.

What is beautiful about NPS and surveys is that they are simple. They provide you an indication of how well your product, service or organization is delivering over time and a benchmark to compare against your competitors with.

However, ultimately, there is no way a single question or data point can tell you everything about your customer - especially what motivates them.

What NPS can’t tell you

1. The totality of your customers relationship with your company

Let’s consider a scenario where your company receives a 20 instead of 30. What does that mean for your relationship with your customer?

Well, the impact of the difference can be huge depending on how the internal teams are evaluated. As NPS is a snapshot of a transactional relationship, the score will mean significantly different things to departments internally. Moreover, as NPS is often contingent upon a problem that has already been diagnosed and being tested per department and this gives you a diagnosis or customer insight into a single problem and not the entire relationship with your company.

2. What and Why your customers think of you

While NPS can tell you what your customer thinks of you in a specific moment, it can not tell you why. This can lead to leaders assuming they know their customers based on data points and subsequently aggregating a lot of customer nuances. It is not surprising that a study by IBM found that while 81% of consumer marketers believed they have a strong understanding of their customers, only 22% of consumers believe the average retailer understands them.

3. Your customers future behaviour.

While NPS gives an indication to the intention of a customer referring you - it can not tell you if they have, if they will or how!

That is not to say that NPS and surveys are ineffective tools but that they are simply top-level starting points. After the analysis, the real work can begin: following up with your customers to ignite a deeper conversation.

1. Following up with Questions

Adding a follow up question will provide valuable qualitative feedback and an opportunity to understand why they have chosen to give you their score. These questions can be customised to a given score or interaction point. But be mindful that not all customers will provide feedback, and when they do, this small subgroup is still expressing a snapshot of a transactional relationship (with a little more depth).

2. User Experience Research (UX)

If your NPS or Survey’s intent is to understand your customers interactions with a product or service, UX is a great methodology to observe what people do versus what they say. The two are often very disparate pieces of information that need to be linked appropriately. This includes: A/B testing, usability testing, user interviews etc.

3. Customer Experience Research (CX)

If the intent is to understand your customers motivations with your company or brand, CX is a great method to map your customers overall experience at all touchpoints of a service, product or brand. CX tends to adopt a broader view of UX with an emphasis on the total experience over simply the product or service.

At the end of the day, the greatest derived value from any survey will happen post-survey. It is here that you can learn the language of your customers motivations, values and what problems they need to solve. Armed with this language, you can truly propel your team to understand your customer motivations, which in turn allows you to create customer-centric strategies.

NPS and Surveys are simply anchor points to begin to understand your customers. Until you take initiatives to further investigate your customers motivations and needs, all a survey can do is confirm or disprove what your staff already thinks.