Net Promoter Score (NPS ®) Across Various Industries, Aspects of the Customer Journey
Constantly assessing the marketplace to ensure both its technologies and recommended processes align with the specific needs and goals of its client base, NICE has taken a particular interest in benchmarking Net Promoter Score (NPS) among the industries it serves, as it applies to both overall customer experience and specific aspects of the customer journey. Not only does NPS measure the likelihood a business’s customers will prove a loyal source of revenue (both via repeat spending and recommendation to others), but it also clarifies which areas offer the greatest opportunities for strategic improvements.
Recently, we conducted an in-depth study of 26 NICE Voice of the Customer (VOC) clients in four key industries—financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and retail—measuring NPS for three million transactions covering eleven different categories, including “overall experience.”
Here’s what we found across all industries, with each gray diamond representing a unique client and blue circles representing the average score for each category:
Among this group, clients do best when it comes to “staff friendliness and attitude” and “overall experience,” with “price/value” and “payment/billing” routines encountering greater levels of dissatisfaction. Based on this data, we can conclude clients have the right people serving as frontline agents, but their perceived value and underlying processes leave room for improvement.
When broken down by industry, however, new patterns emerge. Observe the NPS spread across the different categories, when accounting for financial services (gray diamonds), telecommunications (purple triangles), healthcare (pink squares) and retail (yellow circles) separately:
As it applies to healthcare, it appears “bedside manner” has spread to their call centers; “staff friendliness and attitude” and “overall experience” were clear winners there, while they were clearly hurting when it came to (perhaps predictably, considering healthcare costs in certain markets) “price/value,” which might have a causal relationship to their poor performance on “loyalty and retention.”
Conversely, telecommunications clients were laggards in nearly every category, showing people simply don’t like dealing with their phone companies. However, each of these scores suggests an opportunity for telecom providers to set themselves apart from the competition. Let’s take a closer look at that particular industry, with each gray diamond representing a unique NICE telecom client and purple circles representing the average for each category:
Here, call center agents do put their best feet forward, with “staff friendliness and attitude” and “staff knowledge and expertise” faring relatively well. On the other hand, “payment/billing,” “price/value,” “issue resolution” and “call control”—the ability of agents to guide customers through to call completion in the most effective manner—all land in negative territory. Once again, these findings present opportunities for improving the customer experience, differentiating the business from competitors and ensuring customers remain loyal advocates of the brand. For most of the businesses surveyed, they have good people in customer-facing roles, though those people may not always be positioned to achieve the greatest outcomes with regard to established policies and processes.
Have you measured your NPS as it applies to such aspects of the customer journey? Are you capitalizing on the opportunities these insights present? When it comes to CX strategies that position your business for long-term success, NPS outlines the shape of customer advocacy to come.
For more on CX strategies, visit our BrightTALK channel, the Customer Experience and Marketing Network.