This article is recommended for anyone attending the UX Leaders Masterclass, Manchester, on Tuesday 20th September; where Lawrence, our Digital Strategy Director, will be talking about Delivering Powerful Personalised Customer Experiences. Find out more here.
The amount of data we are able to monitor has been increasing for at least the past 100 years. We are able to track the smallest of clicks and views. Google, Facebook and iPhones go as far as reading your emails, following your friends and watching where you’re walking to provide better and more personalised services.
But there is still one area of the consumer that the industry hasn’t been able to crack; what people think. No matter how much data we have, we are still making educated guesses to anticipate or intuit customers’ thinking. To find out what they’re really thinking we have to ask them.
That’s where our Planning team come in. But this isn’t about us, it’s about them. And it’s about you. Why is it important that you know what customers are thinking? Being blunt, it’s probably about sales. If we know whether customers like you or not you have a better idea of whether they’re going to buy something, right? Wrong.
Over the past few years there have been a number of different ways to measure a person’s relationship with a brand, but two have really stood out.
Customer Satisfaction
It seems logical that a person who is satisfied is going to buy your product. Except, they must have already bought your product to be satisfied, so they might not need to buy it again. Especially if all of their needs were satisfied the first time around.
It’s also important to note that businesses are interested in growing sales, not just maintaining them, so they need to look for an indicator that more people are going to buy their products. This led to the second, and perhaps most popular measure.
Net Promoter Score
Like many things in Ad-Land, it has been given a more complicated name that it needs. This is probably to make it seem complex and therefore expensive. Well, as you know we don’t like that at Home, so here’s the breakdown.
Net Promoter Score is how likely someone is to recommend your product i.e. will they ‘promote it’. They give a mark from 1 (not likely) to 10 (very likely). We have to ask lots of people, because they all have different opinions, and we take the average (the Net) of all those opinions. This gives you a final Score out of 10. It might be easier to call it a Recommendation score. If your Net Promoter Score is 7 it means there is a 7 in 10 chance your customers will recommend you.
Once again, this makes sense but it doesn’t always add up because people aren’t computers. Just because a friend recommends something to you, it doesn’t mean you buy it. I’m sure you’ve been recommended hundreds of books that you haven’t got around to buying or restaurants you haven’t visited yet.
What else?
There are also a few more things that mean NPS doesn’t add up. There are plenty of businesses that people don’t always like such as banks or utilities, but despite low satisfaction and few recommendations, people still continue to use them.
The reason for this is ease. People might not like the brand, they may not recommend them but they find it easy to use and therefore they stick with them. You can read all about it in this Harvard Business review article, but in short; the easier it is to buy from you, the more you will sell. And being easier to buy from than your competitor means you’ll out sell them too. This is called Customer Effort Score; how much effort does the customer need to invest to make a purchase?
What has this got to do with UX and personalisation?
A personalised User Experience is one of the easiest ways for a brand or business to make purchase easy for customers. By using their age, preferences, gender, location, time and even weather, it’s possible to present the customer with the most relevant offer; meaning that they have fewer choices to make, significantly reducing the amount of effort needed. You’ll see from the Harvard Business Review article that reducing their efforts will increase your sales. Something we all want.
Should you still be using NPS? All data is useful, so long as you are aware of its flaws. And whether you choose to replace it with Customer Effort Score isn’t important; just applying Customer Effort Score principals to your UX could increase sales however you choose to measure them.
For more information about UX, personalised experiences and customer effort scores, register for the UX Leaders Masterclass; where Lawrence will be talking about Delivering Powerful Personalised Customer Experiences.
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