Ensuring your company lives up to customer expectations is crucial in today’s world. Customers don’t just want excellent experiences on every channel, they demand them. If your contact center isn’t delivering highly efficient, convenient, and personalized experiences, you’ll lose your customers.
In fact, 73% of customers will switch to a competitor after multiple poor experiences, no matter the quality of your product or service.
To ensure they can compete in this landscape, most contact centers monitor a range of metrics, including NPS (Net Promoter Score). NPS surveys can offer companies a valuable insight into their customer’s satisfaction level, by tracking how likely those consumers are to recommend a company to someone else. The only problem? These surveys are extremely limited.
NPS customer survey insights aren’t a reliable measure anymore, and here’s why.
The Problems with NPS as a CX Metric
To measure Net Promoter Score, companies send surveys to their consumers, asking them to share how likely they are to recommend a company to a friend or colleague, using a numbered scale. At first, many contact centers relied heavily on this metric, viewing it as an excellent way to get direct insights into customer satisfaction.
However, the insights you get from an NPS survey are inherently limited. Why?
Customers Hate Answering Surveys
The first reason is that most customers don’t want to fill out a survey. By the time they’re finished communicating with a contact center, most people are eager to move on with their lives. They don’t want to waste precious time filling out a survey.
The issue only worsens if your survey includes multiple questions. Studies show only around 9% of people take the time to answer long surveys thoughtfully, and many will simply pick a number on a scale at random, or ignore your questions entirely.
This problem is particularly common when consumers feel their responses to surveys don’t garner any real results. If customers take the time to respond to a survey, and don’t see any changes to the experience they get, they see no value in answering future questions.
Agents Hate Giving Surveys
It’s not just your customers that are against dealing with surveys. Agents don’t enjoy using them either. Issuing surveys doesn’t just add an extra task to your contact center employee’s already lengthy to-do list. They also cause stress and anxiety.
Often, business leaders look at the NPS survey feedback of their workforce to identify top performers, and weaker employees. However, they don’t always give an accurate view of a staff member’s value. Some employees end up with poor scores simply because customers don’t answer surveys.
Others suffer from lower scores because of factors beyond their control. A problem with a product, or process can prompt customers to give a low NPS score, even when an agent has done everything they can do resolve an issue. People are more likely to complain about a negative experience than commend an agent for their excellent work.
Analyzing Data Accurately is Complicated
Another major problem with NPS is that since survey responses are often extremely low, the score you define for your business is unlikely to be fully accurate. Reports even show that only 1 in 26 customers will complain about a poor experience, while the rest will simply move to a competitor.