Why NPS is not the Holy Grail
To measure the loyalty of our customers, Leaseweb uses the Net Promotor Score (NPS) as a key performance indicator. The NPS is a management tool that was developed by Fred Reichheld and introduced in 2003. By asking one simple question – ‘How likely is it that you would recommend … to a friend or colleague?’ – it measures a company’s perceived performance and basically tells you how happy customers are.
The NPS is helpful, but all too often, organizations focus too much on the score. The score itself only tells you the temperature of the relationship with customers. If the relationship has deteriorated and has reached a fever temperature, it does not indicate what caused the fever. Was it a bad sales contact, or the quality of the products? And what can you do to improve the sales or product experience?
We want to make doing business with Leaseweb a pleasure. This is why we have deployed a number of initiatives to show that we do not just hear you, our customer, but that we truly listen. We survey our customer base in an all-inclusive customer experience (CX) survey. And on an ongoing basis, we review some specific (crucial) touch points with our customers directly.
Figures on a page mean nothing, unless you – our customer – notice a difference on the ground. Your feedback is one of the key drivers in all this. We want to hear from you, even if it’s about things that went wrong. The voice of the customer (VOC) tells us which services or products we need to improve and which changes we need to implement in our organization and workflows. You say, we listen, we act. And we will communicate these changes back to you, an important, but often underrated part of any customer program. This way, you will know it truly matters to give feedback.
Part of our customer program is a new section on our website named Customer Commitment. Here you can learn all about the changes we make based on your feedback. Our most recent changes are neatly presented in PDF format for easy reading. But we don’t stop there. The improvements we make are continuous, not static, and involve our entire organization.
Customer service is part of our company’s DNA, from every board member to every engineer, developer, receptionist and sales person. We know we all influence the customer experience together. Measures to improve our customer relationship concern all of us. Only our combined efforts will take our customers’ experiences to the highest level.