The 8 Steps to Best Practice Net Promoter Score® Implementation
NPS isn't a metric you bolt onto an existing survey, it's a process you build into the business. Confuse the two and you get the question without the value. Here are the eight steps, refined over 20+ years of NPS consulting, that take you from buy-in through to operating rhythm without skipping the bits most rollouts skip.
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Properly implementing Net Promoter Score in your organisation will yield powerful business results. But between wanting and doing, there are key steps that need to happen for you to be successful.
The first critical thing you need to know is that NPS® is not a metric, it is a process.
Most “how to implement NPS” guides online collapse to four or five steps: pick a tool, ask the question, calculate the score, repeat. Follow that list and you’ll have a working survey within a week and a failed programme within a year.
The steps that actually decide whether a programme survives (executive commitment, governance and change management) rarely show up because, well, they’re hard.
But skipping them is the single biggest reason NPS programmes fail to show results and are quietly killed off around the 12 to 24 month mark.
In this post I review the process we have tested and refined over 20+ years of NPS consulting for our clients. It works.
The NPS Implementation Process: Initiate, Customer Strategy and Context, Listen and React, Quick Wins, Big Bets, Repeat!
Step 0. Demonstrate The Business Value of NPS and Secure Your Executive Champion
To be successful long term you need a senior executive champion to knock down the roadblocks that will inevitably come up. Someone like Tom Allan, COO at CyberCX or Jeff McLean, COO at Grays.
To give them the business value numbers they need to support you, start but creating a business case. See the ROI case for Net Promoter.
For more proof this sequence works, see the full Net Promoter Score success stories and case studies.
Step 1. Get Buy-In for NPS From The Organisation
With your Exec Sponsor in place you can start the Initiate phase of NPS implementation:
- Ensuring the rest of the senior executives are engaged and committed
- You have the right internal structures (Governance) to make effective use of the information
- Launching the process effectively to all staff so you have broad buy-in.
Use that first wave of energy to get everybody engaged in the process.
We know from experience that if you do not get the process Initiated correctly, with the right corporate systems in place, it will fail. Generally it takes 12-24 months but it will fail.
There are three elements to this step:
1. Gain Executive Commitment For NPS Implementation
Implementing an NPS program takes time, effort and money.
Staff will have to re-prioritise what they are doing so you should start by ensuring you have good support up through all levels of the organisation.
Here are some questions you can ask the senior management team to dig deeper into their commitment to NPS implementation.
- You are about to invest substantial resources and time in rolling out Net Promoter: Why - what do you expect to achieve?
- Will there be a Steering Committee to manage corporate oversight?
- What will its charter be?
- Will you have an NPS process team focused on carrying out the day-to-day task of using the feedback to improve the business or will you devolve that to the operating units?
- How will these groups operate?
- Who will be in them?
2. Create the NPS Governance Process
Critical to success is a Net Promoter governance process for your organisation. Governance frameworks can be boring and nobody really wants to talk about them but it is the place that we find many organisations have failed in their NPS launch.
This is the governance model that we use with organisations and it has proven to be very effective. Learn more about the details of the Net Promoter Governance Model.
3. Design the NPS Change Management Plan
Implementing Net Promoter is a big change for most organisations and you need an effective NPS Change Management Plan. You cannot leave this to chance.
The Process team should lead the change management process as they are most intimately involved and have the deepest understanding. They should consider who will be affected by the rollout of the process and who will have the most impact on the success of the implementation.
Then a communication plan should be created to address the needs and concerns of each group of staff.
Some organisations choose to create an internal brand for the Net Promoter program and it can be a very effective tactic. The branding process serves as a way to bring all of the communication together into an effective package.
Step 2. Map The Customer Journey to Prioritise Customer Segments & Touch-Points
Only now should you to turn your focus to your customers.
When you implement a comprehensive Net Promoter program you can do it in two ways:
- Big Bang – roll the whole program out at once. This is a high-risk approach with a long planning and lead time. That long lead time saps the initial energy a new initiative brings with it.
- Incrementally – rollout the Listen phase to selected touch points. Then as you grow in experience and get some runs on the board you can extend the range of touch points.
This second approach is our recommendation and the Customer Strategy and Context phase allows you to prioritise that rollout process.
In this phase you should create Touchpoint or Customer Journey Maps of your customer experience. This will allow you to prioritise the launch and focus on the most important areas first.
Which Customers – are most important
Prioritise your customer segments so the more important segments are implemented before less important segments. This prioritisation can be strategic (growth areas), or by value or some other key variable in your business.
Which Touchpoints– should you measure
For each of your key customer groups create a Touchpoint map that covers their interaction with you from awareness to exit.
Which Opportunities – present the best value
NPS implementation must be focused on driving business value so it makes sense to identify the high-value opportunities for improvement in your NPS and business and then attack them first.
Do you have a poorly performing product line or a contact centre that is constantly having issues?
Think about where you can take action for the maximum effect.
Who needs to be involved – to ensure success
Make sure that you have the right people in the room for these Touchpoint mapping discussions. You should have people who understand the process (of course) but also people who understand the data systems. The data system folks will help you to identify what data is captured and available for use in data collection automation.
Often middle managers will want to be in these meetings. Resist this where you can. Their presence silences the front-line people who know how the business actually runs, not how it’s supposed to run.
Step 3. Design The Survey & Data Collection Process
Only now do you get down to the business of survey design and implementing your data collection process.
Of course with the Net Promoter Score process, part of the survey design process is very straightforward: the NPS question forms the heart of the survey.
The NPS “Would Recommend” question
However, you will still need to look at survey design to gain insights into what is important for your customers.
Understanding what drives the Net Promoter Score is as important as the score itself. If you just collect the NPS and do not collect any supporting data to understand what drives it you are mostly wasting your time.
The data collection process is not trivial either. If you are running a Transactional NPS process, and I recommend you do, then you will need to be able to collect, analyse and act on feedback data day in and day out.
Which NPS data collection system will you use and how will you get data in and insights out?
Step 4. Close the Loop With Customers
If you are implementing Transactional NPS then you have a very powerful customer loyalty opportunity from day one: Service Recovery.
Service recovery, or reaching out to unhappy customers and making them happy, is an incredibly powerful way to generate customer loyalty. So you should ensure you have a solid service recovery system in place when you start your transactional survey process.
Soon after you have started sending surveys you should consciously design your service recovery process.
Run a closing the NPS loop design workshop and make sure that the key staff are involved, including the Process team.
In the workshop you should address key questions including:
- How will the organisation be alerted to low scores? – In practice what will happen, exactly.
- Who should action them? – Will they be triaged (one person receives all the issue and manually sends them to the right person) or will they be automatically distributed around the organisation based on a set of rules. What are the rules?
- How will the actions be tracked?
- What reporting is required?
- What is the process flow?
- How, and how quickly, will you respond to clients?
When the workshop is over make sure you document the new process so that you can act quickly and effectively on the responses from customers.
Aim to make first contact with a detractor within 24 to 48 hours or even sooner, not weeks. Automate the alert and the routing, keep the actual conversation with the customer human.
An apology that arrives from a ticketing system reads like an apology from a ticketing system: no one cares.
Step 5. Identify and Execute on some Quick, Impactful Business Improvements
Okay, so you have everything up and running and you’re collecting data, now what?
Now you need to show some quick wins to demonstrate some payback for all of the effort so far.
Rather than trying for a big-bang win that may be high risk or long term, use processes like the 5 Whys to look for some quick wins that will get runs on the board right now.
Can you change a call centre script to give customers more of the information they need?
Can you change a website form to make it easier to understand?
If you can and you can show uplift in your NPS score you have the makings of a great quick win.
This is exactly the sequence AccessPay followed to move their NPS from 15 to 53 in two years, and Zip Water UK from +2 to +73 in three.
Neither jump came from one big bet. They came from stacking enough quick wins that the Big Bets in Step 6 had a track record behind them before anyone had to sign off a large budget.
Step 6. Deeper Analysis to Drive Big Changes
When you have been running the data collection process for 6-12 months and you have made quite a few small changes you will be more confident in the data and in your analysis. This is the time to look for some Big Bets.
Big Bets generally need detailed costing, ROI analysis and senior management approval so they take time to identify and plan. However, they are where you can make big impacts on NPS, customer loyalty and lowering business costs.
Examples of Big Bets include redesigning products, adding significant functionality to existing products and making large organisation changes.
These are changes not to be taken lightly but if you have proven the value of the Net Promoter process through a range of Quick Wins then you will be in a good position to prove your case.
Step 7. Repeat: the Listen, Analyse, Act Loop
Now that you have the basic process down you simply need to repeat the listen, analyse, act loop. Remember this is not a project with a beginning, middle and end. It’s a never-ending story of continuous improvement.
Next Steps
If you’d like a second opinion on where your organisation sits in this process, or help designing Steps 0, 1 and 2, book a chat and we’ll walk through your rollout plan together.
