“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
At Revere, we’re driven by this kind of thinking. We do great work for our customers, but mistakes occasionally do happen. One of our core values is “Humble” for just this reason. We believe that the quality and service we provide is directly tied to our willingness to identify, correct, and learn from our mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are obvious to us without the customer’s input, and we take the initiative to fix them as soon as they’re found. More often than not, however, we’ve found that our customers’ satisfaction is tied more to subjectively measured things, like how often we communicate with them. This can be extremely tough to identify from our side until a customer takes their business elsewhere. So how do we correct these subtle pains before we see taillights? We’ve got a variety of tools, but one of our primary tools is the use of Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
What is NPS?
NPS scoring is a tool designed to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. You’ve undoubtedly been asked, “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” That’s the baseline of an NPS survey. Answering on a scale of 0-10, respondents are then categorized according to their rating as detractors (0-6), passives (7-8), or promoters (9-10). NPS was built to spit out an objective metric rating a customer’s loyalty. However, we’ve added a follow-up question to the one above that we find to be far more valuable than the number itself: “Why that score?” When a respondent gives a 9 or 10, it’s always nice to hear the good things they have to say about our work. But if a respondent answers an 8 or lower, we have a golden opportunity: we get to hear about those subtle pain points from an active customer!
Why NPS?
The value of that interaction is obvious for both sides. For our customers, it gives a chance to bring up the things that you’d like to see improved within Revere. For us, the value is endless. NPS tells us two things: what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong. It is for both positive and negative feedback. It gives us insight into our strengths and weaknesses. The information learned from an NPS survey is a great training tool. NPS opens the door to internal communication as well. A customer survey gives us a great opportunity to share positive comments with the team and to pat employees on the back for a job well done. And, in turn, it gives us the framework for teaching and developing by taking any negative feedback to avoid future mistakes.
Another of our core values is “Driven”. We don’t just want feedback. We’re driven to go get it. If you do business with us, odds are good that you’ll get an NPS request after the job. This isn’t to annoy you, and we’re not just fishing for compliments. We genuinely want your honest feedback, because we want to be the best we can be. And when our automation solutions are the best they can be, our customers –you!– are the biggest beneficiaries. In other words, help us help you. Because that’s how we’re wired.