However, with consumers becoming increasingly savvy, organizations are starting to recognize that a single-item survey might not be enough to capture the customer experience. As this methodology fails to capture the nuances of customer opinions, organizations are now on the lookout for alternative ways to gather more in-depth consumer insights.
In this article, you will find everything you need to know about the limitations the NPS might have, as well as 10 effective alternatives for collecting in-depth and actionable customer feedback.
Brief review of the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score, or NPS was originally introduced in 2003 by Fred Reichheld as a simple but effective way to measure customer loyalty.
NPS is a score that is based on a simple question: asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or a service to others on a scale of 1 to 10. Based on the answers the survey respondents fall into three different categories.
Customers who respond with a 9 or 10 are the so-called promoters. These are customers who are very likely to recommend the brand to others. Responders giving a 7 or 8 are regarded as passives. These are satisfied with the product but are not as likely to recommend it to others.
Finally, customers who give anything from 0 to 6 are perceived as detractors and are unsatisfied customers who are more likely to negatively impact brand reputation.
The final NPS score is calculated by subtracting the number of the detractors from the number of promoters giving a single metric that reflects customer loyalty. Indicatively, the average American company scores less than +10 on the NPS, with high-performing organizations scoring between +50 and +80, indicating significant variability based on industry and cultural context.
Why NPS is so popular
The popularity of the Net Promoter Score is attributed to its straightforward nature. This one-item survey offers a simple setup and one single product engagement score which is easy to grasp.
On top of that NPS is a non-intrusive survey with high response rates. Last but not least, its popularity among companies has turned it into a benchmark against which companies can measure their performance.
Criticisms of the NPS Metric
Despite its success and widespread use, NPS has several limitations:
Oversimplification
NPS is a score that comes from a single question and thus it fails to capture the nuances of customer experience. For instance, a customer might be willing to recommend a brand for a host of different reasons including pricing or customer service. The oversimplification of this metric might not point in the right direction when it comes to product or service refinement.
Lack of in-depth insights
NPS cannot offer insights into the likes and dislikes of customers making it extremely difficult to identify sticky points or areas for improvement. This is why companies usually choose to combine the NPS survey with some additional qualitative research study to find out the reasons behind the score and ask follow-up questions.
Matt Egol from PwC asserts,
Since the introduction of NPS, customers’ expectations have soared, and companies’ access to information about them has increased dramatically. Today, consumers expect personalized and socially conscious experiences — meaning that CX initiatives are becoming far more critical to a company’s long-term success than they have ever been before.
Heavy focus on promoters and detractors
NPS has a heavy focus on promoters and detectors overlooking the feedback from passive customers who most of the time represent the biggest part of the customer base. Failing to consider those can lead to missed opportunities when it comes to improving the experience with ‘small wins’.
Kim Larsen, a data analytics scholar, comments on the inefficiency of NPS:
As a first principle, it’s best to stay away from any survey-based metric that is based on adding or subtracting other metrics
Biases in customer responses
Last but not least, the Net Promoter Score can often be biased as different people tend to respond to rating scales differently. This makes it challenging for organizations to get an accurate customer health score.
Nonetheless, a lot of professionals believe the NPS metric can still be valid and beneficial, but only if it’s used for its primary purpose and combined with other metrics.
10 best alternatives to NPS
Here are the 10 best effective alternatives to NPS that can help you gather deeper insights when it comes to customer experience.
1. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a metric that shows how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or brand. CSAT asks responders to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to 5. Contrary to the generic NPS score, this short survey is highly versatile and it can be used after specific interactions to provide actionable insights and drive product improvement.
2. CES (Customer Effort Score)
The Customer Effort Score (CES) measures the effort that customers have to put into completing a specific transaction or interaction such as making an online purchase. This survey asks customers to agree or disagree with certain statements about the company.
An example could be: ‘The X company made it easy for me to buy the Y product’. Contrary to NPS which only measures how likely a customer is to recommend a product, this survey is particularly handy for pinpointing friction points in the customer journey.
3. Customer advisory boards
Customer advisory boards are groups of hand-picked customers that provide ongoing feedback about the brand service or product. This method gives companies a unique opportunity to have ongoing and in-depth discussions with customers and craft a successful customer retention strategy.
Unlike NPS and its limited scope, customer advisory boards offer in-depth qualitative feedback that can drive strategic decisions around product refinement and improvements in the customer journey.
4. Voice of Customer (VoC) programs
Voice of Customer (VoC) programs are designed to gather feedback from various sources including surveys, interviews, and focus groups to understand the customer experience for every touchpoint.
Contrary to the NPS score that captures only the likelihood of recommending the company to others, the voice of customer programs can provide a holistic view of the customer’s needs and expectations.
5. User interviews
User interviews are one-to-one conversations with selected customers exploring the individual customer experience. The main goal of this methodology is to get an understanding of the pain points, but also the customer expectations throughout the customer journey.
Contrary to the NPS score which is a quantitative metric, user interviews offer in-depth qualitative data answering ‘the why’ behind customer interactions.
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6. NEV (Net Emotional Value)
The Net Emotional Value (NEV) metric captures the emotional response to a product or a brand. NEV asks customers to select words that describe how a certain transaction or interaction made them feel such as joy, frustration, etc.
The Net Emotional Value (NEV) is a unique metric that can quantify emotions, and in contrast to the NPS score, can show you how customers feel about a product, service, or brand.
7. SUS (System Usability Scale)
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a metric used to assess the usability of a product or a service. SUS is a 10-item survey covering various aspects such as how easy the interface is to use or how intuitive it might be.
The responders need to answer by rating on a five-point scale. Unlike NPS which is used to measure customer loyalty, SUS focuses on the usability of the system giving the companies actionable feedback.
8. Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis takes advantage of natural language processing to analyze user feedback from various sources, for instance, surveys or social media comments. This methodology can help companies not only identify but also analyze emotions and opinions about the brand. Contrary to NPS’ single score, sentiment analysis allows companies to understand the spectrum of emotions that arise throughout the customer journey and act accordingly.
9. Heatmaps
Heatmaps are a visual representation of where users click or how they scroll on an interface. Heatmaps can be a great way to understand the elements of a page or a screen that draw the attention of the user providing valuable insights into the user-system interaction.
Unlike NPS, heatmaps can provide actionable data for optimizing interfaces to boost the customer satisfaction level.
10. Social media listening
Social media listening is a technique used to track and analyze mentions or comments on social media and understand how customers feel about a particular brand.
By keeping a close eye on keywords or brand mentions companies have a great opportunity to gain real-time feedback about their operations. In short, social media listening is a great source of unsolicited feedback which NPS fails to provide.
💡 Pro Tip Learn more about the different methods of customer feedback collection.
Best software for collecting customer feedback
Selecting the right software for collecting customer feedback can make or break your business’s ability to gather and analyze feedback.
UXtweak is an all-in-one user research platform and is a go-to solution for companies that are seeking to turn customer insights into product improvement.
From custom surveys to interviews, usability tests, robust analytics and behavior analytics, UXtweak is THE software you need to uncover customer needs, drive meaningful improvements, and boost your customer retention rates!
Wrapping up
In a nutshell, NPS provides a single measure of customer loyalty however it is no secret that it comes with its limitations. In today’s competitive market companies are looking to gain more actionable insights and are turning their attention to more sophisticated techniques like the alternatives mentioned in the article above.
No matter which method or combination of methods you decide to go with – UXtweak can help you get the most out of your feedback collection strategy!
