In this article, it shares with us the NPS (Net Promoter Score) which is featured in HBR Dec 2003 “The One Number You Need to Grow.” Basically it is to raise the number of “promoters” among existing customers.
Because the feedback loop starts at the frontline staff and are mostly evaluation of how frontline staffs are handling customers, immediate evaluations would help frontline staff to immediately adjust their performance so as to better handle customers. Such real time information can also be fed back to the relevant parties to make adjustment as soon as possible.
One must take note of how the real-time feedback can affect frontline staff. If customers are affected emotionally by events outside the “moments of truth” he/she has a higher tendency to exaggerate certain events within “moments of truth”. If such events perceived and feedback as good, frontline staff’s morale might benefit from it, but if the events are perceived as bad by the customer and he/she gives a very bad rating, frontline staff can be affected by it. Reason being frontline staff gets the full force of each real time data that comes in as compared to getting all the data as a whole where frontline staff would get the average evaluation. Thus management has to take note of this when selecting people for frontline staff.
If one-on-one session are conducted with customers to gain feedback, management have to take note it should be the general opinion of customers that should be taken in and not react to each and every individual opinion that is received by the frontline staff.
Management also has to note that frontline staff’s opinion on customers’ feedback through this one-on-one session plays a part in what is related back to the management too. And its opinions are greatly influenced by what the last few customers it interacts with as compared to the first few.
In gathering feedback from customers, one must note that the questions asked should be open-ended for customers that have time, so as to probe for more information that company can use to improve its customer service. For customers that are rushing, questions that are close-ended such as questions asking for ratings would be great.
This article shows how companies have benefited from feedback loops that started with customers which I feel is a must read given the need to get back to being customer-centric. But one must take note that how it is implemented would play a crucial part in its success and as mention by the article, the support from management is essential too.
