What We Learned From Benchmarking An Internal Vs. External Score Looking back, of course our internal response rate was much better: We gave them a clear action with direct incentives in a format they wanted to respond in. For our clients, however, it was just extra effort on their end. Something hardly anyone has time for.
We put ourselves in our clients' shoes to see why there might have been such a low response. For starters, there were multiple contacts working in different capacities and not all of them were engaging with us every day. We came up with key questions to guide us:
- How can we align ourselves with our clients in a way they care about about that won't cause them extra work?
- How can we work into our client's processes instead of forcing them to work inside ours?
Why NPS Suggests But Never Tells There were a few indicators that reflected NPS works as a suggestion but lacks perfect accuracy.
For instance, certain clients were referring accounts to us, though they had never responded to our NPS email. From an NPS perspective, a no-response might look like a detractor. But in this case, the detractor was actually referring clients to us.
Alternately, we also found that a client who responded positively about referring an account didn't always translate to retention. We have clients that are big proponents for us and refer their friends, while they themselves don't have product-market fit or get acquired and can no longer use our service.
Another insight, but on the internal side: when we separated out the "management" level from the "team member" level, we found that our managers had a higher NPS score than team members. As to be expected, managers have a higher level of engagement, but this data is an insight for our operations team to work on engagement within the team member level.
Why do I look at these together? Benchmarking both client happiness and internal team happiness go hand in hand. When your internal team is working well, that experience translates externally to clients.
To Summarize When using NPS, make sure you and your team define what success looks like, and use NPS to help track this.
Benchmark your score, set goals for upward movement, and then discover insights from what the data is telling you.
Are you tracking both internal and external NPS? I'd love to hear your insights!