16 Ways to Improve Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)

In today’s competitive market, a high Net Promoter Score (NPS) is crucial for standing out and building customer loyalty.

But how can you improve your NPS and create lasting, positive customer experiences?

To find out we asked our panel of experts to share their top advice for improving your Net Promoter Score (NPS) to help you enhance service quality, strengthen customer relationships, and ultimately drive business growth.

How to Improve Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)

1. Introduce NPS Champions

It’s important to recognise that customer satisfaction is the responsibility of the entire organisation, not just customer contact teams.

So, if your contact centre is measuring NPS, the team may not be fully responsible for the score they receive.

For example, if Accounts have been rude to a customer, or a field engineer hasn’t shown up, you could still receive a poor score, even if it’s not your fault.

Bearing this in mind, the best thing to do is to introduce NPS Champions to other divisions to implement the process improvements that your NPS programme shows are needed.

If your scores are low because of rude payment chasing, then it’s the responsibility of the NPS Champion in Accounts to implement the processes and training to stop this happening.

2. Tell the Team That a Perfect Score Isn’t the Objective

If you don’t have the organisational ‘clout’ (or a supportive line manager who will advocate for you) to implement this change, then another valid approach is to reframe the problem.

As a contact centre manager, you need to communicate to your team that a ‘perfect’ score isn’t the objective – there’s no sense in setting targets you can’t influence.

Instead, just do the best job that you can for every single customer when you interact with them, but keep an eye on the trend of your score. Even if you can’t perfect it, you can stop it sliding backwards.

Also, it’s important not to lose sleep over phony competitor benchmarks. Give your team the confidence to provide the best service that’s in their power to deliver and never stop advocating for change elsewhere in the organisation.

Contributed by: Guy Letts, CEO, CustomerSure

3. Follow Up Fast

Prompt follow-up with customers after they’ve given feedback can help contact centres drive increases NPS Score.

The practice, called closing the loop, works for three reasons:

• It demonstrates your commitment to the customer experience
• It resolves individual problems
• It gives you greater insight into the issues that drag down your customer loyalty

Your closed-loop process can vary by customer. How fast you respond, who follows up and even the means of contacting the customer can depend on the type of feedback received, as well as characteristics of the customer or account.

Often, simply hearing that feedback was received improves a customer’s perception of your company. You might even assign a manager or an executive to reach out.

Use follow-up calls to learn more about customer issues. Adding insights from closed-loop conversations can help you pinpoint the root causes of recurring problems so you can fix them at the source.

Contributed by: Richard Burns, NICE

4. Make Time for Refresher Training

Ensure that your advisors are fully skilled and have their skills refreshed on a regular basis.

All too often, one of the first casualties in the battle between the plan and reality is offline time for training – the immediate service level is seen as much more important than the long-term impact on the customer and the NPS score.

When you make a commitment to train, coach, upskill or re-skill an advisor, or provide feedback following a Quality Assurance (QA) assessment, do everything that you can to make sure that session takes place.

One way to make more time for training is to use an intraday management tool, which can give you the ability to make sure that these sessions are booked in during ‘quiet times’ throughout your day. This gives you the best chance of avoiding cancellation and re-booking.

5. Listen to the Voice of the Customer

Many contact centres are structured around their own needs rather than those of the customer. To improve NPS scores, ensure your centre is set up to meet customer needs effectively.

Start by conducting a thorough analysis of your call records. Look at how many calls to advisors in Group A are transferred to Groups B or C, or lead to escalations or complaints. Listen to some calls and identify the main causes of these transfers and escalations.

Based on this analysis, focus on multiskilling your team. Aim to reduce the need for transfers and multiple handlings, ensuring that customer transactions are handled efficiently in a single interaction.

6. Avoid Working in Silos and Consider the Impact of Average Handling Time

A big negative for NPS is when customers feel that they have to deal with many people or departments to get a query resolved.

On many an occasion, a customer’s query will have several threads to it, all of which need to be resolved or actioned in some way.

Empower your frontline advisors to handle queries outside their own department’s main remit and provide them with access to whatever systems they need. This greatly enhances their chances of providing the customer with a ‘one-and-done’ resolution to their call.

Also, look at your Average Handling Time (AHT) targets – are they conducive to promoting NPS?  Are advisors allowed sufficient time and space to properly resolve queries and problems?  Consider changing advisor targets from time-based metrics to quality-based measurements, such as First Contact Resolution (FCR).

Contributed by: David Preece at QStory

7. Get These Three Basics Right

Over the past 19 years, Bright has conducted thousands of operational benchmarking studies across a number of different contact centres.

When looking into their top performers, Bright noticed a commonality between the top performers. This commonality was that they each had a strong understanding of how to:

• Measure operational performance
• Collect and act on employee engagement data
• Put together a strong Voice of Customer research

For more on how to do these three basics well, have a look at the following video.

Contributed by: Simon Thorpe at Bright

For more on the basics of NPS, read our article: What Is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

8. Perfect Your Greetings and Closings

It sounds obvious, but how consistent is your team with their hellos and goodbyes?

The greeting is your customer’s first interaction with your centre, so it’s important to set the right tone. Keep it friendly, ask about their day, show genuine interest, and let them know you value their business.

Allowing advisors to access a customer’s history without switching screens helps streamline the call and prevents the customer from repeating themselves.

Encouraging self-awareness in advisors is key, as it helps them recognise when a call is going off course and how to redirect it. After resolving the issue, ensure advisors end each call positively, as this is the lasting impression the customer will have.

9. Create Feedback Communities

Your promoters may be happy with your brand or service, but it’s worth asking them what you could do differently – or better.

Creating panels and feedback communities can help you identify where you can improve in the short term and even help you develop your product roadmap for the long term.

You can also use optional customer service surveys on your calls to make sure you don’t just stick to the same formula, without realising that you are no longer making the grade.

Maybe your customers feel that your advisors are too formal or casual, too chatty or too abrupt – checking feedback and metrics regularly makes sure you get it right.

10. Encourage Customer Recommendations

Recommendation is one of the most powerful ways to promote a product or service, but how easy are you making it for your customers to share their experiences?

Encouraging customers to leave positive reviews on social media is a great way to spread the word. You can even turn your “passives” into promoters by offering incentives or discounts for sharing their stories, creating an online community that motivates others to comment and engage.

Having skilled advisors who can manage interactions across various channels is also important. It helps make customers feel valued and more likely to share their feedback or post photos.

11. Don’t Ignore Detractors

Detractors can be valuable for feedback, as finding out why they are unlikely to recommend or promote your brand or service can be more useful than knowing the positives.

Identifying whether it’s poor customer service at point of purchase, or when something goes wrong, is valuable intelligence. After all, you can’t fix what you don’t know about.

12. Don’t Ignore Passives

Also, don’t ignore your passives. While they don’t necessarily influence your score up or down, it’s worth finding out what might make them better disposed to your company.

Often price sensitive, they are not loyal to any brand. However, it may be that you can engage them in discussion and show them that you are more than just a product or service. This is where the customer experience can tip the balance in your favour.

If your advisors can connect with these customers, they will be on the way to becoming your best advocates.

Contributed by: Colin Hay, (on behalf of Puzzel)

13. Aim to Understand the Variables That Cause Changes in NPS

Analysing your data to understand customer-sentiment drivers is fairly standard practice, but what drivers exist outside of your contact centre?

Understanding the push and pull within your branch and field teams and the impact your marketing campaigns and media have on your business are key to understanding what else is potentially affecting your NPS.

But remember, don’t get too focused on NPS. NPS is a great metric for understanding customer journeys but it doesn’t always fare too well in predicting customer loyalty or work well as a score for a single interaction.

Scoring customer effort and satisfaction alongside NPS allows for a better understanding of your customers.

Contributed by: Pete Dunn at The Forum

14. Focus on Advisor Morale

Without emotional investment in their work, even the best advisors are going to have a difficult time maintaining exemplary service, which can see your NPS slip.

A driven and upbeat workforce should make a high NPS that much more attainable, and giving advisors a role in their own evaluation is an effective motivator.

So, allowing the team to review themselves alongside their superiors demonstrates that the individual’s opinion is valued and that their development matters, as well as allowing senior employees to build a rapport with their teams.

Similarly, reward schemes like an ‘employee of the month’ programme, or competitions that encourage excellent NPS, are public evidence of pride in good performance and an incentive to raise or maintain standards of work. These schemes provide continued encouragement for advisors to provide the best service they can, which in turn goes towards raising your NPS.

Contributed by: Enda Kenneally, West Unified Communications

15. Make Exceeding Customer Expectations a Key Customer Outcome

The secret to making exceeding customer expectations part of your call centre’s DNA is to focus on exceeding expectations, rather than focusing on the NPS itself.

To do this, you need to look at the NPS as something that measures the difference between the expectations a customer has and the experience they receive.

Put another way, NPS measures surprises. If you miss expectations, you create a negative surprise, and you create a positive surprise if you exceed them.

So, prompt advisors to deliver positive surprises and go the extra mile, rather than concentrating on compliance or reducing the call duration. This will exceed customers’ expectations and help you achieve better NPS scores.

16. Review Your Scripts and Ensure That Common Sense Can Be Applied

Sometimes an advisor’s strict adherence to a script can bypass common sense and cause anything but customer delight.

So, giving advisors the freedom to act with common sense and not stick rigidly to a script, regardless of the circumstances, can deliver better NPS scores.

For example, if a customer who has not had their problem resolved is asked: ‘Is there anything else I can help you with today’, it is likely to be met with a negative response. Unsurprisingly, this lack of common sense is likely to increase dissatisfaction as the customer hasn’t been helped yet.

By analysing every interaction, an interaction analytics platform can identify the impact of rigid scripts on satisfaction and brief advisors to avoid saying or doing things that deliver a negative experience.

To help improve NPS an analytics system can also evaluate what works best at improving your NPS and give your advisors real-time guidance to rescue the call from delivering an experience that misses expectations.

Contributed by: Frank Sherlock, VP of International, CallMiner

For more great information on Net Promoter Score, read these articles next:

• How to Calculate… Net Promoter Score
• What Is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

Author: Charlie Mitchell
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell