Should front-line incentives be driven by Net Promoter Score^®?

Simple, intuitive and easy to benchmark, the Net Promoter Score^® is a great performance indicator to drive a short and efficient satisfaction survey and maintain healthy customer relationships throughout the value chain of your business.

Thanks to a high monthly response rate and regular ongoing improvements, the LitmusWorld Customer Experience & Employee Experience solutions can address some of its main limitations in a positive and effective way. Using this KPI as a support metric in conjunction with other data and assessment methods will allow you to increase your brand ambassadors and boost company sales.

But should you tie the front-line KPIs with NPS^® and other loyalty/satisfaction metrics?

There is no right or wrong answer to this question. It totally depends on the business objective and the current problem at hand.

5 reasons why you should link NPS^® to front-line incentives:

1. It drives front-line accountability to deliver customer excellence. Employees at all levels take customer satisfaction more seriously when they are motivated by monetary benefits.
2. Sends a message to employees that customer loyalty matters. It demonstrates the seriousness of the company and is not just saying the words in a mission statement.
3. Employees follow-up with customers faster and close-loop on issues on priority.
4. Measures customer perceptions in a meaningful way and everyone contributes to it. NPS is good for benchmarking purposes too.
5. Creates a customer-obsessed culture. It’s a proven tactic.

And, 5 reasons why you should NOT link NPS^® to front-line incentives:

1. Employee Satisfaction gets priority over Customer Satisfaction. If employees are happy and loyal, customer satisfaction will inevitably follow.
2. Data can be influenced. Employees learn to create the numbers and beg for high scores, thereby defying the purpose.
3. Research/Surveys aren’t always administrated fairly. Bias is a concern. There are companies that don’t police this data and show completely false scores that eventually destroy brands.
4. Incentivising leads front-line to become more concerned with the score. It creates an environment where they focus more on the numbers instead of actually delighting customers.
5. Creates an over competitive work environment where it gets unclear as to WHO is actually responsible for a detractor (and promoter) score. The value of a score and customer comment gets lost in “whine” and “shine” games.

Factors that determine the success of your NPS^® initiatives:

1. Explain Why: It is the responsibility of the management to communicate the reasons and the methodology used for calculating the NPS^® scores. This ensures that employees understand the credibility of the metric and trust the process. Employee buy-in is the premise on which any transformational initiative is built.
2. Share Onus: Reinstate that every employee owns the customer experience just like the financial results. Ensure a constant supply of motivation so that employees put customers first even when their managers aren’t looking. Celebrate promoters and huddle on detractors more often to ensure a customer-centric culture.
3. Enable With Technology: Use an unbiased third party expert (cough* LitmusWorld *cough) to monitor the entire customer journey to get a clear view of the existing problems and identify the hidden trends. Build a technological environment that is unbiased, uninfluenced and extensive.

So coming back to the original question, should front-line incentives be driven by NPS^®? In my personal opinion, I guess the answer is yes! Having weighed the pros and cons, yes, you should tie NPS^® scores to the front-line incentives. Why? The pros outweigh the cons with a few minor concerns keeping the business’ interest on top. I guess that’s the only way to make everyone in the organization realise the seriousness of a CX initiative and own the accountability of a customer’s experience. That’s honestly the difference between rules and ethics. We need to impose strict rules despite the fact that we know that the same is ethically correct.

What’s your take on it? Contact Us and tell us your opinion on the same.