The old adage "the customer is always right" has been a mainstay of offline customer experience for decades. But is it correct?
A core component of the work I used to be involved in at Seren related to digital Customer Experience trackers, or Voice of Customer programmes — typically an on-site survey to find out what your customers actually think. Online surveys, if implemented well, can be extremely powerful, especially when integrated with other data sources and used as part of a wider customer feedback mechanism.
The Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an industry standard measure that has been shown to correlate with financial performance. The score is created by analysing responses to a single question: "Would you recommend this site, service, or product to your friends or family?"
Responses are measured on a scale from 0 to 10. Scores of 0–6 are classified as Detractors, scores of 7–8 as Passives, and scores of 9–10 as Promoters. The NPS score itself is then calculated as the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors.
How the NPS scale breaks down
Turning detractors into evangelists
By integrating survey responses with backend CRM data — always with the user's permission — and web analytics data, you gain two distinct advantages. Firstly, you can scale the size of the problem, understanding exactly how many customers are affected and where. Secondly, you can proactively contact Detractors to help resolve the issue before it festers.
This proactive resolution can be remarkably powerful. You can convert a former Detractor into a Promoter, and in doing so, turn them into an evangelist for your brand. The strategy works across every customer touchpoint — retail, call centre, IVR, online — and can help drive channel-specific service adoption by investing in the channels that matter most to your customers.
For every hour Apple spent calling their Detractors, based on in-store customer feedback, they generated $1,000 in additional revenue — $26 million in the first year alone.
As reported by ForbesAdditional revenue generated by Apple in year one, simply by proactively calling customers who gave critical feedback.
Know when not to chase
Here's the counter-intuitive part: using this approach, you may actually find that converting Detractors to Promoters isn't always cost effective — and that's a valid, useful conclusion to reach.
Without econometric modelling, you'd simply be working from overall volumes. You might find that, although your Detractors are numerous, they aren't high-value customers and may never become so. In that case, focusing elsewhere — for example, upselling your Passives — may yield a better return on the same effort.
To be clear, I'd still advocate that a fantastic experience for all customers is vital — the low-value customer of today may be the high-value customer of tomorrow. But the commercial reality is that resources are finite, both in people and budget. It's vital to focus on what generates the most value first. Fail to do that, and the business will start to question the worth of the whole programme before it's ever had a real chance to deliver a return.