itSMF Bulletin November 2017 Bulletin - November 2017 | Page 12

“Feedback is the
breakfast of
champions”
~ Ken Blanchard,
Management Expert,
Author ‘The One Minute
Manager’
Introducing Net Promoter
Net Promoter is an open-source methodology used by thou-
sands of companies, big and small, to grow their
businesses by increasing customer loyalty. There are a moun-
tain of case studies that show how effective it can be. Unlike
traditional surveys for gathering customer feedback, a Net
Promoter survey – with only two or three questions – is pain-
less for customers to complete.
At its heart is a metric called the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a
company’s products or services.
An NPS is calculated by asking customers a question along the
lines of, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recom-
mend us to a friend or colleague?”.
Based on their rating, a customer is categorised as a Detractor
(when they give a rating of 6 or below), a Passive (7 or 8) or a
Promoter (9 or 10). The NPS is then calculated by subtracting
the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of
Promoters. This results in a score ranging from -100 (all your
customers think you’re rubbish) to +100 (all your
customers think you’re the bee’s knees).
One or two important follow-up questions ask the customer
why they gave that rating, and what they’d most like to see
improved.
Net Promoter Score
= % of Promoters - % of Detractors
The Net Promoter concept is simple to understand by execs
and frontline staff alike. Categorising customers as
Detractors, Passives and Promoters provides a useful
language for the customer-centric team (“Emma is a
Detractor, give her a call”). And it provides a clear clarion call
– reduce Detractors and increase Promoters. The follow-up
question, tells you everything you need to know to do
exactly that.
12 itSMF Bulletin—November 2017
Net Promoter, as a system for driving service improvement,
is often overlooked or rejected by IT teams because of the
irrelevance of the “likely to recommend” question for an
internal service provider. But that concern is easy to address
by simply changing the wording of the first question from
“likely to recommend” to a more traditional “how satisfied
are you”.
Listening Post 1: Transactional Surveys
Transactional surveys are the surveys you issue when you’ve
closed a customer’s ticket. They are used to drive continual
service improvement of IT support. They ask the customer
specifically about their experience of that ticket.
These surveys are where customers will tell you how
annoying it was that their ticket was closed without their
problem being solved. Or how knowledgeable and helpful
Rosie was.
This feedback is ideal for:
Coaching support team members. For someone in a
customer-facing role, there’s no feedback more relevant
and powerful than that from the customers they provide
service to.
Proactive alerting of (dis)satisfaction issues, giving you a
chance to turn a bad experience into a positive one and
avoid costly (in terms of both effort and reputation)
escalations.
Providing a more holistic measure of support service quali-
ty than just time-based response and resolution SLA
measures.
Identifying themes in verbatim feedback to identify and
prioritise performance improvement initiatives for your
support team.
Listening Post 2: Relationship Surveys
Relationship surveys are used to inform IT strategy. These
surveys are run periodically, typically annually. They ask all
of IT’s customers for their feedback on their perceptions of
IT in general.
Unlike transactional surveys, customers get the chance to
tell you about any aspect of the service that IT provides -
network performance, the crappy laptop they’ve been giv-
en, or how much they love the new self-service portal. Any-
thing.