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Net Promoter Score Vs. Hively (Pt. 2)

Posted on November 8th, 2011

Many companies have considered using the Net Promoter Score (NSP) as the go-to method for measuring customer happiness. Although there are some great aspects of the NPS rating method, we highlighted several several failures of the Net Promoter Score in our last post in this series. In this post, we’ll describe how Hively improves upon the NPS method.

1) Hively is specific. Hively is different than the Facebook Like button or simply asking the general question “would you recommend our company?” Although those things are interesting, they’re better suited for popularity contests. Hively measures every single transaction that takes place between you and your customers. It’s all about the transaction, not broad content or a generalized concept. When your measuring the customer experience down to this detail your data becomes very valuable.

2) Hively creates a culture of customer service excellence. Hively motivates each of your customer facing team members to constantly seek out feedback and improve the service they deliver each customer. Your team members get points for all the feedback they receive and these points translate into an overall customer happiness score for each person.

As a manager, you can see how your team as a whole is doing and as well as each individual. You can use Hively to reward your top performing team members and work more closely that need more assistance. As a team member, you can see how you’re doing compared to the rest of the team. By providing full transparency to the entire team everyone knows what’s working and where improvements need to be made. Adjustments can be made quickly because all of this is happening in real time.

3) It’s more than a score. Hively shows you how each team member (and your company as a whole) is doing in terms of a customer happiness score, engagement level and the percent of each rating type. While the score is important, the engagement and percent of rating types are also critical. For example, if you send a NPS survey to 100 people and only 1 of these people fills it out and gives you a score of 10, you’d have a perfect score. However, if you made decisions for your company based off of this score you’d be making a big mistake. Knowing the amount of ratings and the % of each type is key to truly understanding customer satisfaction.

4) Hively customer ratings are clear. The rating system within Hively is simple. A green smiley face for Happy, Yellow straight face for Satisfied and Red frowny face Unhappy. Having both a text visual cues make it clear to the customer what type of rating they’re giving.

5) Hively rating options are relevant and equal. The application of the rating scale is consistent with the question and scale used. While having equal chance of receiving the same rating type, your team members are award points based on the ratings received: Happy face = 3 points, Satisfied face = 1 point, Unhappy face = -1 point.

6) No bias. Hively gives your customers three simple rating options and assigns equal weight in terms of the chance an option will be received. Again, with the Net Promoter Score, the negative (or detractor) option is the largest option presented to the customer (0 – 6). Meanwhile, the options for neutral (passive) or positive (promoters) are limited. Proponents of NPS will tell you it’s this way by design. However, combining this bias with a lack of labels really just introduces inconsistency for the one being rated and confusion for the one giving the rating. This fact alone make the whole method flawed.

7) Hively is actionable and immediate. Companies using Hively get feedback in real-time, all the time. When you get feedback at this level you no longer need to send out surveys and you no longer need to guess at your customer satisfaction. If you’re waiting to ask your customers how happy they are every 30, 60 or 90 days it could very well be too late. Hively gives you instant customer feedback at every touch point with your customers.

8) Hively was built to measure every customer transaction. The NPS method was built around 1 question (“The Ultimate Question” as it’s called) – “Would you recommend our company?” The question alone demonstrates clearly how the method was designed, studied and is better suited for gather broad, general information on your company as a whole. Hively, however, was specifically and uniquely designed to measure every single transaction your customers have with your customer facing team members. The feedback is mapped to a transaction and specific person and rolls up into an overall company satisfaction score in much more meaningful and valuable way.

9) Hively is simple, quick and easy. The number one thing our customers tell us they love about Hively is that it’s simple. Systems that give you every option you’re looking for are complicated and time consuming to use. Hively gives you all the actionable data you need and no more. Best of all, there are no big plans to make or prep work. You can literally get a team of 100 people set up and getting feedback with Hively in less than 5 minutes.

10) Specific, immediate feedback delivered to the people that need it most. Hively gives you feedback on every customer interaction in real time and delivers this feedback directly to the people who need it most – your customer facing teams. Instead of sending this data to management and let them turn it into power point slides for next months board presentation, feedback is delivered instantly to your team so they can instantly act on it. Positive feedback throughout the day increase morale and motivation. Getting notified instantly about negative feedback gives you an opportunity to act on it and address the issue. Most often this will allow you to take your customers negative experience and turn it into a positive one before things get out of hand or worse – you lose them as a customer.

 

In summary, the Net Promoter Score has been a preferred method for measuring customer satisfaction for many companies for quite some time. However, the short comings of the NPS method are becoming more and more obvious as time goes on. Now, Hively provides you with a system that addresses all of these shortcomings and will lead you to a much more valuable way to measure and improve your customer satisfaction.

If you’re considering using the Net Promoter Score for measuring your customer satisfaction consider using Hively instead. Or, if you’re currently using NPS in this way, give Hively a try and compare the difference. You can sign up to try Hively for free with teams of up to 3. Let us know what you think!

 


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