NPS Declining Despite Action Plans

Evaluating the customer experience aims, using measured KPIs, to identify areas for improvement to be implemented to optimize this experience. The company or brand can then enter into a virtuous dynamic. But sometimes, the evolution of KPIs is disconnected from improvement plans, and this situation is often demotivating for the teams. The cause often lies upstream, in the way the evaluation of this customer experience was constructed.

The approach that we detail here includes 6 steps that we believe are necessary and that we have put into practice in numerous missions. This logic implies good upstream preparation when implementing the customer experience evaluation (or when redesigning it). From experience, this preparation makes it possible to optimize reaction times once the KPIs are known and action plans must be put in place.

Step 1: Involve stakeholders at startup

The measure that you will put in place (or that we will reorganize if your project involves overhauling your approach) will provide a diagnosis leading to proposing plans to improve the customer experience. You will therefore need to involve the different audiences who can lead such improvements from the outset, by forming a steering committee, because:

• the objective of the approach must be explained as soon as possible, at the risk of allowing misunderstandings or tensions to manifest themselves downstream once the die is cast,
• everyone must be clear as soon as possible about their scope of intervention when it is necessary to carry out improvement plans (in order to avoid areas of vagueness upstream from turning into “hot potatoes” later in the process),
• these audiences must share their experiences and their vision, helping you build your customer experience measurement,

Who to involve?If this is a strategic/transversal evaluation, you will need to involve representatives from each of the territories covered by your action plan: customer relations, quality, marketing, brand, communication, etc. If your evaluation concerns a managerial ambition of a specific team, for example the after-sales service, you will need to involve those at the after-sales service level who will be able to lead improvement actions.

Step 2: Cross the customer perspective and the internal perspective

Customer side:exploring customer expectations makes it possible to define the themes on which an action can bear fruit in terms of the experience perceived by customers. The vision of operational audiences (even when they are close to the field) can sometimes be partial or biased, and require exploratory exchanges directly with different customer segments in order to properly nourish this stage.
Internal side: with the members of the steering committee, it is then necessary to inventory the different areas on which the actors can really act. Taking the time to work on this step carefully ensures the operationality of the evaluation, with everyone knowing in advance which lever it will be up to them to activate depending on the configuration of the evaluation results (see Step 5).
The evaluation will be at the intersection of the customer side and the internal side: each customer expectation must correspond to a possible internal action. And it is on each of these intersections that we will therefore have to produce KPIs guiding action.

Step 3: Choosing KPIs

The choice of KPIs therefore occurs after the first two preparatory stages. Indeed, these KPIs are at the service of a precise diagnosis (combining customer expectations and an operational field of action of the teams). There are two types of KPIs:

• Technical KPIs: they correspond to what the company knows to have delivered (they are often extracted from its information system). For example in the context of after-sales service, the number, duration and channel of contact with the customer, the processing time of their request, etc.
• KPIs linked to the quality of the relationship: they correspond to the perception that customers have: satisfaction, desire to remain a customer of the brand or to recommend it, etc.

Concerning the KPIs linked to the quality of the relationship, there are different approaches, each having its advantages and limitations. It is mainly the combined use of different KPIs that makes it possible to obtain a truly operational tool. Given the different customer expectations, but also the different types of actions that can be taken to meet them, the idea of ​​a single KPI is not tenable. See our paper on the properties of different customer experience evaluation KPIs.

Step 4: Define the KPIs communication methods

The issue of communicating KPIs is eminently managerial and must be studied on a case-by-case basis with great caution. Several decisions must be made (ideally during the initial steering committee):

• For information or for action?Internal communication must make it possible to distinguish a KPI transmitted for action from a KPI transmitted for information. Stakeholders having different responsibilities and fields of action, certain KPIs of which they will be communicated will concern them for “action” since they enter into their direct field of intervention, others for “information” since they have no direct lever of intervention. This detailed clarity of the “rules of the game” is absolutely crucial and must be established even before launching the process (in order to avoid the “hot potato” syndrome that we mentioned in Step 1).
• A key indicator of internal communication?Often, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used as a single indicator of common communication between different teams. NPS relates to recommendation intention, which is an indicator for which the responsibilities of each person are very diffuse in the company, so much so that teams often have the feeling of acting blindly in an attempt to develop a corporate NPS which exceeds them, and whose variations seem disconnected from the efforts that each person undertakes at their level. This communication strategy centered on the NPS will only work if, in addition to this central KPI, the teams have to the same extent their specific “KPIs” (detailed satisfaction on certain aspects of the customer relationship, etc.) allowing them to clarify their field of intervention to contribute to the evolution of the NPS,
• Communicate all the numbers?The frequency of communication of KPIs also plays a key role. Obtaining an improvement in customer perception requires in certain cases improvement plans which may take time to deploy. In such cases, continuing to communicate on KPIs when the action plan has not yet been deployed can discourage teams. In other cases, too little communication can prevent you from realizing the urgency of certain improvements. It will be understood that such a plan must be studied on a case-by-case basis. But it is crucial because the long-term commitment of the teams depends on it.

Step 5: Evaluate the customer experience and produce KPIs

After Step 3, queries allowing the collection of “technical” KPIs will be set up. At the same time, a questionnaire to evaluate the customer experience will have been designed. It will be necessary to define when this questionnaire must be submitted to customers. In certain cases, it can be useful to trigger the questioning hotly following an event (new subscription, after-sales service call, chatbot, etc.), in other cases coldly (as it happens or periodically outside an event or on D+N of an event). This question of temporality of the measure is particularly sensitive and must also be studied on a case-by-case basis.

Step 6: Implement improvement actions

Once you have well prepared your program, from Steps 1 to 4, the implementation of the improvement plan is the step on which you can really dedicate yourself to action and deploy the necessary points of improvement in an agile and responsive manner. If, on the contrary, we have not prepared the ground as we recommend, this stage is the one where we must at the same time set the areas of responsibility (who must act on what), know if this corresponds to a real expectation of customers, think about how we are going to act, etc... In short, it is often far too late, because this is precisely the moment when we need to be reactive and mobilized. Good advance preparation therefore remains, in our opinion, the best option.

Then, in the “run” of the evaluation, we alternate between steps 5 and 6: measurement-action plan-measure-action plan, etc. to enter into a dynamic of improving the customer experience.