Podcast Recap: Antonella Pisani Joins the ECommerce Marketing Podcast
The ECommerce Marketing Podcast teaches marketers about new growth strategies. Arlen Robinson hosts a variety of entrepreneurs who bring their passion and experience to discuss critical topics in the industry.
Listen, like, and download this podcast episode and every episode of the ECommerce Marketing Podcast with Arlen Robinson.
Here are the highlights from Antonella’s conversation with Arlen on Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
Net Promoter Score: What It Is and Why It Matters
Arlen Robinson: Today, we’re going to be talking about Net Promoter Scores (NPS). For anyone that’s not familiar with what it is, why don’t you tell us about it and why it’s important?
Antonella Pisani: So even if people haven’t heard the phrase Net Promoter Score, I’m confident that most everyone here has received a survey that asks if you are willing to recommend this to a friend, family member, or colleague. So that one simple question is, What makes up the Net Promoter Score?
Net Promoter Score is a measure of your customer’s satisfaction with your product or your service. It’s a formula that looks at the percentage of people that are promoters. So that would be a score of a nine or ten on a zero to ten scale. And then you take that percentage and then back out the percentage of what’s called a detractor, which is people that have given you a zero to a six.
People who are seven and eight get considered neutral. And those numbers get thrown out because they’re not going to be your raving fans, but they’re also not going to be bad-mouthing you either. So it’s a simple way to understand whether your clients are happy with you at the end of the day. And you can correlate it to their likelihood of coming back to make future purchases and say nice things about your company.
AR: Yeah, it makes total sense. As you said, even if people aren’t familiar with the term Net Promoter Score, I’m sure they’ve gotten those types of emails. I get them constantly. Brands are steadily using it.
These major brands send out those emails asking you to rate them on a scale from one to 10 and asking what’s the likelihood that you would recommend us to somebody. That’s typically what it is. So if the big brands are doing it, it’s something that we all need to take a look at.
Small or Big Business: Every Customer Matters
AR: Now it seems pretty straightforward, as you mentioned: a simple survey you can send out to customers. You can think about what timeframe you want to send that out, but it’s a pretty straightforward email.
Now to do this, as far as an e-commerce brand is concerned, are there any particular tools or resources that you need to have in place? Any tools to facilitate sending that survey out and then taking a look at the results? That’s what is the heart of this, along with calculating the score. And then, what do you do with the score?
AP: I would say a couple of things. One is: this is actually really important for smaller businesses as well, right? I mean, we capture this for ourselves and that the smaller the business, the more that every single customer matters. So regardless of the size of your business, I’d encourage people to capture this.
It can be done in a few different ways. You can use a survey tool if you want to go about it inexpensively. You can use Survey Monkey or Typeform. Then there are other tools like Qualtrics. We prefer a tool called Ask Nicely. The reason is that it allows us to slice the data more and understand what types of customers are happiest with you. It gives you an idea of which kinds of customers are less happy. And then getting that feedback that pairs with the score help to understand the why behind the score, which is critical in improving it.
The main reason to start capturing it is so you know where you stand, and then you can take proactive steps to improve that score. For an e-commerce business, there are a few ways to do it:
You can do it as a feedback tab.
You can use a tool like HotJar.
You can ask for a satisfaction score on the website at the end of checkout.
You can use a feedback tab you can engage with.
You could send an email.
The value of doing it before someone has purchased is it also gives you some context on how people feel about your site overall. So you can capture feedback a couple of different times.
I would recommend waiting at least a week after you’ve delivered the product to the client if you’re an e-commerce company. Then they have a sense for engaging with what they bought from you. It’ll be like a reflection of your fulfillment process as well. You know as well as I do that you can have an awesome-looking website, and the product can be great, but if fulfillment’s not great, that’s going to negatively impact perceptions.
If you’re selling something like a software solution, sometimes you can do a prompt within the actual platform as well. What’s nice about this score is that it’s not a complicated formula to figure out. You don’t need to be an analytics wizard, and most of the tools I mentioned will give you your score. It’s such a simple formula a calculator can get it for you. You don’t need much more than that. It’s more about getting started and starting to get that baseline for yourself.
What Do You Do With the Scores?
AR: Gotcha. Now, you’ve gone through this process, and you mentioned some key things here that I’m glad you brought up. You don’t have to track it in one place. You don’t have to use it as an email campaign post-purchase because a lot of times, you see companies doing that.
With that score in multiple areas, that’s very key. Now let’s say a company has gone through the process, they’ve got the score and whether it’s calculated or they’ve manually calculated it. What do they do with that score, and what is that saying about their company once they have that score?
AP: So the big thing is understanding the scores relative to a benchmark. How are you doing? Eighty and above is considered world-class. I’d have to look at the different thresholds below that, but the first thing is understanding, are you at a zero? Are you at a negative score?
And so, depending on where you show up, that’s going to drive what your next steps are. The first time I deployed it at one of the companies where I worked, it came back, and it was a negative score, which is the best place to start.
In that case, what was cool is the tool was giving us information about the browser version and the operating system and device. So we figured out that the site wasn’t loading for people on certain devices and operating systems, and that’s part of what was driving some of those poor scores.
So this is why it’s worth investing in this - you’re getting that feedback associated with it and can slice and dice the information. And that versus a survey solution, you can see what’s driving your lower scores.
Or, what’s driving your higher scores? We have a client whose 12-month average was 76, and they started taking the scores that were lower and immediately contacting those people and figuring out what they could do to make things right.
And over the last couple of months, this score has gotten over 80 now because of that diligence in reaching out to people giving lower scores. That’s why even with the smaller companies, it’s really important because it could be something you’re not even aware of what’s driving it.
It could be something they heard, or it could be something with the fulfillment process that wasn’t something that your business screwed up, right? It could have been a UPS or FedEx issue. So once you’ve got that score, creating your benchmark, and getting to the understanding of what the drivers are, good and bad, you can start working against those.
I first learned about NPS back in the day at ProFlowers. There, we calculated the dollar value of each NPS point, so we knew if we could get that score up an extra point or two, what it was worth to our business. That type of analysis is getting a bit more advanced for most companies right now. It comes down to a matter of, are folks happy with me or not?
The Right NPS Questions for the Right Experience
AR: And why? Yeah, that’s the bottom line. And that can say a lot, right? There is the overall opinion of your company at various points. Now, I know a lot of the brands and companies that are listening.
People these days are always concerned about the individual touchpoints that they have with their customers or the perspective of their customers. Sending out something like this or taking a poll, a lot of times, you’ll have companies who are going to be more cautious about what they’re asking when they’re asking. Do you recommend adding other questions along?
Would you recommend keeping it more as an individual question, just asking for the rating and leaving it at that, or would you suggest bundling this in with some other feedback questions that the company would want to ask?
AP: Yeah, you can bundle it in. I would say lead with this question. I can walk you through how we do it for ourselves and similar to how we implemented it for that company. The first question is the NPS question, and then what is cool with those more advanced tools is you can build in logic. So let’s say that person is a promoter, so they’ve given a nine or 10.
The next thing is it feels like you’re just texting with someone. It’s a cool interface. And so it makes it easy to get more details without it feeling intrusive or annoying, right? It’s like a chatbot.
So if someone gives you a nine or 10, then that’s awesome. What is it that we did that delighted you? Maybe it’s a select one from five options. Is there something we could do better for you? And then, it could be the same five options, and then based on that, we may refine one more time.
Conversely, let’s say we got a zero to six score; that’s when this person doesn’t like you very much, so we’re not gonna ask for a lot of details. We may say, hey, I’m so sorry to hear that. We’d like the opportunity to make it right. Which of these things could we be doing better for you?
And then they pick one of five. You just have to be thoughtful about it. I think you can get away with asking your promoters a little bit more detail than you can your distractors. They’re not going to want to spend a bunch of time, but you can use it as an opportunity to try to get more quantitative feedback.
For example, pick one of these options from these five and then one piece; it’s a bit more qualitative. I wouldn’t go ask 15 questions and then lead with something like this.
If you are doing it through an email, you can embed the survey into the email. That way, they’re clicking a button within the email. They can pick their score right from there. Then that opens up the ability to ask more questions, but that way, you capture that score right away.
AR: So, with some of these tools, you can lead with this question. And then, is it based on the response? So if they’re zero to six, you’re gonna ask a different follow-up question as opposed to somebody that says that they rate you a nine?
AP: And the same thing on the promoter side. You can do logic based on what they’ve picked. So let’s say for us one of the options was Great! We’d love more details. Is it the speed of analytics, the frequency of analytics, or the depth of analytics? So when you can use that logic and make it easy, you’ll be able to extract more info.
Licensing Fees: What to Know
AR: One other question that I have —and I don’t know if this has changed as far as the whole history of the Net Promoter Score.
But I do recall several years back, if you were going to use this type of rating system, there was a licensing fee you had to pay. Is that still the case?
AP: I think it’s pretty wide open. For the e-commerce site or whoever’s sending out the survey, when you’re sending something out, you’re not using that phrase anyway. You’re saying, “Hey, we’d love your feedback.”
I think where there may be a licensing thing is the software. So if Qualtrics asks someone that is advertising their product for a Net Promoter Score, there might be some licensing fees. I haven’t gotten involved with that side. If you’re a brand or a service organization, you’re never saying that to your clients anyway.
AR: That’s exactly what I thought. I think you’re right, it comes down to the fact that if you’re a software company and you’re looking to incorporate that as a tool within your solution, you can’t call it Net Promoter Score because that’s trademarked, but if anyone’s looking to use it anyway as a brand, you’re not going mention that pro score.
People are going to ask, what is that anyway? That’s going to confuse people even more. So that makes a lot of sense. You know, as we get ready to wrap things up, I’m always interested in looking at examples of brands that are using some of these strategies.
Results and Benefits of NPS
AR: You mentioned that your company uses it internally, but are any other companies you can mention that use the Net Promoter Score? Can you give specific details on how they used it, what their results were, if they made any changes based on that, what were they, and how did it benefit their company?
AP: Yeah, for sure. The client that I mentioned is a company called Peacock Alley. They do luxury linens, and we implemented the solution that we use, which is one with a lot of that logical conditioning in it.
So we could capture a score based on not only an overall score but understand that it’s the people who bought sheets that gave you this kind of score. People who bought blankets gave you this kind of score. People who bought pillowcases gave you this kind of score.
They started high. I would say just shy of that world-class score, but we pulled some of the benchmarks just before this call. If you look at their 12-month average versus year-to-date, we’ve moved over to world-class. It’s improved by about five points, which is pretty meaningful.
And I would say the way that’s been done is one of the things has been having that segmentation to understand, are there certain products causing dissatisfaction or less happy clients? Getting that feedback to see what are the things that are tripping people?
And then what we do is route it. If someone gives a low score, that feedback immediately gets sent to the customer care team. And that customer care team can immediately reach out to that person and say, Hey, we’re so sorry about this. We just got your feedback. What can we do? Can we hop on the phone?
One thing we always recommend is to capture that NPS score at a certain cadence, whether it’s every quarter or every year, but watch how those individual customers also trend and change.
But there was some feedback about the website that was coming in. We were right in the midst of a redesign, so I think the redesign addressed some of those customer issues. But that’s been a pretty fun case study because it was already high, but then getting it to continue to go higher by monitoring, being responsive, and looking for those patterns in things that have been causing some dissatisfaction.
A QA Army
AR: Yeah. I think the key thing you mentioned is using that information and being proactive. Because if you’re getting certain people or a few people that are rating their experience in a certain way, most likely, there are going to be others.
So if you jump right on it based on that initial poor response, get it over to your customer care team, and then jump right on it, that makes a big difference. You’ll be able to identify any holes you have in your process and hopefully prevent others from giving that lower rating.
And I think with marketing in general, these days especially, we have all of this data coming in from various sources. Trying to figure out what our customers are doing and their behavior on our website, there’s a ton of data and metrics that we’re all tracking. But the bottom line is if you’re just tracking things and storing them in a database, you might as well not even be tracking them at all.
So that’s the key right there to make sure you make use of that data. And a great way to do it, as you said, is that in that example where they immediately jumped on it to resolve any issues to prevent other people from having that same dissatisfaction.
AP: And sometimes it can be little things, right? One of the things that I’ve seen crop up on various e-commerce sites, especially something like clothing, is the color swatch wasn’t quite the same as the product.
It is so much about getting that feedback right so that you can go, it was this shade of gray, but the product is this shade of gray. So let me update the swatches. Once you get this customer feedback, one way I like to think about this is it’s kind of this army of QA people, right?
Most companies do not have enough QA resources, like content QA, and so all of a sudden, you have this army of QA people on different devices and browsers giving you insight into this stuff that might not be quite right.
So it’s an awesome opportunity if you take that data and act on it, to your point of just having the score and not doing anything with it. Even if you have an awesome score, you can’t stay idle because someone else is on your tail. Always strive to be more.
AR: Yeah. Definitely. And I like that you have that army of QA people, which you’re right in saying it’s your customers. Everybody’s looking to give their opinion about something and their feedback. So you might as well take advantage of it and use that to your benefit.
Wrapping Up
AR: Well, Antonella, this has been an awesome conversation. As I mentioned, we hadn’t talked directly about the Net Promoter Score before in the podcast, so this is very, very refreshing. I know it’s going to go a long way with our listeners and viewers. Thank you for coming on.
We appreciate it. But before we let you go, we always like to switch gears so our audience can get to know you a little bit better. So if you don’t mind sharing one quick fun fact that you think we’d be interested to know.
AP: Yeah. A fun fact is I’ve been super involved with service and giving back since I was about 16, so a long time now.
It’s something that we bring into the company pretty heavily. We support a ton of organizations. and the fun fact is that, hopefully, in the next few days, I’ve got my own nonprofit going live. So that’s going to be a big adventure on top of running an agency. So that’s a big, fun one.
AR: Yeah, that’s awesome! Service is always a good thing, and no matter what you’re doing, it’s always good to give back in some way to help others that are less fortunate. I applaud you for that. I’ll be looking forward to what you have going on once you get all that together.
We thank you for sharing that, Antonella. So thanks again for joining us today on the e-Commerce Marketing Podcast.
AP: Thanks so much. Great speaking with you. Thank you for listening to the E-Commerce Marketing Podcast.
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