5 Ways To Improve Your Contact Center’s NPS

What is the Net Promoter Score? How is NPS calculated?

First introduced in a 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review, a contact center’s NPS is often considered a “gold standard” to measure customer experience and determine its ability to garner and maintain customer loyalty.

Two types of NPS can be measured: cisco unified call manager

Transactional: Taken immediately after each customer interaction

Relationship: Taken at regular intervals to assess the ongoing customer-company relationship

NPS is calculated based on a two-part question posed to a customer:

On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend the company or agent you spoke with to a colleague or friend?

Why?

In the first part, a score of 0 represents “extremely unlikely to recommend,” and 10 means “extremely likely to recommend.” In the second, optional part of the question, the customer can explain their choice in more detail. Collated scores are then divided into three buckets and the customers assigned to one of three categories:

Score Customer category Meaning

0-6 Detractors Unhappy customers who can damage the brand’s value

7-8 Passives Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers

9-10 Promoters Loyal and enthusiastic supporters and fans

To calculate NPS:

Calculate total # of survey responses: a

Find:

Total # of Detractors: b

Total # of Passives: c

Total # of Promoters: d

Find:

% of Detractors: [(b)/(a)] x 100

% of Passives: [(c)/(a)] x 100

% of Promoters: [(d)/(a)] x 100

NPS = % of Promoters – % of Detractors

NPS can be anywhere from -100 to 100. In general, a score over 50 is considered good for a contact center, because this indicates that it has more Promoters than Detractors. By measuring NPS, your contact center can understand how well your agents are performing and on which channels you excel. Equally important, you can identify key sticking points that dissatisfy or annoy customers, understand the strength of your relationships with them, and gain better visibility into their loyalty. This information can help with goal-setting and change management so you can take the necessary actions to improve. In the longer term, NPS can empower your contact center to improve customer relationships, boost revenues and RoI, and enhance its growth potential.

Now that you know why NPS is so important, here are 5 ways to improve it at your contact center.

1. Ask For Qualitative Customer Feedback

A great way to improve customer experiences and thus NPS is to ask customers for feedback. In addition to asking them to rate you on a numerical scale, ask what your agents can do to make their experiences better. What did we do well? Where are we falling behind? Based on their responses to such qualitative questions, you can identify the gaps and decide what you need to improve their experiences. If customers see a tangible improvement in your service, you will notice a steady increase in the number of Promoters as compared to the number of Detractors (or Passives).

2. Reduce Average Handling Times (AHT) and increase First Call Resolution (FCR)

Customers are busy and/or impatient, and they want quick service and fast answers. By reducing AHT and increasing FCR, you can provide quick resolutions, which will make customers happy and yield a high NPS for your contact center. And one of the best ways to do this is to empower your agents with the right tools such as Unified Agent Desktops and integration solutions.

An Agent Desktop provides agents with easy and near-instant access to relevant information and context to focus on customers and have meaningful interactions that improve their experiences. By simplifying agent workflows, the Agent Desktop helps reduce errors, lowers AHT, and improves FCR, all of which positively impact NPS.

Solutions that integrate the contact center’s main operational platform with third-party technologies and tools like CRM (e.g. Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics), ERP, Zendesk or ServiceNow can help leverage operational synergies and streamline business processes to improve agent efficiency and productivity, which again has a positive effect on customer interactions, and thus on NPS.

3. Get Rid Of Inefficient Silos

Customers don’t appreciate contact centers where they have to talk to multiple people in different departments to get answers. And this is exactly what happens in siloed contact centers. In such situations, agents often don’t have the proper context crucial to delivering high-quality, timely, and relevant customer service. This adds to customers’ frustration, decreases satisfaction, and increases the probability of negative experiences.

Remove the silos and make intelligent omnichannel routing part of your long-term customer service strategy. With this solution, the caller can be connected to the right agent as soon as they call so they don’t have to be switched back and forth between departments or agents. Also, AI-powered automation, voice agents, and chatbots can help guide more meaningful conversations that improve customer experiences, CSAT, and ultimately, NPS.

4. Identify NPS “Champions” to Help Create an “NPS Culture.”

Identify agents with consistently high NPS numbers, and make them the ambassadors to train and mentor other agents, particularly those with low NPS scores. This can help increase the right knowledge and skills across the enterprise, lift all agents’ performance, and improve the contact center’s NPS.

It can also regularly review customer NPS feedback to identify under-performing agents and deliver the necessary training to plug gaps in their service delivery. Track and display real-time NPS metrics with wallboards, say, by customer segment, channel, journey type, etc. to encourage immediate follow-ups to improve poor NPS experiences.

5. Implement a Balanced Metrics Strategy

Keep in mind that although NPS is an important indicator of customer experiences, satisfaction, and loyalty, your contact center’s customer experience strategy should not be built around it alone. So instead of leveraging NPS in isolation, use it in conjunction with comprehensive call center reporting tools. Implement a balanced metrics strategy that includes other measurements such as Voice of Customer (VoC) and Customer Satisfaction. These measurements can be gathered via a survey immediately after a call to review the agent’s performance and the customer’s overall experience with the interaction. VoC also addresses productivity factors like occupancy, service level, FCR, and even financials like cost per contact.