Why you should analyse the NPS data

NPS is considered one of the best ways to measure customer loyalty for a company’s brand, products or services. Every once in a while, companies receive tons of data related to it, but the difficulty to analyse it all makes them to not make the best use of it.

In this video, our CEO Riccardo Osti explains why this data should be analysed. He covers the importance of each section of this type of survey and focus on the value the unstructured data has in order make managerial decisions.

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First of all, in case you don’t know, NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, and it is a metric for assessing customer loyalty for a company’s brand, products or services. It is an important metric for enterprises because it measures the strength of the relationship with their clients.

This NPS is used as a general indicator of performance and is usually connected to company level goals. I bet that at least once you have received a survey from an airline after flight… Yeah, that flight, with a terrible flight attendant… Remember they sent you an email asking how was your experience? Exactly, that’s how they get this information.

It might have different formats, as you might have seen it, but it basically consists of 3 things:
The rating, from 1 to 10, for an overall evaluation
Some closed questions and
A free text-box, where customers can write some extra things

Let’s talk about the rating first… it allows companies to know the willingness that clients have to recommend a product to someone else. This means that the higher the score, the higher their loyalty, and consequently if the score is high, they are most likely to recommend this product to someone else.

A score from zero to six usually comes from people who are not happy with the experience, and are called detractors. A score from seven to eight is usually considered neutral, while customers who rate your product or service from 9 to 10 are considered the promoters. Promoters are loyal customers and they are very likely to recommend your business to others.

Let’s now talk about the various questions that may be asked together with the numeric rating.
These questions are the main cause of bias in NPS results. In fact, corporates tend to ask customers to reply to questions that are interesting from a management perspective, and often limit the freedom of clients to talk about things that are really interesting for them. For example, an airline could ask you to rate their catering even if you didn’t eat during that flight.

At the very end, a free text-box finally gives customers the freedom to write what they really think about the product, brand or service. This usually generates great insights, but in my experience, is poorly analyzed, due to the unstructured nature of the texts themselves.

Going back to our airline example…this would be the moment in which you can say what really matters to you, and where you would not oblige to talk about the catering or other things that are not relevant for you.

When you review a product from Amazon, Best Buy, or another retailer, they usually ask you just one question together with the star rating. They just care about the score, and the why behind it.

If this is the case for Consumer Feedback, why should NPS be different? Instead of wasting customers time with several useless closed questions, which most likely will bias the results, companies should start giving customers the freedom to express themselves the way they want.

So, why is so important to analyze NPS unstructured data? Because it contains the reason why behind the NPS numerical value. Performing this analysis might not be easy, however, with the support of a text-analysis tool, it would be definitely doable! If you do this correctly, you could then identify the key factors that influence the NPS, driving your quick wins as well as longer-term plans.

As you can see, important insights might come from NPS, and I hope this answers the question of why you should analyze your NPS data, correlating the score and the free text, in order to enhance the actionability of results.

Check the solution we provide here at Wonderflow, which helps great companies analyzing their NPS score.