What I want to talk about is the impact of culture on NPS. I started thinking about it when a long-time client of ours in the Netherlands was acquired by an American company. The American company placed great importance on NPS even basing bonuses on it. The American company was surprised at what a low NPS score the Dutch Company was getting. The score wasn’t low, it was just above 0 which in NPS terms is actually neutral.

What was going on here? Well it had nothing to do with the quality of the service of our Dutch client. It had to do with ‘scoring’ nature of the Dutch respondents versus American respondents. When Americans are asked to rate something on a scale of 0 to 10 they give more extreme responses as compared to their European counterparts.

This scoring bias is deeply engrained in the cultural differences between Europe and the US. American children are expected to get all A’s, even in high school. In Europe where tests are graded on a scale of 0 to 10, students can almost never get a ten. A teacher of my daughter once said that an 8 is great, a 9 is for geniuses and 10, well only God can get a 10. In Belgian colleges, around 70% is considered cum laude and around 80% magna cum laude.

When European respondents, growing up in such a school system, are confronted with a classic NPS scale of 0 to 10, they will – if extremely satisfied – give an 8 (a compliment in their mind). I see plenty of surveys conducted in Europe based on some American template where these respondents are then asked “What can we do to get a 9 or 10?” They inevitably respond with “Nothing, I love your company!” or “Nothing, it was the best service I ever had.”

In classic NPS scoring, the 8 from these respondents has no weight! They are ignored. That is why so many European companies have neutral NPS scores. What I propose is a European Net Promoter Score variant where an 8 also counts as a promoter and 6 as passive.

If I apply this NPS-EU scoring to various client EU companies of ours, I get scores much closer to their respective American industry benchmarks!

Using the NPS-EU, would allow American companies to realistically compare their NPS scores with those across the pond. It would also give European managers a more accurate and usable instrument.

In the future, it could be fine-tuned even further. Once there is enough data from different European countries, a weight or factor could be applied to scores based on the cultural response bias in each country.

What do we do in the meanwhile? Well, our advice to our clients is not to worry about industry NPS benchmarks. Start measuring NPS now yourself and use your score as your own benchmark and base. Then start tracking it through time. Use key-driver analysis to find out which factors affect your score. Take action and repeat. Don’t ask everyone at once. Spread it out and ask a small panel once a month. That way you shorten the cycle between measurement and action and back to measurement again.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

“Net Promoter” is a registered trademark of Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix.

Automated alerts give you the opportunity to break that perception and quickly interact with your respondents. Alerts, used correctly, can win back at-risk customers. They allow you to communicate with dissatisfied customers to learn and repair damaged relationships through coordinated follow-up.

For example, you can identify disappointed customers automatically based on an NPS or general satisfaction question and push an e-mail alert to their account manager for immediate follow-up.

What kind of alerts are possible?

• E-mail
  This mail contains a link to the real-time respondent report which includes all respondents answers, contact fields, location, etc.
• An SMS
  You can send an SMS to recipients anywhere in the world. This SMS text message contains your personal message as well as a short URL to the real time respondent report.
• A Twitter message
  This is a private message that does not appear in your public stream. It contains all the information the recipient needs to handle the alert.
• An HTTP request
  These requests are very powerful, because they allow to interact with other systems and APIs. For instance, you could create a support ticket in your helpdesk application, based on answers given by a respondent. You could also send the respondent a follow-up survey automatically if they answer a certain way or use it to update your own CRM.

An example

A company organises a customer satisfaction survey. An account manager will immediately receive a message whenever a customer indicates they are not satisfied. The respondent report gives him a clear view of the needs of the customer. He can immediately contact the customer to address their concerns and win them back.

» Click here to see an example automated alert.

Some figures

• Several studies indicate that by 2014 the number of mobile internet users will pass the number of fixed internet users. In the U.S. this is already the case.
• By the end 2011, 50% of Americans own a smartphone and there will be approximately 1 billion people worldwide that connect to the internet in a mobile way. (The Official Google Blog)
• In the EU-5 (France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain), the penetration of mobile internet usage is estimated to increase from 19.7% in 2010 to 35.1% in 2015. This equates to 94 million mobile users, doubling in five years’ time. (eMarketer)



• The tablet PC sales could quadruple from 17.6 million units in 2010 to 70 million by 2011.The prediction for 2015 is 294 million sold units (Gartner). In the Netherlands alone there will be some 750.000 tablets, primarily iPads, by the end of 2011.
• In 2010, 295 million smartphones were sold (74% vs. 2009). In 2015 the sales figure rises to 1.2 billion. By then there will be 2.8 billion smartphone users worldwide. (Berg Insight)

How to use it?

There are two approaches for doing mobile research. The first one is to invite or recruit respondents to respond to a survey via a mobile phone. Or you can use interviewers to survey respondents by using an iPad or another mobile device.

In the first approach, you can question for example people via their smartphone about the TV program they are currently watching. Or you can survey specific target groups about spending their weekends. You can even organize contests or evaluate advertising campaigns.

For the second application with interviewers on site there are lots of opportunities for both B2B and B2C research. You can gather feedback on events such as concerts or fairs, evaluate purchases or measure satisfaction in retail outlets. Your own staff can conducting the interviews, but make sure that they do not influence the respondents.

A variant of the second option is a tablet PC that circulates in a group so everyone can fill in the survey in turn. In schools or training centres you can collect feedback with an iPad at the end of a training course.

A new challenge

Along with the social media, the mobile approach offers market research new challenges and a range of opportunities. The information overload makes it increasingly difficult to attract the attention of today’s busy people that are always on the move. Therefore mobile research can serve very well as a complement to traditional research methods.

Mobile Research is the instrument par excellence to ask relevant questions ‘on the spot’’. These are tailored to the location where the respondent is situated and the activity he is doing. You cannot get closer to the consumer than via the mobile device in his pocket.

Consumers become the eyes of the researcher or marketer showing him 24 hours at a day a 360° view of reality and providing him with immediate feedback. This is an incredible wealth of information.

Advantages

Smartphone based research offers you many distinct advantages. The most important are:

• It is time and location independent.
• It is accessible: respondents can share their views within minutes without any impact on what they are doing.
• It goes fast and generates more responses the first hours after the launch, allowing you to react faster.
• By asking relevant contextual questions, the response rate goes up.
• The questions can be answered directly, rather than retrospectively, so fewer details are lost.
• You can now reach audiences that would be difficult to trace otherwise.
• With geo-tagging you can track the location from where a respondent participates.
• You can ask respondents to take pictures as part of the study.

Considerations

Mobile research requires a slightly different approach compared to traditional research. For example it is recommended to keep such studies short. Participation should not take too much time or impact the activities that the respondent is currently doing. If the survey project takes more time the respondent should have the opportunity to stop and to continue later. This is a default option for CheckMarket surveys.

Work with short questions and possible answers and try to eliminate open-ended questions, as they influence the response rate. Mobile phone screens are small, so lay out your page(s) so that the answers are clearly visible and easily clickable. Avoid scrolling (this also applies to common online surveys) and make sure that you test on different devices.

Considering the target audience you can do no harm to foresee any entertainment value in your survey, without affecting the reliability of course. Communicate also to the respondent that the participation costs and the exchange of data are not on his behalf.

If you want to generalize the results, keep in mind that most mobile respondents are generally younger than other respondents, belong to higher income segments, and work more often full-time.

Conclusion

Mobile research adds an undeniable value to traditional distribution methods. It is can be used for short research projects that require context-oriented questions related, for example related to the location where the respondent is located and/or the activity he is performing. It is also a perfect solution for otherwise difficult to reach target groups can.

In the future, this type of research becomes increasingly important. Make sure you do not miss the train!

What is the Net Promoter Score?

The Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric developed in 2003 by management consultant Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company in collaboration with the company Satmetrix. The objective was to determine a clear and easily interpretable customer satisfaction score which can be compared over time or between different industries.

The NPS assesses to what extent a respondent would recommend a certain company, product or service to his friends, relatives or colleagues. The idea is simple: if you like using a certain product or doing business with a particular company, you like to share this experience with others.

Specifically, the respondent is asked the following question:

How likely are you to recommend company/brand/product X
to a friend/colleague/relative?

This can be answered on an 11-point rating scale, ranging from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely).

Calculation

Depending on the score that is given to the Net Promoter question, three categories of people can be distinguished:

• Promoters = respondents giving a 9 or 10 score
• Passives = respondents giving a 7 or 8 score
• Detractors = respondents giving a 0 to 6 score

The Net Promoter Score is calculated as the difference between the percentage of Promoters and Detractors. The NPS is not expressed as a percentage but as an absolute number lying between -100 and +100.

If you have for example 25% Promoters, 55% Passives and 20% Detractors, the NPS will be +5. A positive NPS (>0) is generally considered as good.

Don’t make the common mistake of placing a percent sign (%) behind your NPS score, it is not a percent.

Usage

NPS is used nowadays by many large companies as a customer feedback tool. It gives your organization an unambiguous number that is easy to understand for all employees and useful as input for managers to steer the company . According to many people the NPS also gives a good indication of growth potential and customer loyalty for a company or product.

You can track the evolution of the NPS over time, or compare it with a predetermined target. You can also benchmark different areas or products, or check where your company positions itself versus the industry average if this is available.

To give an indication: according to Reichheld the average American company scores less than +10 on the NPS, while the highest performing organizations are situated between +50 and +80. These values may however vary considerably from sector to sector and from culture to culture.

To understand the motives of Promoters and Detractors it is recommended to accompany the NPS question by one or more open questions that probe the underlying reasons behind the given score. This allows you to make the appropriate adjustments to increase the future NPS, either by boosting the percentage of Promoters, either by reducing the proportion of Passives and Detractors (or better yet, a combination of both).

NPS in the CheckMarket tool

To respond to the increasing popularity of the Net Promoter Score CheckMarket has decided to add the NPS question as standard question in the tool. If you want to use the NPS in your survey, the only thing you have to do is to select this question type. It is still possible to modify the formulation of the question or the naming of the endpoint value labels.

Once the responses start rolling in, you will see a bar chart in the reporting tool, showing the percentage of Detractors (red), Passives (orange) and Promoters (green). Under that is the detailed response distribution for the 11 possible scores.

Based on these percentages, the actual NPS is calculated. Your NPS is represented on an easy-to-read gauge (showing positive NPS in green, negative in red). Enabling you to see at a glance how well your product or business is performing.

Some critical remarks

From a scientific perspective and in certain market research circles there is some skepticism about the NPS. Opponents of the NPS concept argue that there is insufficient scientific base for the outcome and that the model is too simple. They claim customer loyalty and satisfaction is not only about numbers and percentages, but also about causes, consequences and correlations.

It is also suggested that the NPS method cannot accurately measure customer behavior. Customers can claim they will recommend a company or product in a greater or lesser extent, but it is not proven they will actually do that in practice. Besides that, the recommendation of one customer is not always as valuable as that of another one.

It is also a fact that the NPS is more useful in markets with a lot of competition where potential buyers have a greater tendency to ask friends or acquaintances for advice before deciding about a purchase. Another limitation of NPS is that it only takes into account customers, while also a lot of non-customers can act as detractors and generate bad word-of-mouth publicity.

Furthermore the NPS disregards important differences in the answer score distribution: no distinction is made between a 0 score and a 6 score, while there is obviously a substantial discrepancy between those two. It also makes no difference whether there are 70% Promoters and 30% Detractors or 40% Promoters and 0% Detractors. Both result in an NPS of +40 which doesn’t seem very logical.

Conclusion

Some caution is therefore required. It is obvious that the NPS on its own may not be sufficient as a management tool, but in the right framework and with some additional motivational questioning it can undoubtedly be a useful metric. Its greatest strength is the simplicity, making it functional and interpretable for every stakeholder. Considering the large number of big companies using this tool on a continuous basis, it certainly has proven its worth.

To be clear, NPS is only a starting point. After the analysis, the real work can begin: improving your organization and taking actions to boost you NPS. This will be a long term project, but the NPS allows you to perfectly assess at which stage your organization is in this growth process.

“Net Promoter” is a registered trademark of Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix.

Front End Web Developer

A talented expert who can further develop our survey tool along with our Development Team. He or she likes working on the client side and has an eye for beautiful and user-friendly interfaces.

Market Research Project Manager

An organizer who can easily and accurately support survey projects for our national and international clients from the proposal phase to the analysis. In addition, he or she takes care of the further expansion of our client base.

Do you have ambition or know someone from the province of Antwerp? Let us know!

The tool offers you and your respondents:

• the 23 official languages of the European Union
• the 10 most popular languages on the Internet
• the 6 official languages of the United Nations

So if your customers speak Español, or maybe العربية or even ελληνική γλώσσα, they can easily fill out your survey in their own language.

To meet the renewed rising popularity of written surveys, we have optimized the workflow from creation to reporting, to make the whole process extremely (cost)efficient. With our newest team member, a high-performance scanner which can process up to 15.000 pages per hour, we can handle any volume.

The scanned questionnaires are processed automatically by our custom software and the results are visible immediately in our online tool. Open answers can be processed quickly, accurately and cost effectively with our self-developed Mechanical Turk tool.

What this all means is that next time you have a group you can only reach with a written survey, go ahead and do it, with CheckMarket, you don’t need to be afraid of the costs or processing time.

You can combine online and paper questionnaires. In the reporting tool you can have a look at the overall results or you can filter by distribution method. If you need more information about the development of written surveys take a look at our website.

Furthermore CheckMarket tweets with its users and others on market research, HR trends, social media, customer satisfaction, etc. Are you tweeting? Lets us know and when we see an interesting tweet or a fascinating article, be sure that we will retweet it!

Want to follow us? Discover the CheckMarket Twitter account. You can also find tweets from and about CheckMarket on the tool homepage when you sign in.

ESOMAR is an international market research organization with more than 4.800 members in over 120 countries.

This association was founded in 1948, and has as a mission to encourage, advance and elevate market and customer research worldwide. ESOMAR’s main objective is to promote the importance of market and opinion research as a way to gain insight into specific topics and issues in order to make effective business decisions. To achieve this ESOMAR offers a wide range of sector-specific conferences, publications and communication platforms.

With this membership CheckMarket also commits itself to ESOMAR’s severe code of conduct. This code requires, among other things, the use of rigorous survey procedures, a clearly defined structure for sample groups and respect for the anonymity of the respondent.

With the ESOMAR membership CheckMarket puts a further step in the professionalization of its services.

For KBC Bank and Insurance a well-defined customer policy is high on its list of priorities. KBC hands out its biennial prestigious award for the most customer-oriented SME in Flanders. This thematic award is part of the SME Laureate, a highly valued initiative in which every two years UNIZO, (the Union for Self-Employed persons), KBC Bank and Insurance, Electrabel and Base reward outstanding entrepreneurship.

Of course the winner is not pulled magically out of a hat.
With CheckMarket’s help the KBC invites Flanders’ entrepreneurs to run as contenders for the prize. Then by email or post the customers of each participating SME are invited to take part in a customer satisfaction survey. CheckMarket also wrote the survey questions.

The results of this customer satisfaction survey are automatically input into our tool. KBC discovers who has the most time and patience for their customer’s questions, suggestions and complaints, and from these selects five finalists who have to appear before a jury of experts. The jury, which includes Alexander Dobronte – CheckMarket Manager and a specialist in market research – grills the finalists about their general customer service policy. Following a comprehensive assessment the most customer-focused entrepreneur of the year is finally chosen.

At the end of the survey our staff provides each participant with a carefully prepared PDF report which includes graphs of their individual results. CheckMarket presents a stylish, bound report to the winner of the award for the most customer-focused entrepreneur. The winning company also receives a CD-ROM of its results.

So you see that CheckMarket invests in many other extra services. Our contribution to this thematic award proves that anything is possible for CheckMarket. You can approach us with your questions regarding any aspect of your research project. We will always look at how we can best answer them and if necessary offer some suggestions.

Are you also interested in the SME Laureate 2010 and the most customer-focused entrepreneur?

This exciting event, that includes a reception, starts at 5 pm and will be attended by Unizo’s directors and other dignitaries. This is also a great opportunity to meet some of the most progressive entrepreneurs in Flanders.

Send us an email with your name and telephone number and keep the date free in your diary. From your responses CheckMarket will randomly choose five people who will be able to participate in this exclusive evening.