The System
Robust Operational and Analytic Infrastructure
Robust Operational and Analytic Infrastructure
An effective Net Promoter System requires organizational advocacy, significant IT investments and analytics capabilities.
At the heart of the Net Promoter System is fast-cycle, closed-loop feedback powering your inner loop, huddles, and outer loop.
To work effectively, you should create an advocacy organization that can ensure the reliability of the metric and the consistency of customer feedback and data capture across your organization. It also requires support from a robust operational infrastructure that can trigger feedback requests, capture the responses, send them to the right employees, track follow-up, and support data mining and insight generation.
Building a Robust Infrastructure
Building a Robust Infrastructure
Loyalty leaders support the Net Promoter System by focusing investments in three areas.
The best Net Promoter companies typically have a team leading the effort, spearheaded by a customer advocacy officer (CAO). This team is responsible for maintaining the rigor and consistency of the Net Promoter process, including supporting the outer loop, as well as improving the company's relationships with its customers. It rallies disparate departments around the mission of serving customers and bringing the voice of the customer into decision-making.
Just as you wouldn't want each business unit or team to create its own accounting procedures and serve as its own financial controller, you don’t want individual units assuming responsibility for collecting and evaluating customer feedback.
Large, complex organizations that run on enterprise software require significant IT investments to integrate Net Promoter into their broader operating systems.
Several specialized software providers offer services that can help support a high-quality Net Promoter System. These include Customer Feedback Management (CFM) platforms like Qualtrics and Medallia to support feedback collection and reporting for the inner loop. For the outer loop processes, companies may customize existing project management tools like Trello or even manually manage them using email when first starting out. For more mature organizations, Bain and Qualtrics recently partnered to create Bain & Company NPS Outer Loop on Qualtrics XM. Built native in Qualtrics XM, the NPS Outer Loop on XM is seamlessly integrated into inner loop workflows and designed to Bain’s best practices.
For more information on Bain & Company’s technology recommendations and licensed vendors, please see Net Promoter System Technologies.
Analytics are critical for informing actions to improve customer experience or product design. For example, the claims department may want to determine how the amount of time it takes to process a claim affects its Net Promoter Score®. It must be able to sort through a database of claims interactions for which surveys were completed, sorting by time to resolution. It must be able to sort further by product, customer segment, claims type, claims outcome, and several other factors.
Moreover, among those assigning low scores to the experience, claims leadership needs to be able to dig into comments and follow-up call records so that they can discover what impact time-to-resolution had versus other factors, such as rep treatment. The same goes for any other type of analysis a company would likely need, categorizing the data by geography, customer tenure, share of wallet, and other variables to help determine how to improve the process in the future.