The best leaders need empathy.
Despite all the hype around the strongman-mentality, psychology tells us that leaders who mercilessly boss around their followers don’t get the job done. As someone in a leadership position within a startup, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your customers.
There’s no better way to gauge how they’re feeling than by measuring Net Promoter Score, or NPS. Knowing your NPS can help you improve your interactions with your current clients and reel in new ones at the same time.
Measuring NPS is a must for any startup. Here’s why.
The way NPS works is simple: you get consumer feedback on your services and products in a quick and quantifiable way. What you do with that number, though, shouldn’t all be internal.
Think of an NPS score like an SAT score in high school. While you do all the work, a big point of taking the SAT is to have a score. It’s a number you can float around in the future, whether in contact with universities or in misguided small-talk at parties.
Fundamentally, the NPS can improve how investors think about your company. If you can report a positive NPS score, that means your startup has serious positive momentum in its direction.
That score is yours to advertise to investors: you know what you’re doing. Consequentially, if you don’t have a good NPS score, a firm picking between startups to invest in will wonder why.
That’s why it’s important to mold your reputation using an NPS score. But you should also let it guide your practices.
As the saying goes, the customer is always right. Well, that might not always be true in practice.
But, in the context of measuring NPS scores, the phrase has some merit. A troublesome customer thinks they can look at your startup in a quick minute and come up with several glaring flaws. These aren’t the kind of costumer you should be targeting with NPS scores.
NPS surveys should go to customers who had a wide range of experiences in your business. When they tell you something was great or not about their time with your customer service, it could reflect something within your company.
With your expertise and their feedback, you’ll be able to wrangle a solution to many issues using NPS. Plus you’ll be able to grow your customer base.
Great customer service can come in many forms. With NPS, you might be able to hit all of them on the head.
One main purpose of the NPS survey is to let clients point out issues with your team, as has been stated. If you can fix the flaws that many customers are pointing out, they’ll come back.
Of course, that’ll lead to happier customers. On some level, that’s your main goal as a manager. Happier customers mean a better environment for everyone involved in any interaction that happens in your startup.
But their happiness will also open the door to new friends.
A high NPS score reflects a high desire within your customer base to tell their peers about their positive experience with you. That, of course, is a huge difference.
If one customer has one bad day in your store, you’ve lost one client. But, if they have a good experience and keep it to themselves and even come back, you’re still getting the best outcome possible.
What you want and need as a business is for that customer to be ecstatic about your product or service. You want them to be so happy that they can’t keep quiet about it when they come across their friends and families.
All of a sudden, one customer has turned into ten. NPS tracking allows you to create more situations like that, instead of just stabbing in the dark.
Over time, as you build a base of more customers, this is how you’ll grow. NPS tracking is in this way a foundational part of any future for your startup.
Get to know your clients and make them happy. Then you can watch the magic happen.
As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to keep track of your NPS score. But, you should still be wary of the ways measuring NPS could go wrong. If you don’t, you’ll get frustrated with NPS and be tempted to ditch it altogether.
Don’t make your surveys a burden. A problem that many startups seeking feedback run into is annoying and boring surveys.
Imagine that you’re a customer going about your daily life. The last thing you want to do is to spend your free time trudging through a twenty-minute questionnaire about your experience buying something a few days ago. You might ignore it, or give simple answers.
That’s why measuring NPS goes much better if a survey is subtle, quick and noninvasive. And, in general, keep in mind that your NPS surveys should be used with specific subjects in mind.
You should use NPS scores often and to your benefit. But that doesn’t mean throwing it at everything–you need to use measuring NPS to resolve specific issues within your company.
Do customers like the new product development or hate it? What’s their experience like when dealing with your customer service?
Your company will see improvement in no time if you can get answers to questions like those.
Measuring NPS can holistically improve the way your startup is run. By getting in the head of customers, you can see what’s good or not about how you run things.
Sometimes, you need to get out of your own head to see something new about yourself. The same is true with NPS. It’s a new perspective on your startup that will show you new realities about your business.
Still looking for ways to improve your startup? Check out our blog here. What are you waiting for?
Go for it!
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