Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most popular CX metrics used for gathering feedback and gauging customer loyalty. But, understanding customers, especially the empowered customers we deal with at present, requires a comprehensive feedback collection strategy that taps into all the factors that affect a consumer’s purchasing decision.
While NPS is an effective KPI and can help businesses improve their customer retention rates, it only measures the advocacy aspect of customer loyalty. This is why it’s important to integrate a more versatile metric like the Emotional Value Index (EVI®) with NPS to obtain critical insights on all phases of the journey.
NPS Alone Can’t Take You on The Right Track
NPS measures customers’ likeliness to recommend the brand or its products to someone else and is a great way to know the impact of word-of-mouth marketing on your brand. It is also a key indicator of loyalty because people who promote your brand are most likely to be loyal customers. Therefore, if you want to retain your valuable customers and keep them loyal, NPS is a great metric.
But here’s the hitch. NPS tells you the customer’s willingness to advocate for your brand on a scale of 1-10, but without a follow-up question, you won’t know the root cause of their response. There can be a myriad of reasons, like the initial impression of the brand, quality of customer service, difficulties in selecting products, or the product itself.
Even if you include a question, the customer may not bother to respond, or their response will not accurately reflect the problem because the feedback is about the willingness to recommend. What if your customer loves your product, but he/she doesn’t like discussing it with friends or family? So, relying solely on NPS can lead to skewed interpretations, inaccurate assumptions, and maybe even wrong decisions!
How EVI® Can Step In and Fill the Void
Fortunately, with EVI®, you can address and resolve these gaps effectively. EVI® measures customer sentiments towards the buying experience and different interactions that take place throughout the journey. It captures how customers feel as they transition from one phase to another.
Unlike NPS which is only applied in the post-purchase stage, EVI® can be applied to measure the customer’s reaction to individual touchpoints at any phase. You can gather feedback on the overall experience or specific interactions using EVI®. This way, you can have a thorough understanding of the customer’s emotional experience.
Also, with EVI®, brands can obtain insights about customer satisfaction, happiness, effort, churn and retention, and even employee engagement. It provides a deeper understanding of the connection between the customer and the brand. The feedback you receive through this metric is well-rounded and comprehensive.
NPS and EVI: The Duo Business Always Needed
If NPS is one of the key KPIs for your business, it is worth adding emotional experience measurement in your feedback collection. With NPS and EVI®, brands can gain a good grasp of the complexities of customer behavior. While NPS will tell you whether a customer is loyal to your brand and will recommend it to others, EVI® will provide insights about the reason behind their response.
You can also analyze data gathered from the two to identify the emotions that result in a higher NPS rate and emotions that deter customers from the brand. It will help you determine what customers expect from your brand and devise ways to cater to them.
More importantly, your evaluations and predictions on customer retention rates will be more accurate and reliable, allowing you to make better business decisions. EVI® has an 80% correlation with conversion rates. Building your brand based on complete and all-inclusive feedback delivers better results.
EVI® data can not just enrich the feedback you get through NPS surveys. It also complements other metrics like C-SAT and CES very well. Leveraging the combined power of NPS and EVI® is essential for a brand for sustainable growth and competitive advantage.
Watch Also This Webinar Replay: Integrating NPS and Customer Emotions for Leveling Up CX Insights
At this webinar, Feedbackly’s Jaakko Männistö explained how to add measuring emotional experience to your CX program, how NPS and customer emotions can be measured together throughout a customer journey, and what should be the strategic role of both in your CX program.
