Since the emergence of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), organizations have based their customer experience and customer satisfaction metrics on the basis of those numbers. That isn’t the wrong way look at it – after all, a higher NPS means more satisfied customers. Interestingly, according to Bain & Co., the leader in any industry has an NPS score of more than double compared to its competitors. This is significant and also the reason that companies are so focused on their NPS.
However, I would argue that customers are more than just an NPS score. They are real people that have had an ‘experience’ with your brand. When you think of an ‘experience’ it’s more than a transaction, it’s something that was personally lived through. This includes time and resource investment as well. So don’t treat them like a number or a transaction. Show them you care and want to get their insights.
Your promoters (those that ranked a 9 or 10 on the NPS question), want to interact with your brand and are likely to be what we call ‘engagers’ of your brand. These promoters want to give more meaningful insights and feedback. So, let them! It’s time to put your promoters to work. Many of the top brands are realizing that getting additional insights and co-creating with the engagers and promoters of the brand has led to unparalleled insights. This can impact everything from product to acquisition and retention which all have a direct path to increasing sales. Remember that innovation can come from anywhere and your promoters have a higher ownership quotient so it’s time to get them into a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) so they can start working for you.
Key Customer Experience questions answered with the Customer Advisory Board
QuestionPro Communities is geared towards helping brands leverage the right audience to be advocates for the brand. It’s not easy, it has to be strategically done so that the Promoters identified through the NPS score are part of the Customer Advisory Board. This includes matching NPS scores across the entire customer experience spectrum and then identifying the Promoters that are the most relevant to the business.
As previously mentioned the CAB is being increasingly leveraged by brands to tap into their most active promoters. The CAB comprises Promoters that are the strongest advocates for a brand. These consist of the people that have truly been seen as promoters for the brand and have been recruited by using the NPS question or those that are identified as top customers. There are many ways to this but playing off the NPS question is the best way to get started.
Where NPS stops, the CAB continues and always the brands to get their key questions answers on a deeper level. We’ll get to the tools that are at your disposal with a CAB but first let’s take a look at the key business questions that are more thoroughly answered with a CAB.
Key questions the Customer Advisory Board help answer are:
- Am I evolving to meet my customer’s expectations? The CAB best helps answer the question about what customers want. This helps to manage a viable go-to-market strategy as well as helps to stay ahead of the competition.
- Do I have the insights to make the right business decisions? Another important benefit of the CAB is to gain the right actionable insights from the most relevant audience. The right insights can help fortify the brand value in the mind of existing and potential customers.
- How can I delight my customers? Businesses exist to satiate a need and want of a customer. Creating a suite of products or services that wow the customer is important for the relevance of a business.
The CAB can help a brand stay relevant, be profitable and also stay ahead of the competition. Insights collected from this tighter but loyal group of people are easier to manage and easier to monitor instead of a wider audience that includes multiple qualitative and quantitative studies.
How can I best manage the Customer Advisory Board?
You have seen the benefits of the CAB and the role that it plays towards a business being profitable, preferred and relevant. QuestionPro Communities makes it simple to even manage so you are left with worry only about recruiting your Promoters. We can help do the rest. The platform is set up in a way to offer you multiple options such as:
- Surveys & Polls: Create and deploy surveys and polls with our deep level integration with the survey platform to collect insights on one-time or an ongoing basis. These can quickly help collect actionable insights from the audience.
- IdeaBoard: The IdeaBoard is a handy tool that helps with the crowdsourcing of ideas from the relevant audience. Collect feedback in the form of text as well as rich media and allow members to interact with the ideas with upvoting them, etc. to validate the relevance of the idea.
- Topics & Discussions: These tools allow members to directly interact with each other and ideate as well as discuss the relevance of these ideas. You can also create and manage a live focus group with advanced text analysis to collect underlying thoughts and ideas from the audience.
- Rewards: Plain and simple, incentivize the most active CAB members so that they offer relevant but continual feedback to the brand. Use the in-built gamification module to engage the audience into engaging with the brand and the community.
The bottom line is that collecting an NPS score is imperative for the brand. But the CAB helps transform the relevance of the brand with the NPS score on the basis of the recruitment and onboarding of relevant members. Your promoters want to co-create with you to empower them to do so using a CAB.
