You’ve probably even encountered it before. It’s a mainstay on Customer Experience (CX) surveys—the type you receive after paying a visit to a restaurant, retailer, or hotel.
But behind this deceptively simply question lies a powerful method for measuring customer loyalty: the Net Promoter Score.

NPS, a powerful method to measure customers loyalty

NPS is probably the most respected survey question you can use to measure the loyalty of customers to a company. Developed in 2003 by industry researchers working closely with universities, NPS is now used by millions of businesses worldwide—restaurants, retailers, hotels, airlines, amusement parks, even sports teams—to measure and manage customer loyalty.

NPS uses the question at the top of the this post to get a 0 to 10 answer from each customer. Based on those responses (and using some straightforward arithmetic), we can derive an NPS score for the entire customer experience. But we can measure just about anything using an NPS score: cleanliness, food quality, location, friendliness … even customers’ feelings about how much flair your hosts are wearing (inside joke for Office Space fans!)

There’s no doubt that NPS is amazing tool to measure CX and loyalty. But, if you’re going to use it properly, you need to understand what NPS DOESN’T do. NPS is a statistic, a diagnostic measure: it can tell you WHAT’S happening in your restaurant, but it doesn’t give you any specifics about WHY it’s happening. NPS is a bit like pain in your body: you know something’s wrong, but without a trip to your family doctor, you’re not quite sure about what’s causing the pain.

Unless you complement it a bit, it can be very hard to take action on NPS.

How do we complement Net Promoter Score and make it as actionable as possible?

That’s where the open-ended part of a CX survey comes in. Open-ended questions allow patrons to express their feelings and frustrations in their own words. A perfect example would be, “What did you dislike most about your latest dining experience?”

That raw, unfiltered, sometimes emotional feedback can be tied back to your NPS score to make it actionable. Is your NPS score dropping? Dig into the open-ended diner feedback and see common complaints keep popping up. Maybe you’ve changed a recipe and it’s not going over well with customers. Maybe the bathrooms aren’t clean or there are accuracy problems with your orders. Whatever it might be, real open-ended feedback gives you a blueprint for making positive changes. That’s how we transform NPS from a mere number into a totally actionable system for fixing complaints and building loyalty.

Hopefully you can now see the power of NPS when combined with real-time open-ended feedback from ongoing CX surveys. Hexa can help you launch a CX program that tracks loyalty on an ongoing basis, but also delivers a steady stream of actionable customer feedback that puts NPS to work in your restaurant!

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