How likely are you to recommend a company to a friend or colleague?  Most executives are familiar with asking this question and using the Net Promoter Score®* (NPS) — a method developed by Fred Reichheld and Bain & Company — to measure customer sentiments and ultimately, customer loyalty, toward the company or product. This measurement is important; loyal and passionate customers stay longer, spend more, provide more suggestions and are the first to give praise to their peers about your company. Customer loyalty correlates strongly with sustaining profit and providing opportunities for growth.

Some of the best-known brands and successful companies have discovered how to take the data from the NPS and effectively use it to drive strategies across their organizations — from sales and marketing to product development. They’ve leveraged a Net Promoter Score to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to rank at the top of their industries.

Here are three essential ways to ensure you drive corporate strategies and make the most of your customers’ time.

1. Build a Strong System and Framework
The power of NPS comes with shifting your mindset from a score to a system. If you’re effectively using customer data, you’ll view it as the Net Promoter System. This allows you to build an ecosystem where every person at the company — from the executive leadership to frontline employees — focuses on the customer and deploying continuous improvement. Companies that do this best see it as a way to do business.

At Genesys, our NPS framework puts the customer at the center of everything we do. We collect, analyze and inform all parts of the organization with an emphasis on closed-loop feedback and delivery of continuous improvement. “Closing the loop” is when feedback from the customer is shared as quickly as possible to the employees or part of the organization most responsible for impacting the customer. These teams are accountable for acting on that feedback — from providing an immediate fix or leveraging the team to place it into a long-term strategic initiative. The strength of closing the loop comes from contacting the customers whose feedback requires a follow-up. This additional level of engagement gives you an opportunity to delve deeper into what you deliver to improve the customer experience.

2. Drive Actions and Improvements
Unless you do something with the feedback you receive, Net Promoter Score means nothing. Rather than spending time scrutinizing the actual score, companies must analyze why customers feel that score is appropriate to their sentiments about your company. This allows you to look more closely at the processes, systems and products you have — and learn more from customer feedback. It’s vital to look at everything from the customer, or the outside-in, perspective and ensure there’s accountability to act, find solutions and fix any gaps. The score will follow; the important part is that your customer knows you’re listening and acting on their behalf.

3. Don’t Take Your Customers for Granted
It goes without saying: Make sure you value your customers. Get to know them so you can give them the right type of attention. And while it’s critical to know your high-value customers, those customers aren’t simply determined by the revenue they bring in. High-value customers also have brand recognition power.

Pay attention to both your promoters and detractors. It’s important to differentiate the what and why behind promoters and detractors. What motivates a promoter is most likely different than what motivates a detractor. Tailor your customer engagement according to each of their needs. If you focus solely on your detractors, you might lose an opportunity to meaningfully engage with promoters who could provide more strategic discussions.

More Than a Score
When you build the right framework to make NPS the fuel that powers your Voice of the Customer engine, you can build a lasting relationship with your customers. No matter which metric you use, if every employee isn’t passionate about the customer and knows that they can drive actions and improvements, the score won’t matter.

Build a system or framework that puts your customer at the center of everything you do, continuously drive improvements and actions on their behalf, and make sure you really get to know all your customers.

Read the ebook to learn more about including these customer service best practices in your contact center.

*Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.