Vodafone uses NPS to build predictive modeling
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Vodafone Australia is using their NPS results and customer interaction data to predict how customers will react.[/caption]
Vodafone Australia is using the Net Promoter System to help them better understand how customers will respond to particular future events.
Suffering from very low NPS response rates, at roughly just 5 to 7 percent, Vodafone’s marketing team decided to use the data they did have to create a customer sentiment for every one of its account holders.
For, with millions of customers, a 5 to 7 percent response rate still meant they had a large data sample to work with.
As such Vodafone was able to pair their NPS results with their customer interaction data, and use algorithms to extrapolate their findings across their entire customer base to make projections about how customers will respond to certain events depending on where they are along their user lifecycle.
This meant that if a customer breached their data cap or wished to change pricing plans, Vodafone was able to model customer sentiment.
Using the user lifecycle Vodafone sorted it’s customers into groups. Meaning that an event that happens in the “welcome” stage requires a different response to the same event happening at the “loyalty” stage of a lifecycle.
As Nilanjan Sarkar, the telco’s marketing communications chief explains of NPS:
“You can take those scores and project them on to a larger set of customers who have had similar experiences, and you can predict their happiness and unhappiness. Over time your models can be trained to predict a certain customer experience score based on a certain set of events."
Read more about Vodafone’s adventures with NPS right here.
Woolworths takes its eye off the prize and drops by 14%
While all the warning signs have been there for months, Australia’s largest supermarket chain Woolworths has watched their share price fall by around 14% in the last 3 months and recorded the first drop in sales in 20 years.
A number of months ago we wrote about the hopes of a new app that would speed up shopping at Woolworths. Well it appears those days of a bright and sunny customer experience trajectory are gone for now.
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The ups and downs of Woolworth over the last five years. Source: Woolworths[/caption]
Out of stock shelves, rising prices, meat and vegetables really not so fresh, poor customer service and the removal of popular brands from shelves. These were just a few of the common themes that customers had been voicing across Twitter, Facebook, customer hotlines, exit interviews and focus groups.
However Woolworths chose to ignore the steadily building wave of dissatisfaction, as they believed they were on the right course of action.
In their continual battle with Coles over growth and profit, their internal price index showed that its prices were competitive and its measure of on-shelf availability was telling them that in-stock levels were the best in Australia.
However, Woolworths has now admitted that they got it wrong. They had put profit growth ahead of the customer.
"Our customers were telling us that our prices weren't where they needed to be … and that our availability wasn't as good as it could be," chief executive Grant O'Brien said, "but when I looked at the metrics they were. We lost a bit of sight of the customer in the latter part of 2014 calendar year."
Most candid of all was the frank admission that they had been ignoring the increasing negative feedback they had been receiving through their NPS®.
Analysts had long been telling the retailer that they had lost sight of the customer but as Deutsche Bank’s Michael Simotas put it, "we appreciated management's candor because admitting that it lost sight of the customer by focusing on the wrong metrics is a key step towards addressing the issues."
The hope now is that such an admission means that Woolworths has actually learnt from their mistakes, and will start to use customer feedback to put the customer front and center again.
Read the full article here.
How apps helped Tui Travel raise its NPS
According to Tui, brands should for example follow the actions of Lowe’s and engage with their customers via apps to create significantly stronger advocates for their brand.
That’s the finding from Tui Travel, which stated at a recent summit in London that the NPS score of their app users was 14 points higher than non-app users.
However, apps have to be done well and help the customer throughout their journey. For they can just as easily raise a company’s NPS® if done well or lower it, if it is poorly designed.
Tui’s director of mobile strategy John Boughton pointed out some simple factors that can make or break an app.
- Customers are impatient. Just one or two app crashes and customers will probably decide it’s not worth it.
- Apps are highly demanding and grow at a rapid rate. The more it grows the more input it needs from a company.
- Simplicity cannot be stressed enough with apps.
- Make the app more than just functional it should be exciting. While apps are about selling, they need to be engaging.
In brief
The UK divisions of both Vodafone and Virgin Mobile have posted scores of -1 and 7 respectively.
The U.S. brokerage and banking company, Charles Schwab has come out with a comfortable 52.
The U.S. digital communications company for the energy industry Questline, has posted a score of 60.3.
Volume, the digital content and innovation company out of the UK has a score of 46.
Lastly, wireless service provide Ting has a score of 75.
