When it comes to customer loyalty and retention, the technology sector scores an overall NPS of 60. In comparison, telecommunications sits at an NPS of 32, financial services at an NPS of 50 and consumer brands an NPS of 48. The technology industry has been continuously disrupting and leading markets when it comes to customer experience. So, while these benchmarks will change with time, tech continues to stay firmly at the forefront.
While it’s good to understand the general average of your Net Promoter Score® from an industry-level perspective, it’s even more vital to know how companies are conducting their programs towards CX and NPS improvement.
In this guide, we’ll walk through tech companies who are across the spectrum in terms of scores, but all delivering on one important promise: using their NPS program to promote growth and improve the customer experience.
Apple Consumer Brands/Electronics
Apple is one of the biggest advocates of the Net Promoter Score. Since introducing the Net Promoter System® back in 2007, Apple has been systematically listening to customers and managing its business in response to their needs.
Apple currently has an NPS of 89, which they’ve achieved by proactively listening to customers, empowering employees to deliver a very personalized customer experience and for quickly closing the loop on customer feedback.
Apple employees use the same steps with every new product the brand releases.
1. A-P-P-L-E Approach to Customer Service
Apple employees use the same steps with every new product the brand releases.
2. Listen to Customer Feedback
Apple also has a centralized NPS team that uses customer feedback to better understand the reasons behind promotion and detraction. The Apple team then does a daily standup, where employees review the NPS feedback received from customers and discuss what can be improved.
3. Quickly Close the Loop
From our experience and knowledge, companies who clothe loop within 48 hours can enjoy an up to 12% increase in customer retention.
Taking into account that acquiring a new customer can be 4 to 10 times more expensive than retaining customers, closing the loop the right way is extremely important. Following an NPS survey, Apple store managers call detractors within 24 hours.
Apple found that following up with dissatisfied customers 24 hours after completing an NPS survey resulted in a greater return on investment—every hour spent calling detractors was generating more than $1,000 in revenue or additional sales of $25 million in the first year.
You can find more information on how to close the loop with customers to generate better business results like Apple here.
What's Fuelling Apple's High Net Promoter Score? Click Here For More
SAP Computer Software
SAP is a German multinational software corporation, serving more than 296,000 customers in 190 countries. The technology giant relies on customer feedback to make their products and services better and meet customer expectations. SAP is also a big promoter of the NPS system and sets NPS targets on an annual basis.
In 2016, SAP announced it ended the year with an NPS score of 19. With an initial 2016 NPS target of 25, SAP conducted a customer survey to uncover the drivers behind their final score.
Using customer responses, SAP learned that it needs to invest more in improving the quality of the follow-up process to ensure a timely resolution to customer issues. As previous stated, companies who close the loop within 48hrs can enjoy up to a 12% increase in customer retention.
To tackle customer dissatisfaction, SAP provided more insights and guidelines into how customers can migrate to SAP’s innovations without disrupting their business process. In doing so, the company equipped customers to do self-support and reduced the number of customer issues.
This year, SAP objective is centered around customer loyalty, employee engagement, growth and profitability. SAP’s NPS target this year is between 21 to 23, and for 2020 the company aims to achieve an NPS score between 35 to 40.
Cisco Hardware, B2B
Cisco has deployed a variety of technologies and strategies to enable prompt and accurate customer feedback analysis and response. These include customer and employee listening posts, text and sentiment analytics, social media monitoring, and targeted on-demand surveys. Cisco’s NPS score currently sits at 38. What’s even more interesting is that Cisco pays very close attention to negative customer feedback. Curtis Hill, SVP Customer Assurance at Cisco shares:
“We know that if you, as our customer, take the time to communicate with Cisco about a bad experience, you’re probably angry, frustrated, and definitely have something to say. So, please give it to us straight.” – Curt Hill, SVP Customer Assurance at Cisco
Listening to negative customer feedback helps Cisco easily identify customer pain points and put forth improvements.
Several years ago, customers were frustrated about packaging and shipping standards for some of the company’s spare parts, cables, and adapters. As a result, Cisco’s team gathered further insights from customers, partners and distributors via surveys to act on the negative feedback.
Cisco customers can now order set quantities of parts, shipped with minimal packaging and clear labeling on the carton that includes product name, serial numbers, and quantity.
Veeam Computer Software
Veeam Software is an innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Always-On Enterprise.The tech software company has been investing in NPS for years, and results show the company’s score is increasing on a yearly basis.
Veeam Software’s NPS improvements have also been accompanied by high financial gains.
Not only did Veeam see NPS improve by 11 points in 2017, but it also achieved a 27% year-overyear increase in revenue growth. Within their NPS program, Veeam Software is also very proactive in drilling down to the reasons why customers are satisfied and willing to recommend the company. Veeam customers highlight the quality of products and the professional work of the customer support department, SEs and sales specialists, who, in a survey, got the highest ratings for their work.
In 2015, Veeam Software introduced gamification to their customer support team in order to increase customer satisfaction. The gamification system showed a weekly leaderboard, individual achievements, and a closed-case progress bar.
The system then tracked each team member’s activities and assigns reward points for completed tasks. For Veeam, the use of gamification has meant that managers are able to improve performance by pinpointing problematic issues or bottlenecks in the work process, in turn creating an experience that creates happy customers.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Computer Software
Serving such a large number of customers only works by proactively listening to customer feedback via NPS. We recently sat with Dr. James Borderick, Head of Customer Experience Analytics at HPE Software to discuss the company’s NPS story. HPE Software currently has an NPS score of 48.
The company’s head of CX shared with us how they reached such a score:
1. Senior Buy-In
NPS was first introduced in HPE Software by Meg Whitman, CEO of HPE. Meg brought Net Promoter with her from her time as President and CEO of eBay. Therefore, NPS was already a ubiquitous metric throughout Hewlett- Packard Company, which later became Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Measuring and acting on NPS became a key way in which HPE Software tracked customer loyalty.
2. Know the Drivers of Customer Satisfaction
In addition to asking the ultimate question (i.e., on a scale from 0 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend HPE Software to your colleagues?), HPE Software also adds 2 verbatim questions to the customer survey – “Why?” and “What would you improve?”.
HPE Software also uses three different methods to track and respond to customer feedback.
“We keep surveys short and simple to improve verbatim feedback and actually improve customer happiness (who really wishes to spend over 10 minutes on a survey?)” – Dr. James Borderick
3. Link NPS to Revenue
HPE Software has successfully proven within the company that NPS is a driver of revenue. As such, the company is able to prove how much 1 NPS point is worth to the business.
HPE Software has a mature enough NPS program to enhance it by adding revenue figures. CustomerGauge’s Definitive Guide to Monetized Net Promoter Score
goes into details on how and when companies should combine NPS with revenue figures, such as subscription fees, sales revenues, profits and customer lifetime values.
“I find that linking NPS and revenue makes people sit up straight, and moves the conversation from “just a metric,” to strategic responses and actions.” - Dr. James Borderick
What NPS best practice series interviews? Click Here For More
About the Author
