Taskrabbit’s guiding light through the darkness: The Net Promoter System®
Making changes to products or services requires conviction, strength to stay the course and do what is needed in the face of opposition. But who ever said customer experience was supposed to be easy.
Taskrabbit, the Silicon Valley startup that provides on-demand services, is a testament to the fact that believing in their Net Promoter® eventually paid off.
W
hat happened? In the summer of 2014, Taskrabbit rolled out a dramatically new version of its platform, feeling it to be a significant improvement and far more user-friendly. The result on launch day: a wave of angry and confused users.
Taskrabbit just simply didn’t see it coming, they thought they had rigorously user tested it and they couldn’t understand the backlash. What was at play was a lack of significant communication to users about the new platform upgrade and reluctance by some to change even in the face of an improvement.
However Taskrabbit was certain it was an improvement over the old platform. The feedback received from their NPS was the driving force behind the change; the changes made were the result of a direct call by a majority of their users. The voices of unhappiness, although creating a great deal of noise and stress for the company’s service attendants, were only a minority that merely needed time to adjust.
The result. Those first weeks and months were tough, but they knew their NPS metric wasn’t lying and ultimately it wasn’t. Since the summer of 2014, those voices of discontent have dissipated. In the past six months, Taskrabbit has seen their NPS rise by 40 points, alongside a projected doubling of revenue by the middle of 2015.
Taskrabbit’s trail by fire taught them not all changes are pleasant, but it is often the most difficult ones that offer the most reward.
Simyo’s simple promoter activation project
The Net Promoter® System is a great tool by which to identify customers that will spread positive word-of-mouth, but this doesn’t mean an automatic transaction, sometimes these customers need a little extra help.
For the last year, the Dutch mobile service provider Simyo has sought to activate their promoters by allowing them to open their own web shop to offer friends and family a Simyo subscription. For doing so, customers received €10 in prepaid credit and to date over 15,000 web shops have been created.
Where did it all start? Utilizing their NPS, Simyo realized that many customers were recommending Simyo to friends and family. They had an excellent set of promoters that were spreading the good word about Simyo, it all just needed a facilitating process to turn that word-of-mouth into solid transactions.
As a result of this promoter empowering initiative, their NPS has risen over the course of the last year from -3 to 9. A welcome shift as such a score sees them reach their industry average.
Is your advertising all a waste: Your NPS might be an early indicator
In a recent study carried out by Ipsos Australia research a group of individuals were exposed to a range of advertising. The advertising of financial organizations that had they deemed to be highly untrustworthy did not register with the research group, they simply could not remember seeing them.
While highly trusted organizations were 5 times more likely to be seen than the average, trust was also found to have a 70 per cent correlation between trust and NPS. Those experiencing a dropping NPS, may find then that their marketing and advertising efforts are not gaining the recognition they had hoped for.
Click here for the full article.
In brief
The Indian fashion and lifestyle e-commerce portal, Jabong has declared a score of 73 this week.
PlanSource a cloud-based health exchange and benefits provider has recorded a score of 67.
The IT group, Softcat announced the creation of 50 new jobs this week, and this growth is not better summarized by the fact that they just received a 67 for their NPS.
Discovia, an eDiscovery provider for corporations, law firms and governments is posting a healthy score of 60.
Finally in the airline industry, Delta Air Lines pushed their domestic NPS up by two points to 33.
