It has been an established fact that customer satisfaction is related to customer loyalty, which in turn drives profitability. Loyal customers are satisfied and can be used as a marketing tool. Customer loyalty is defined as satisfied customers who are inclined to purchase goods and services. Satisfied customers are therefore loyal to the brand and are good Ambassadors. The challenge of ensuring best in class customer experience varies among industry sectors. This is mainly because of different operational cycles of the industries. For example, in product/engineering industry, goods are first produced, then stored and finally sold and consumed whereas, the services are first sold, then produced and consumed simultaneously in a service based industry.
Loyal customers plays a major role in building the brand image of a telecom operator which as per the latest believe, is based on nothing but the word-of-mouth. Net promoter score (NPS) has been widely adapted to measure customer satisfaction in product industry such as telecommunications and retail.
In service industry such as banking, consultancy and wholesale, service quality is one of the critical success factors that influence the competitiveness of an organization. Unlike word-to-mouth, is based on the long-term evaluation of the customers’ extrinsically perceived attitudes on services, employee involvement, commitment to the final goods and services, strategic effort to obtain a competitive advantage, and value of the creation.
Most managers got the awareness of NPS after the release of a 2003 Harvard Business Review article titled “The One Number You Need to Grow.” Contrary to the past believe, the article states that the measurement of customer satisfaction and customer retention does not help firms achieve growth; instead, word of mouth is the metric that is linked to growth. However, the word-of-mouth metric must be designed in a particular way to calculate a Net Promoter score. For that, a survey is designed in which the respondents are asked how likely they are to recommend a brand to others on an 11-point scale, ranging from 0 = not at all likely to 10 = very likely. Responses are classified into Promoters (9–10), Passives (7–8), and Detractors (0–6). The score is calculated by reducing the percentage of Detractors from Promoters and represents a firm’s Net Promoter score.
The use of NPS is unfortunately not as trivial as stated above. E.g., variations in response to the NPS have also been noted based on the respondent’s demographic characteristics such as age and gender. E.g., Millennials tend to provide a lower score compared with Non-Millennials and females are more likely to be strong promoters. Furthermore, variations in average scores are also noted based on the medium of communication, i.e., a survey with text messages yielding lower scores compared to computer-assisted or telephone interviews.
The survey have several other limitations such as both scores “0” and “6” are treated equal. No option for “don’t know,” thus forcing a response and being susceptible to artificially low scores. The aforementioned limitations sometimes suggest a re-classification of points 5 and 6 as Passives and points 7–10 as Promoters.
We provide an appraisal technique to better understand the NPS score where a systemic functional linguistic approach is performed on the comments section. Comments help to identify the type and strength of attitudes expressed in natural language to identify consumer’s true sentiment. Attitude represent how people think and feel about something or someone such as, happy/sad, judgemental and appreciative. Whereas graduation relates to the strength of the attitude expressed and is based on the force and the focus of conviction in a statement. Forceful language identifies the emotive elements of the text and includes words like “amazing” or “completely ridiculous”. Using graduation, statements may be sorted on a continuum from Highly Negative to Highly Positive. Therefore, comments section is expect to have higher levels of conviction resulting in stronger language at the extreme scale points. E.g., a person scoring a “0” would be more likely to provide a comment that is semantically highly negative in graduation, compared with a person scoring a “10” who would be highly positive.
Our appraisal technique is deep rooted in scientific methods and ensures a more precise understanding of Net Promoter scores by carefully measuring the graduation of attitudes expressed by the customers.
