Should you implement NPS in B2B?
Should you implement NPS? Top 5 Critical Factors when considering a VoC Programme in B2B
Customer Attuned Customer Strategy Consultant Peter Lavers, asks whether B2B organisations should implement NPS.
The Net Promoter Score (or Net Promotor System), NPS, is very well established in the Voice of the Customer (VoC) industry as a way to quickly and simply to assess brand affinity and advocacy by asking the straightforward question “would you recommend?” on a scale of 0 to 10. Those scoring 9 & 10 are “promoters” and those scoring 0 – 6 are “detractors”, and subtracting the latter from the former generates the NPS score.
Benefits of NPS
- NPS is easy to understand and explain to customers and employees
- It logically leads to open ended “why” and/or backup diagnostic questions
- It sidesteps some inherent issues that ‘satisfaction’ questions have:
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- Fundamentally, satisfaction is a function of customer expectation and/or brand promise, which can be interpreted differently customer-by-customer, making CSat very subjective
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- Individual CSat isn’t particularly stable – it can fluctuate on a daily basis.
A no brainer then? Well maybe not in business-to-business (B2B) …
In my role as an independent consultant, the subject of VoC regularly come up, and I’m asked about NPS’s suitability in different client situations. My answer is almost always not an immediate ‘yes’ or ‘no’, as there are some critical factors to take into account when considering a VoC or NPS programme in the B2B environment.
Summary of my top 5 critical factors
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- Business Model. There’s little argument that NPS has been proven to be effective in the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena. In B2B there are important differences in the complexity of the customer journey (e.g. procurement, activation, transitions); contractual requirements (e.g. SLAs) and durations (often multi-year); and multiple layers of stakeholders involved (decision makers, influencers, developers, users, etc.). These differences become even more important in key/strategic accounts and formal partnerships. If all your B2B customers are SMEs or if your products are purely transactional in nature then a B2C-originated approach may well be appropriate but if you have key accounts or partners, a different approach may be required
- Fundamental Strategic Fit. The foundation of NPS is ‘intention to recommend’ (AKA advocacy). Note that it’s not trying to assess reality (have you?) but sentiment (would you?). Simple question. Is that what you are strategically aiming to achieve via your customer management? If so, do you have KPIs that correlate the intention (NPS) with the reality (referrals)? I have been surprised by the number of times I have found an NPS programme that has been implemented tactically by a silo in the organisation with little strategic debate beforehand. If your aim is to be “trusted advisers”, and the sector has relatively few players, then who are your customers recommending you to? Their competitors? Why would they do that? We would argue that long-term, deep trust is a better strategic objective than advocacy in ‘big’ B2B (i.e. account managed and key/partner segments)
- Two-Way. NPS is self-evidently a VoC tool. Some companies implement “Staff NPS” programmes, but this is about whether your employees would recommend you and your products to their friends and relatives (i.e. B2C). I have never seen a NPS programme in B2B where staff are asked if they’d recommend their customers to other suppliers (if you’re struggling with the concept think Uber drivers rating their customers or eBay sellers rating their buyers). I think B2B might be missing a trick! My point here is that B2B tends to be more personal and relational than B2C, with potentially multiple teams and individuals selling to and servicing client-side counterparts, so we’re not talking simple transactions or ‘would you/wouldn’t you’ choices. B2B relationships are a two-way street – actually more like Spaghetti Junction – so only listening to one side (VoC) will never provide an effective relationship diagnostic. We need to listen to our staff as well as customers (and join up the findings)
- Empowerment. If we get point 3 above and decide that we need to investigate depth and breadth of relationship on both sides for our ‘top’ clients, then we need to consider the different levels of empowerment at play. Asking the recommend question to a user may not be very relevant to them. Ease of working, satisfaction or trust may be much more appropriate to how they interact with you. Increasingly, staff are simply not allowed to recommend – as B2B suppliers ourselves, we know how difficult it is nowadays to get an attributed case study approved for general publication!
- Diagnostic for Account Management Action. If your business model (point 1) and customer strategy (point 2) involve any level of account management planning or joint business/partnership planning then it’s vital that relationship strengths and weaknesses can be pinpointed and diagnosed at account level to be either capitalised on or resolved. If it’s an NPS programme this comes down to the quality of the follow-up questions, their analysis, and the buy-in from Sales/KAM leaders. In our case, we draw upon Dr Mark Hollyoake’s ground-breaking work on B2B trust, which includes a catalogue of triggers, incidents, behaviours and attitudes that build or damage trust on both sides of the customer/supplier divide, linked back to Mark’s academically proven yet pragmatic model and ‘S Curve’ of trust development. Thereby, issues can be identified, diagnosed, related to the bigger picture, and addressed via insight-led dialogue and tailored account plans
In summary, a NPS-based VoC programme could work for you (similarly ease-of-working, CSat, or B2B trust depending on your strategy) – if your customers are SMEs, your products/services are transactional, or if you only want to focus on decision makers and ignore input from other stakeholders.
An Alternative to NPS
However, if in reading these five factors you have concluded that you need something with a better fit to your business model and strategy – at least for your key accounts or partnerships – then the Partner Relationship Survey from Customer Attuned could be for you. It is different from general B2B “customer research” such as NPS and you can find out how it works and listen to one of our clients talking about their experience with this type of survey by clicking here.
If you would like a discussion on how this approach could address these factors in your company or access to case studies, please contact us.
- Should you implement NPS in B2B? - January 22, 2025
- B2B Trust as a Predictive Indicator - November 12, 2024
- Relationship Crises and Trust - October 2, 2024
