It is time to kill the NPS Invasion
Which is more important: NPS or online reviews?
The proliferation of the Net Promoter Score Survey — the strategy of asking your customers to give you a grade — has become standard across industries; but perhaps not more than in financial services.
Bain and Co. is responsible for the creation of the survey as they viewed it as the key proponent of business growth. Fred Reichheld believed that not only are the most important customers those who would recommend (I do believe in the value of this), but that these customers were the most important.
In an article on Harvard Business Review, he wrote:
The only path to profitable growth may lie in a company’s ability to get its loyal customers to become, in effect, its marketing department.
Reichheld isn’t wrong. But the NPS is misguided in the step of those most valuable customers becoming the marketing department.
But what has happened is NPS is now reviewed as frequently and as often as the monthly Income Statement and Balance Sheet. Depending on your industry, it is also peer bench marked and added to incentive programs. (It is!) So instead of focusing on things we can all control and drive direct impact, many rely on an NPS survey that is not filled out by everyone and can be impacted by a range of factors; of which you have no control.
Now, the NPS does offer great insight into the current temperature of your customers. And there is great value and potential in using these insights to better your business and drive further growth.
But if we don’t conduct NPS surveys, how do we know what our customers think and feel about us?
Enter Google and Yelp.
You read that right.
What better place to encourage and get real (mostly unsolicited feedback) than online channels ripe with members sitting behind angry keyboards pounding away late into the night.
What is the one thing that NPS doesn’t give you? Public validation.
Online Reviews appear in SEO searches, are used in purchase decisions, drive increased trust and credibility, and are easily reviewed by AI LLMs. In fact, according to Rival Banking Research, 76% of consumers regularly rely on Google Reviews when deciding on a new bank.
So, what now?
Who wins between NPS and Online Surveys?
I believe it is a mix of the two.
A single, annual NPS survey on a set cadence with a proactive push to gather online surveys will pay even larger dividends.
With the NPS you get:
Ongoing and track able quantitative and qualitative feedback at an individual level
Targets for up-sell and referral programs
With Online Surveys you get:
Future-ready SEO content
Built-in marketing where Google and Yelp do your job for you
The choice is yours; but an imbalance toward NPS over-weighs silent feedback over future-ready automated marketing set to scale.