We are often asked what a good NPS is or what the NPS is of companies in similar branches. One way to find out is through NPS benchmarking. Benchmarking in general means that you compare your business to other companies in the same industry to analyze how your organization is developing in comparison to your competitors. You can do this with NPS by comparing your company’s NPS with the NPS of your direct competitors. One way to do this is through yearly recurring NPS benchmark reports. Reports for which you often must pay if you want in-depth insight. Don’t do this! We believe that NPS benchmarking is a waste of time and money.
NPS is measured at different times
Let’s say your average Net Promoter Score (NPS) is 45 and a competitor has an NPS of 60. This seems to be a big difference, but is the history of the company considered here? If, as a starting company, you have just started measuring the NPS and are asking for the opinion of your customers for the first time in this way, it is likely that only customers with complaints will respond. A company that has been measuring their NPS for a longer period usually has more respondents who give a higher NPS. These customers have more experience with the company and the company has probably already built up a legion of loyal customers over the years who would like to give their positive feedback.
You must be sure that the NPS is measured at the same time in the customer’s journey and at the same touch point. Sometimes, the NPS is only measured after the customer has been in contact with customer service, while other companies are not requesting the NPS until the end of the customer’s journey. If the moment and the touch point that are measured with NPS vary by company, you cannot compare these scores with one another.
Time-Specific NPS recording does not give insight into season-dependent industries
NPS benchmark reports are typically time-specific because they are conducted annually and provide no insight into fluctuations throughout the year. The averages these reports produce do not give a good picture of how a company scores throughout the year. Especially companies in a season-dependent industry have to deal with fluctuations. A garden center attracts many more visitors in the spring than in the winter, making the experience in the spring very different. This affects the NPS score. This also applies to the travel industry. It is therefore important to know at what moment the NPS is measured.
Cultural influences on NPS
The score people give also differs per country. In the Netherlands, people do not often give a score of 9 or 10, while Americans are much more generous in that regard. The Dutch are more down-to-earth and therefore express their enthusiasm less easily than Americans. As an international company, never compare your NPS with other countries. In Japan, for example, it is socially undesirable to give a company a rating that is too high or too low. And Germans are very conservative, even if they are highly satisfied.
So you must be sure that the NPS is measured and calculated in the same way at comparable companies. You must be sure that you are comparing apples to apples. Otherwise, it makes no sense to compare your own company with other companies based on NPS.
More importantly, NPS should not be seen as just a score, but rather as a way to analyze the trend of the score throughout the year. For example, you can compare which branch is doing better and what the reasons are for that. Internally, it is possible to compare apples to apples and learn from each other.
You should therefore see NPS as a ‘system’ to give your organization insight into where changes are needed to improve the customer experience and customer satisfaction. It is much more important that your NPS continues to grow than having a higher score than your competitor. Only then will you get value from measuring your NPS!
