Customer service software platform Zendesk has launched its built-in Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, allowing organisations to measure customer loyalty and gather insights to improve their long-term customer relationships.

With NPS surveys, Zendesk enables organisations to proactively gather and analyse customer feedback directly from the same customer service platform they use to support and interact with customers. The company also released findings in its third quarter 2014 Zendesk Benchmark report that highlights the impact of customer service experiences on NPS results and, ultimately, the willingness of customers to promote an organisation.

NPS measures the loyalty of a company’s customers over time, while customer satisfaction surveys are typically sent after a customer service interaction to reactively measure whether a specific interaction was good or bad.

“Customer feedback should not be an afterthought; it should be integrated into a company’s ongoing engagement with its customers,” said Sam Boonin, vice president of product marketing at Zendesk. “NPS surveys in Zendesk give organisations a way to regularly gauge the long-term health of their customer relationships, all from the same platform they already use to interact with their customers.”

NPS surveys ask the simple question: “How likely are you to recommend the company to someone you know?” Customers can answer on a scale of zero to 10, with zero being “not at all likely” and 10 being “extremely likely.” The resulting score ranges from negative 100 to positive 100 and is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (scores of 0-6) from the percentage of promoters (9-10).

The Catch Group is an e-commerce company in Australia, running daily deal website www.catchoftheday.com.au, amongst others. Adam Rudy, head of customer experience, sent out an NPS survey from Zendesk to get to know his customers better.

Speaking about his results, Adam said “we’re very proud of our NPS score of 58” and that he now knows “where we’re falling short”. The open feedback provided by customers, highlighted opportunities where they could improve the customer experience. Having this data from Zendesk helps Catch of the Day measure the impact of changes they are making to the business, to demonstrate how it results in a better customer experience.

Because Zendesk integrates NPS surveys within the same platform used to provide customer service, customers’ NPS rating and comments are automatically displayed on their user profiles in Zendesk. Customer service teams know if individual customers are promoters or detractors as they interact with them and can tailor conversations to better fit the sentiment of customers — and improve customer loyalty over time.

Zendesk Benchmark: Customer Service Experiences Impact NPS

In addition to NPS surveys becoming generally available in Zendesk, the latest quarterly Zendesk Benchmark report examined 103,000 NPS survey responses from 230 companies that had been piloting the survey feature. The results showed that customer service is a key driver of a customer’s NPS rating.

As part of the NPS survey, customers can leave written, open-ended feedback. In analysing that feedback, the topics most-often cited for a high or low NPS score was the quality of the customer service that customers received.

Other key findings from the NPS report include:

• Customers want to be heard: Customers are twice as likely to leave written comments on NPS surveys (53 percent) as they are on customer satisfaction surveys. While promoters leave shorter comments, such as “you’re the best,” detractors tend to leave much longer, more-detailed responses that offer valuable proactive feedback for organisations. Seventy-five percent of detractor comments contain more than 50 words.
• Influence of past service experiences: Customers who previously gave good satisfaction ratings for past customer service experiences were more likely to be promoters on NPS surveys (62.3 percent), while only 17.2 percent who left bad satisfaction ratings also were promoters.
• Extremes rule: The majority of customer responses, 54 percent, leave either the highest rating of 10 or the lowest rating of 0 on NPS surveys. Ratings of 10 are the most common overall accounting for 44 percent of responses.

As with previous reports, the Zendesk Benchmark also examines customer satisfaction by country and industry, focused on the largest increases and decreases during the quarter. In industry news, travel, web hosting, and entertainment and gaming were the most improved industries. In country news, Peru, Argentina, and Italy were the movers and shakers with the biggest gains in customer satisfaction from previous quarter.