Are You Delivering an Incredible Customer Experience?
Almost 18 months ago, I wrote a blog post about calculating Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the importance of NPS for gauging the quality and health of your client relationships. While some question the validity of NPS as a single metric, I hold that the power of NPS is simply that: it’s a single metric. Your customers either love you or they don’t, and NPS is a simple way to determine whether or not you’re delivering an incredible customer experience.
As more companies make the move to utilizing NPS, it is interesting to note the variances of NPS scores for different industries. Inavero, a Bullhorn Marketplace partner, specializes in helping service-based companies (aka professional service firms) deploy, capture, and analyze client satisfaction data, and has aggregated its client data to create industry-specific benchmarks and comparisons.
NPS for Professional Service Firms in 2015
Source: Inavero 2015
Now look at the staffing industry, which is about as service-based (or people-based) as it gets. Staffing NPS has been declining year over year and is at a woeful -3% right now. Even the best B2B service-based industries are only yielding NPS scores in the mid-20% range.
NPS for Staffing Firms from 2010 to 2015
Source: Inavero 2015. Staffing Industry Analysts covered these findings in a recent article, which breaks down NPS even further by staffing segment.
Compare the NPS of B2B service firms to the 2015 results for firms in consumer-facing industries (B2C). Once you throw out the scores for cable/satellite TV providers (e.g. Comcast) and ISPs (again, Comcast…we all know what the Comcast experience is like), you see that the average experience clients have with professional service firms don’t match up to the experiences that consumers have with B2C brands. There are a few exceptions here, but generally, B2C scores are higher. Much higher.
Average NPS for B2C Industries in 2015
Why is this? Why do consumer-facing companies deliver a better customer experience than B2B professional service firms? How and why do B2B services firms fall short? Do business clients expect more out of their relationships and experiences than consumers? Or are services firms simply behind the curve when it comes to delivering an incredible customer experience?
After fifteen years of developing and delivering software to professional service firms, we at Bullhorn have learned that these firms have extremely sales-driven cultures. And too often, relationships continue to be managed and monitored by sales-minded professionals. We’ve learned that salespeople loathe the process of entering data into their customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Data entry is tedious, time-consuming, and usually just a burdensome requirement. But without the capture of client and contact interactions, it is difficult to evaluate and assess the health of a relationship. And it’s especially difficult for a manager to assess health without direct input from a sales rep or account manager (and even then, managers could be receiving a skewed version of the truth).
What if your CRM system could automatically track the interactions that you and your employees have with your clients, freeing your sales and account people to do what they do best: build relationships? What if your system could analyze those interactions to inform you about your clients’ sentiment and health? Finally, what if that same system provided tools like NPS surveys to allow you to proactively ask your clients exactly how they feel about you and your company?
A modern CRM that’s built for the way humans work and interact can do all of that. As a human, you should be able to work the way you want to work and benefit from smart software that runs in the background to help you make smarter, more informed decisions. Bullhorn CRM helps you do just that. If you haven’t seen what a CRM for humans can do for your business, take a test drive today.
