Glossary

Net Promoter Score in Training

DEFINITION

Adopted by most Fortune 1000 companies, Net Promoter Score gauges the loyalty of a business’s consumer base. Fred Reichheld originally introduced the concept in a 2003 copy of the Harvard Business Review.

The “consumer base” could be anything from actual clients to partnering businesses. It can even encompass the company’s own employees in the case of corporate training. In fact, the employee net promoter score is not an uncommon metric to help improve workplace courses.

What Is NPS?

If you’ve ever taken a customer survey from a company with which you interact, you’ve probably seen one question more often than others: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”

There’s a reason why this question is so prevalent in these surveys, and the answer lies in a metric known as the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Let’s talk about this universal business measurement and how you can take advantage of it as a business owner or manager.

 

How Do You Measure It?

Obtaining NPS is easy: just offer a survey to your customers with the question, “How likely are you to recommend our service or product to a friend?” Participants can answer on a scale of 1 to 10.

Once you receive the answers, count the number of users who choose relatively low figures. This group is known as the detractors. Participants with high responses are known as promoters. Those in between can be considered “passive” respondents.

Promoters are loyal to your business and will likely help you with word-of-mouth advertising in the future. Detractors, on the other hand, will probably share their negative views with others. The percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors results in your Net Promoter Score.

Companies use NPS to improve their own services, products, and training. Many industries rely on it to measure customer satisfaction and the progress of the business, both of which have an impact on your revenue and ability to gain more clients. Others use the Net Promoter Score as a training benchmark.

NPS and Business Training

If you ask this question after an in-house or virtual training course, you can easily see which classes, lessons, or instructors are generating the most detractors or promoters. Using the Net Promoter Score for training evaluation is a popular approach for this reason.

Professional coursework is incredibly complex, with different topics, groups, instructors, and classes to manage. How can you tell whether your company’s consumer education is really doing the trick? Surface-level feedback can only take you so far, so consider measuring Net Promoter Score in customer education.

As a Net Promoter Score example, IBM once used NPS to improve its own courses. The tech giant found that certain instructors resulted in low NPS figures when they surveyed participants afterward. They also discovered that an eBook format in use was not popular with the users.

The Benefits of NPS

Net Promoter Score is almost universally recognized among large companies for a reason. It’s an easy question to ask and a quick way to gain actionable feedback to improve your bottom line.

Plus, because it’s a global standard, NPS can let you compare your performance with other organizations in your industry. You have an opportunity to ask follow-up questions as well. What can you do to turn Passive responders into Promoters?

The Limitations

As useful as the metric is, NPS only gives you a broad idea of what responders think of your company. For instance, a detractor might provide a low rating because of a specific aspect of your product or service. Getting useful information from NPS usually involves further investigation into why a client answered the way he or she did.

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