Lately I’ve been sharing the importance of the Net Promoter Score in my newsletters, blog posts, and podcast.
Why?
Net Promoter Score is a really simple tool that will help you discover how you are performing in the eyes of your customers.
As I started sharing more stories about the importance of NPS and how it can light a path where you know whether or not you are meeting your customers’ needs or not, I had a chance to talk with the folks at Eventellect because as the pandemic began they ran a survey of their customers and included the magic NPS question in the survey.
The magic question is:
“How likely are you to recommend ___ to your colleagues or friends?”
What stood out to me was their score, 77.
That’s an amazing score.
As Patrick Ryan, Co-Founder of Eventellect said to me, “At first, I thought this is just a little better than average.”
It actually isn’t. Because the way that NPS breaks down is with your business scoring on a scale between -100 and 100.
I run a NPS survey about 2-3 times a year in my Talking Tickets newsletter and at the end of 2020, I had a 53. Pretty good.
To put these scores in context. Anything below 0 is a low NPS score. Anything above 0 is good. Anything above 30 is very good. And, once you hit above you are world class in delivering for your market.
To put the scores in context, Apple is reported at 72 online. I’ve seen Tesla’s NPS listed at 96-98. And, I’ve seen Amazon with a 53.
The number matters because it tells you a few things that can improve your business:
- How loyal your customers are. If you have a higher score, they are likely more loyal.
- How likely you are to grow. When you track the score over time, you can see whether or not your business is moving in the right direction. If your NPS score is growing, that often points to business growth too.
- It can be an early warning system to alert you to new ways to deliver value, grow your business, or to be careful of.
All three of these ideas were in play with the way that Eventellect laid out their survey. Let me explain.
At the top, I talked about the magic question: “How likely are you to recommend ___ to your colleagues or friends?” On a scale of 0-10, will give you a numerical rating.
But with two additional questions, you can take the survey to another level:
- Can you briefly share why you gave us the score you did?
- Would you be willing to have us follow up with you and get additional feedback?
These three questions allow you to capture qualitative data and quantitative data.
This combination of big data and small data sets can transform your business.
With Eventellect, their primary goal was to help their partners during the pandemic and to find out what folks valued about their relationship with Eventellect.
The data was pretty clear in this case. People partnered with Eventellect for a number reasons including:
- Shared accountabilities.
- Expertise around pricing, distribution, and data.
- Their focus on the relationships and not just the transactions.
- A constant focus on value.
As the pandemic dug in and upset teams and organizations around the country, this survey data helped point Eventellect towards a couple of key ideas that helped them build better relationships with their partners, reshape their value, and develop new core competencies.
The ability to focus on specific issues:
One thing that Eventellect’s survey showed was that many teams were dealing with similar challenges, but the way that those challenges were expressing themselves was unique to each market.
Having the ability to call on partners and data from markets around the country gave Eventellect an opportunity to gain a better grasp of the challenges from both the macro-level and the micro-level.
This gave the organization the chance to package insights that put larger trends and challenges into context and provide insights that allowed their partners to take action.
As Kate Howard, Eventellect’s Chief Commercial Officer shared with me, “We learned to deliver insights in a few different manners so that we could make sure that executives could get the information they needed to take action quickly, but with enough detail that the underlying issue could be explored as well.”
One example of this was in the way that the assumptions about 2 packs and 4 packs changed based on real data once fans were allowed back in certain markets.
Being true partners:
One idea that has come back to me over and over through the pandemic is that you are going to remember who was there for you during the extreme low points.
Again, in the NPS survey data, the idea of being “true partners” came out again and again.
To Lisa Walker, Eventellect’s SVP of Business Development for College Athletics, being a true partner can be defined by a number of qualities including shared outcomes, a focus on win/win situations, and using core competencies to elevate both partners’ businesses.
One thing that has stuck with me is the way that Lisa talked about “First Class Data” as a way to help create these kinds of impacts for their partners.
One way that Lisa does this is by using the conversation around data as a way to show her partners where their data is still relevant, not relevant, and where you and when you should look for data to be meaningful heading through the pandemic.
This comes out in the way that Lisa and her team at Eventellect have been able to focus their attention on helping their college partners achieve their goals whether they be driving attendance, driving revenue, or filling up specific locations for visual impact.
The core is understanding the partnership, the goals, and the value that can be delivered by working together.
Reinventing value:
Back when I chatted with Patrick Ryan on my podcast, we talked about “value” constantly.
To me, creating and capturing value is the key idea that drives any business forward. But you don’t always see people that have injected that idea into their business so completely.