When providing excellent customer service, organizations across all fields are focused on enhancing their customer satisfaction score. The best ally any Member Experience Team has to do this is by evaluating the overall Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). So, what is it? Is it important? Is it the only metric you should be measuring? Most of all, how does it affect credit unions, and what are some of the ways to gauge and boost your credit union's score? In this article, we'll cover these topics, plus a few more.
For many organizations, the Net Promoter Score® is a good way to gauge customer satisfaction. While providing excellent customer service isn't new, comparatively speaking, trying to measure the effectiveness of your customer experience (CX) efforts is.
The idea of Net Promoter Score® first gained traction in 2002. It became popularized because of the concept of administering an easy, one-question survey to clients, asking them to rate their experience with the surveying organization numerically. Member Experience Teams were told to boost their scores if they wanted customers to keep doing business with their organizations.
As mentioned, a Net Promoter Score® is a crucial metric for measuring your customer satisfaction score. It is obtained through a single-question survey that is usually administered soon after a member interacts with the organization. Responding members answer the question on a scale from 0 to 10 - the higher the score, the better. From the responses, members are placed into one of three categories:
Finding your credit union's Net Promoter Score® is easy. You subtract the percentage of Detractors from the portion of Promoters. For example:
An organization's NPS® can fall anywhere between -100 to +100. Most credit unions average +50 or higher overall. This is a high bar considering some of the best-known brands in the world, such as Apple, have an NPS that hovers in the high 40s.
Measuring and tracking your credit union's NPS® can also be a valuable tool for benchmarking against competitors in the industry. By comparing your credit union's NPS® to other credit unions or financial institutions in your market, you can gain valuable insights into how well you're meeting your members' needs and expectations. This can help identify areas where you can improve your member experience and remain competitive.
It's also worth noting that NPS® is a dynamic metric that can change over time, so it's crucial to regularly survey your members and monitor their responses. Doing so lets you track changes in member satisfaction and loyalty and take proactive steps to address any issues or concerns before they become bigger problems.
Overall, while NPS® is just one metric in a larger toolkit for measuring member satisfaction and loyalty, it can provide valuable insights into how well your credit union is meeting the needs and expectations of your members. By regularly tracking and analyzing your NPS®, you can identify areas for improvement, benchmark against competitors, and ultimately strengthen your relationship with your members.
While NPS® is essential, it's important to remember that it's just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to measuring member satisfaction. Other metrics, such as the Customer Effort Score (CES), can also provide valuable insights into the quality of your member experience. In today's digital age, members want quick, easy, and hassle-free interactions with their credit unions. By measuring your CES, you can determine how easy or difficult it is for your members to interact with your services, identify pain points in the member journey, and take steps to improve their experience.
CES - or the Member Effort Score (MES) in the case of credit unions - is a cross-industry Key Performance Indicator (KPI). For credit unions, MES examines members' efforts to interact with the credit union or one of its financial offerings.
In a single-question MES survey, similar to an NPS®, the recipient may be asked, "How easy was it to join our credit union?" or "How easy was the loan application process?"
The standard response scale is 1-7, providing a way to identify and monitor difficulties at every touchpoint for the member's journey with the credit union. Historically, better Member Effort Scores have shown a willingness on the part of the member to engage with more financial offerings from the credit union.
When used as part of a blended scorecard approach, NPS® and MES together are incredibly helpful in understanding the sentiment, advocacy, and loyalty of a member and uncovering the 'why' behind the scores.
More and more organizations are recognizing the importance of measuring the customer satisfaction score to improve the member experience. To achieve this goal, they are investing in customer service experience platforms. While several of these platforms exist, MemberXP is a SaaS provider offering a suite of tools geared towards helping credit unions effectively gauge and manage member experiences. For example, the MemberView tool from MemberXP allows credit union Member Experience Teams to track their scores for member experiences as well as specific experiences such as lending.
At MemberXP, we benchmark a credit union's NPS® and MES against others in the industry for every experience and member touchpoint we measure. This information provides context and visibility for growth and is a valuable benchmark for setting goals. Both KPIs are drillable to region, branch, and coach and can be viewed by member demographics - all within one powerful tool.
For questions about how MemberXP can help your credit union achieve its marketing objectives or to request a demo, visit memberxp.com/live-demo/.
*Net Promoter Score is a trademark of Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichhield.