Net Promoter Score: Simplicity is a good start
NPS is derived from one or two questions (including “How likely are you to recommend us to someone you know?”) and subtracts lower from higher scores to yield a single number and benefits from high response rates and rapid deployment. But NPS has some well-known limitations including its difficulty to understand the absolute economic value of the score (NPS is a relatively weak indicator of actual purchase behavior) and the fact that NPS won’t reveal why a score is low, high or in between. For more action-oriented insight, Customer Effort Score (CES) holds promise.
Customer Effort Score: Isolate and act
CES focuses on key transactions between a brand and a consumer, positing that customer service and online experience are the key indicators of customer loyalty. Speed and simplicity are believed to be key brand builders and attitudinal measures such as NPS, are sidelined. CES allows a brand to isolate transactional variables to address performance issues. CES is both actionable and operational, but tends to focus heavily on the customer service angle of the customer experience.
Mobile & Wearables: Promising but early
Today, marketers can yield customer insights by combining attitudinal and behavioral data through web tracking, mobile app engagement and transaction analysis. But the promise of new data sources such as wearable devices and broader mobile tracking strategies have the potential to open up a whole new level of customer insight. By combining behavioral data alongside attitudinal data, companies can discover patterns and correlations that have the potential to make predictive models much more powerful. Though early in their lifecycle, now is the time to monitor the progress of wearable technology and predictive algorithms to yield a complete picture of attitude and behavior.
