If you're a PetDesk user, you might have noticed something new in your dashboard. While it's small enough to go unnoticed, it's a rather significant upgrade to your arsenal of business-evaluation tools.
Your Net Promoter Score (NPS), neatly tucked away in the Metrics tab of your dashboard, is our latest addition to your tool set. What is it? In short, it's a reflection of your rating by clients. According to Bain & Company, businesses with long-term profitable growth have an NPS twice that of your average company. The higher your NPS, the better off you are.
Raising this number can drive the growth your practice. Due to this, it's a good idea to keep an eye on it, especially if you're interested in growing your practice. Let's find out how it works, why it's important, and what you can do to create favorable reviews that move your Net Promoter Score upwards.
"On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to promote this business to a friend?"
Ah, the ultimate question for any service business. To gauge performance through the eyes of the customer is to truly see where we lie. By establishing a scoring system, we allows ourselves to incorporate feedback into building better processes, products, and services. As Peter Drucker said, "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it." That's where the NPS comes in.
Your clients are categorized into three groups: Promoters, Neutral, and Detractors.
- Promoters are those who sing your praises to friends and family. You can probably think of a few of these off the top of your head. These are your most loyal clients. More than 80% of business referrals come from promoters.
- Neutrals are what Bain & Company refers to as "passively satisfied". Repurchase and referral rates are 50% lower than your promoters. A good deal or promotion from another practice can pry these clients away easily.
- Detractors are your negative clients. Remember the "80% of business referrals coming from promoters" figure? For detractors, it's flipped: 80% of negative reviews and word-of-mouth comes from this crowd.
To calculate the NPS, we subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. It's that simple. Neutrals are disregarded.
Why does having a high NPS promote growth? Let's go back to Bain & Company, the creators of NPS. They wanted to establish a correlation between NPS and growth. To do so, they identified the relevant competitors in a business and measured their NPS.
"These relative Net Promoter Scores were then correlated with organic growth measures. In most industries, Net Promoter Scores explained roughly 20% to 60% of the variation in organic growth rates among competitors. On average, an industry’s Net Promoter leader outgrew its competitors by a factor greater than two times."
What can we learn from this? If you want to see the future of a company's growth, look at the NPS. It's your crystal ball. It's also right in your dashboard!
When you head to your dashboard, you'll notice your NPS figure will fluctuate over time. Excluding neutral feedback, every review you receive factors into the score. What's nice about this is you can actively monitor your NPS and take action on a daily basis to encourage positive reviews. This, in turn, creates new promoters. Think of it as a pulse of your business that you can actively influence. Pretty neat.
Depending on how your reviewing system is setup with PetDesk, clients receive a feedback request after each visit. Whether this request comes through an email or via the app depends on how your client prefers to be reached. The client is then encouraged to post the review to popular review sites like Google or Yelp. This score is then factored into your NPS. This figure then shows up neatly in your dashboard under the Metrics tab.
Again, it's an important tool in your business-evaluation arsenal. Because promoters and detractors heavily influence your business growth, you should actively keep an eye on your NPS.
We recommend setting up a process where your staff monitors your NPS on a daily or weekly basis. When negative or neutral reviews come in, we send you an email alert. Use this as an opportunity to let your clients know their voice has been heard and that you care. To clients, this is very important.
In time, you're bound to see your NPS tick upward. With this upward trend, you're bound to see your business grow.
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