If you’re in the telecom industry, then you know all about its notoriously poor track record with customer experience. This is especially reflected by Net Promoter Score (NPS), a measure of how likely a customer is to recommend your company to their friends. On average, the telecom industry has an average NPS of 31—a red flag that CX needs improvement.

Moving the needle of how your customers feel isn't easy, especially if you've already implemented NPS or other feedback methods. It might be tempting to increase your survey frequency, but actionable insight doesn't come from asking more questions—it comes from asking the right questions at the right time. Gathering targeted feedback is a direct window into your customers’ feelings and a great way to guide your brand’s decision-making process in every facet of your business.

Read on to learn how to improve your NPS survey, gather more customer responses, and use analytics to elevate your NPS.

Where telecom brands drop the ball with NPS surveys

Having an NPS survey is enough, right? Nope. 

Like any other part of business, you need to continuously work to improve your NPS surveys to gather honest and actionable feedback from your customers.

NPS surveys are incredibly simple—they only require a single question—but there are still lots of ways to get them wrong. Some of the most common reasons telecom companies struggle with NPS surveys include:

• Sending surveys randomly and inconsistently throughout the customer journey.
  
  
• Not including personalization to drive customer engagement.
  
  
• Adding poorly constructed questions that dilute the survey’s value.
  
  
• Ignoring the results or not acting on them quickly enough.
  
  
• Keeping the survey feedback in one department.
  
  
• Focusing only on detractors rather than balancing analysis of successes and failures.
  
  
• Chasing a specific score instead of looking at trends and industry benchmarks.

5 ways to elevate NPS surveys in telecom

NPS is one of the most powerful metrics your telecom brand can leverage to forecast growth, customer retention, and overall performance. Research from Bain & Company shows that an industry’s NPS leader grows at more than double the pace of competing brands. In a saturated field like telecom, where CX is one of the biggest differentiating factors, that’s a fortuitous advantage.

The first step in driving your NPS is to get customers to respond with actionable data. Here are five strategies to improve your NPS surveys.

1. Optimize the timing and frequency of surveys

Timing is everything in life, and NPS surveys are no different. Since the goal is to capture customer satisfaction—and hopefully increase it—you want to check in regularly. Blasting an NPS survey to your entire customer base once per year will yield a lot of data, but it won’t necessarily be useful.

Instead, focus on contacting all users during critical points in the customer journey (such as within 24 hours after a transaction or cart abandonment). This will make your data both more consistent and more valuable. And make sure you’re mixing periodic relationship-oriented surveys with transactional surveys triggered by actions like upgrading to a new service, buying a new device, or resolving a support issue.

Even the time of day you send surveys makes a difference. According to SmartInsights, recipients open almost a quarter of all emails within an hour of delivery. Encourage customer engagement by asking for their feedback when they have free time to provide it. Studies have shown that sending emails on Tuesdays during business hours tends to garner the most responses, but every audience is different. Thus, using analytics to hone in on your users' habits can help optimize your survey scheduling.

2. Leverage both in-app surveys and transactional emails

How you ask for feedback is just as important as when you ask. Emailing customers an NPS survey is a great way to touch base when they haven’t contacted you in a while. And it has the advantage of being unobtrusive, as long as you’re not spamming customers.

On the other hand, it’s hard to beat a captive audience. Your customers are on your app or website regularly, whether it’s to pay their bill, update their account, or contact support. Take advantage of the opportunity to serve customers an in-app NPS survey while you have their attention.

3. Make it easy for your customers

Ease-of-use is a critical component of NPS surveys. Use a customer feedback platform with a friendly UI that integrates well with all of your channels, especially mobile. Around 57% of global internet traffic comes from mobile devices—if your NPS survey loads slowly or doesn’t display properly on a phone, you can expect significantly lower response rates. 

Surveys embedded in email or apps are also a great way to encourage responses. Rather than having to go to an external site and wait for it to load, users can take the survey directly from their email or while using your app.

4. Implement eNPS surveys

Employees are your customers’ connection to your brand. Their feelings will permeate every human touchpoint on the customer journey, whether it’s sales, service calls, or general support. If they aren’t satisfied, what kind of image will they portray to your customers?

While you want to find out where you’re succeeding with employee engagement, don’t ignore your detractors. Along with discovering internal pain points to address, low eNPS scores are a good early indicator of employees that are flight risks–and you can’t deliver good CX without good employees.

5. Dive deeper with follow-up questions

NPS surveys are brief, but they can be a springboard to so much more. However, it’s important to be deliberate with what you ask and how you ask it. Automating follow-up questions based on a score can help garner focused feedback and improve customer satisfaction. 

If a user gives a low score, apologize for their bad experience and ask how your brand can improve. Conversely, thank promoters for their support and ask if there’s anything you can do to enhance your services or products. Based on scores given, you can also set up automated emails and surveys to encourage feedback and stay in touch with happy (or unhappy) customers.

Asking if you can follow up with a customer about their experience can also provide a human touch that’s often lacking. If a user gives a negative score but has the opportunity to talk through it with a customer service specialist, it can make a world of difference.

What to do with your NPS survey results

While telecom hasn’t always delivered on the customer experience front, it’s increasingly becoming a focus. A November 2021 industry survey revealed that 56% of carriers ranked enhancing CX as their top priority for 2022.

Customer NPS survey responses are one of the most valuable tools you have to improve CX, but you have to put the data to good use. Let’s look at some key steps to turning customer data into actionable–and impactful–insights.

1. Close the loop

When a customer provides feedback, they’re implicitly saying that they care enough to take time out of their day to complete a survey. The least your brand can do is close the loop by responding to their feedback, whatever it may be.

For promoters, you’re letting them know that you appreciate their support. For detractors, you have an opportunity to resolve their issues and increase customer retention. Given the telecom industry’s high churn rate, every chance to keep a customer is a win.

2. Facilitate internal review

NPS surveys might fall under the authority of your marketing or customer service department, but they’re not the only team that interfaces with your users. Everyone in your company needs to see and understand the results.

A Salesforce survey indicates that 76% of customers want consistent interactions across departments. Sharing NPS survey results—and the action items they spawn—will help ensure your brand is providing excellent CX at every step of the customer journey.

3. Perform root-cause analysis

Users can express feedback in a variety of ways, but they usually boil down to a handful of key issues. This is where your follow-up questions come in. For example, responses with phrases like “hard to navigate,” “couldn’t find,” and “had to repeat” all point to a need to improve your app’s UI.

By performing root-cause analysis, you can focus on overarching ways to make impactful changes, rather than getting bogged down in minor details.

5. Implement predictive analysis based on patterns and trends

Customer feedback is inherently reflective of past performance, but it can also give you a glimpse of the future. Once you’ve built up years of NPS survey responses, AI and machine learning algorithms can help your team spot subtle trends and predict ways to improve, especially within segments of your customer base. 

Being able to project how decisions might impact your NPS can help avoid missteps as you launch new products and services.

6. React to feedback in real-time

The digital world moves at lightspeed, and your customers want to see results quickly. Researchers at Hubspot found that over 90% of consumers want an immediate response when they have a customer service issue. Waiting for a monthly NPS report won’t cut it.

Using real-time analytics to improve NPS can give you rapid and continuous insight into your customer journeys. You can spot problems when they first crop up, address them quickly, and prevent them from growing into a crisis for your brand.

Improve your NPS with Scuba Analytics

NPS is a simple metric, but improving your score can be a complex problem. You need to gather actionable insights from your customers, improve your CX accordingly, and continuously monitor the impact of your changes.

Scuba’s continuous intelligence platform can help you put all of that survey data to work and rapidly analyze its meaning. With Scuba Analytics, telecom brands can:

• Easily ingest disparate data sources from across your enterprise, so you can analyze customer journeys relative to their NPS survey responses.
  
  
• Perform complex queries to segment NPS responses without technical knowledge or data science resources.
  
  
• Set up real-time KPI dashboards for metrics related to NPS like bounce rate, churn rate, and daily active users (DAU).
  
  
• Configure customized real-time alerts to spot small problems before they impact a big portion of your customers.
  
  
• Explore customer journeys with interactive visualizations to discover pain points that could be dragging down NPS.

Want to learn more about how Scuba can help elevate your NPS? Request a demo today or talk to a Scuba expert.