Can you think of a recent customer service or support event that stands out in your mind as having been stellar or outstanding?

Chances are you have a better memory of the last negative experience. That’s a natural outcome. As Alina Tugend describes in an NYTimes piece in 2012. Tugend quoted Florida State University, social psychology Professor Roy F. Baumeister, author of a journal article he co-authored in 2001. Baumeister wrote “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” “Research over and over again shows this is a basic and wide-ranging principle of psychology… It’s in human nature, and there are even signs of it in animals”.

Your, remembering of the bad over the good turns out to be something simply human. Negative emotions, poor parent experiences, and negative feedback have more impact than good. Further, bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.

That’s not much of a consolation to a business that sells goods and services. That a dud product or poor experience ultimately could ruin a lifelong experience for customers is not very encouraging. However, all is not lost.

Though you are more likely to remember the negative experiences, the reality is that your business can recover from these kinds of negatives, but the approach that you use depends heavily on customer data and knowledge and insights about your customers.

Praise Is Fleeting, but Brickbats We Recall

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You might have heard or read about the concept of Net Promoter Scoring or NPS. At its heart, NPS, as a measure, is used to calculate the status of sentiment within a customer in relation to a product, service, brand, or experience. When looked at in aggregate it is the percentage of customers who are effectively pro or positively disposed toward that thing as opposed to against, or negatively disposed detractors of that good, service, brand, or experience.

For organizations, NPS is actually calculated based on one or more surveys of customers where they “How likely would you recommend X to a friend, colleague, or family member?”

The responses are often out of 10 with 0 = “not at all likely,” 5 = “neutral,” and 10 = “extremely likely.”

A net promoter is someone who scores 9-10 and a detractor is 0-6 with 7 and 8 falling neutral. This is a sharp contrast to the mean, median, and mode scores often used in ratings where you might think that anything above 5 suggests support or enthusiasm for your offering.

We know, from what we see in social media, on review sites, and the like, that people are quick to share negative experiences and not necessarily as balanced on the positive side. Actually, providing genuine positive feedback takes a lot of effort and negative feedback may be fueled by disappointment or frustration, or feelings of betrayal.

If you’re gathering NPS, where does that information land? It is probably in your survey system, probably in your statistics, but do you bring it all the way back to your customer master? Perhaps you want to.

Your next question might be, well “why on earth would I want to store something that is potentially negative or only valid for a particular point in time“? It’s a good question and one that the following ideas on engagement might answer.

Feedback becomes insights

If you’re a product or service company, you should look at how your business harvests customer sentiment to drive the enhancement of your products and services. If it doesn’t then perhaps there is an opportunity right there. If you know who your fans are, then they’re great candidates for providing you with an understanding of what matters to them. Further, the detractors can fuel an understanding of the deficiencies or what’s missing in what you provide.

If you don’t have any of that tied to your customer master then, you’re effectively blind and building and refining based on unknown customers or potentially only those who shout the loudest.

If you recognize and acknowledge that surveys are a good way to get a sense of customer sentiment then it makes sense to go to the next step of attaching that sentiment to the customer master itself. This also can help guide service and support personnel in understanding that in some instances a particular customer has already indicated some sort of unhappiness and may need some specific special handling, Now that’s what we call customized or personalized customer interaction!

Using Pretectum APIs to manage and access the customer master, you can hook the survey results on a per-response basis right back into the customer master and surface elements like the date the last survey was undertaken the NPS, and any other data that you feel might be important. Ultimately the choice of what you store when you store it and the frequency with which you store it, is entirely up to you and the needs of your business.

Aggregated data

It was mentioned earlier but of course, there is value in understanding the NPS for your responses in aggregate. In other words, looking at all the customers that responded to your survey, what is their general feeling towards your product or service. This again can be useful for guiding leadership on how aligned the business is in relation to its overall goals. Nudging the NPS for example could be an OKR for both product and service or all kinds of aspects of your business.

When you look at that data in aggregate and then zone in a campaign to say promote a new offering or a new product; you may have, as your intent, incentivization of a particular kind of customer or past customer. Here, knowing where they lie in NPS ranking might be a way you optimize the effectiveness of your outreach or promotion campaign. You may choose to actually ignore your fanbase and focus on trying to convert those still sitting neutral or you may choose to convey a completely different message to the three different camps. What you choose to do, will of course be dictated by what you know and what you have planned.

Surveys and their results can help organizations evaluate the strength of their offering and even their competition. The results can be used to segment and pursue new markets or cross and upsell in existing ones. Ultimately, though, you need to have the data and it needs to be accessible, and usable. With Pretectum you can close the potential gap that exists when you consider your customer master data through too narrow of a lens.