In addition to business telephony, M12 Solutions also provides Internet core delivery and support services for ourselves, our national Internet service brand Giganet, and also for Wessex Internet which serves rural businesses and homes in Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. We are currently finalists in 3 categories of the local Blackmore Vale Business Awards; the Customer Service Award, Online Engagement Award and the Green Award.
Wessex Internet now has almost 2,000 customers, and rather than having us present to the award judges, we thought it would be better to let our customers ‘speak for us’. So, we sent out a short survey. The first question was “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend Wessex Internet to a friend or neighbour.” Apart part from giving us useful feedback, it also provides us with a Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is an international standard for measuring customer loyalty. Net promoter divides our customers into three groups: Promoters (score 9-10), Passives (7-8) and Detractors (0-6). The way it is calculated is to take the percentage of Promoters and subtract the percentage who are Detractors. Amazingly with a possible outcome ranging from -100 (everyone dislikes us) to +100 (everybody loves us) we scored a truly massive +96…Wow!!
My initial reaction was to shout this from the rooftops – to put this into context, Apple has an NPS of 89, Microsoft 45, and Sky -5. However, I started to reflect on that fact that out of our requests, we only had 420 responses. Could we assume this was a representative sample, or was it just the evangelists who were motivated to respond? If it was a representative sample then that would mean there are about 25 customers who would chose an alternative if they had the time, inclination or another provider who can give them alike internet speeds.
To me therefore, it’s all about the notional 25 and finding out what they don’t like about our service. Do we include price into this? Possibly, but having been happy to sign up at the asking price and seeing our growth continuing to rise I don’t think so. Therefore, we must look at the detail of our operation for any negative areas and attempt to address the possible issues. We have been doing this through the last few years – continually and it has resulted in a win/win of happier customers and improved efficiency. We’ve dramatically improved communications and we embrace all methods of communication so we meet the needs of all our customers whether via text, Facebook,Twitter, email or phone, as well as updating and bespoking our portal to inform with only relevant updates. In other words, no matter how great the result, we continually try to keep giving customers fewer reasons to be dissatisfied and to head off misconceptions and misunderstandings.
Perhaps therefore, our result may well be genuine, even if it seems a little too good to be true! However, because we want to keep dealing with any reasons as to why we might get a score of 6 or less out of 10 then we by default, raise our score. I will label this the ‘Net Promoter Enigma’ I think.
96 – It is truly an amazing result on every level!
Happy customer serving.
