The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has evolved over the years both in terms of its use case and interpretation; human interest businesses such as deathcare are gauging crucial data points from it to fuel growth
Mr RIshabh Jalan, CEO & Co-Founder of Last Journey, India’s largest tech-enabled, end-to-end deathcare and funeral service provider.
As businesses today are transcending from their primitive notions of profit accumulation, the factor of customer satisfaction plays a vital role in their sustainable growth. The overall experience of a customer from the inquiry to delivery (of product or service) and even the post-purchase phase, largely impacts a variety of business matrices. The key tool to measure customer experience is the Net Promoter Score also known as NPS which is a widely used market research metric that is usually based on a single survey questionnaire asking respondents (customers) to rate the likelihood of them recommending a company, product, or service among their social networks.
Being a proprietary business instrument, NPS works on a simple and transparent methodology; its use case was predominantly deemed relevant for mainstream businesses since customer retention was of utmost importance in their context. However, as new age businesses are emerging and a considerable number of them work on the PPU model or have one-time service requests; customer retention is not of much importance to them. Despite this difference, their focus on garnering a better NPS is rather more, to gather intel on – revenue, churn rate and most importantly, the improvement of customer satisfaction.
In terms of the death care industry and funeral services sector, the concept of a defined NPS mechanism may seem odd at first, but in reality, it is quite the opposite. As an emotion-driven arena, where empathy is integral, NPS in the deathcare business helps companies to train their inbound sales team, and create a more diverse yet simplified menu for the end user. NPS for human interest business ventures acts as a device to ensure that the company aligns with what customers prefer and what they don’t. By designing a customer survey that speaks to your company’s concerns and by acting on the results with thoughtful, strategic changes, the brand-consumer relationship gets stronger.
For an industry that was on the verge of collapse in India during the peak pandemic phase and then saw the following rise in the entry/growth of private players to work in rebuilding and redefining the death industry of India, NPS is such a tool that can make or break the early bird players of this arena. Over time businesses have realized that the only way to make the system work better is to develop a complementary metric that draws on accounting results, not on surveys, to record and analyze the quality of a firm’s growth. Many organizations are now filtering potentially biased sample(s) of survey responses, so that the response biases that earlier tended to plague the results of non-anonymized surveys can be tackled.
In the coming times, the inclination of NPS’s wider use will be more towards answering the question, “how satisfactory a product or service was’ ‘ rather than just “how loyal a customer is’ ‘. Change is never easy, therefore companies will have to keep figuring out ways to adapt to the new consumer expectations that would shape their path for years to come. Although, in 2022, many industries managed to approach the pre-pandemic NPS values, and in isolated cases even achieve better results, it remains an area of constant innovation and retrospect for human interest businesses; more so for the deathcare industry players.
