If your survey sampling tactics produce survey results that over- or under-represent portions of your customer base, you may want to consider weighting your results. Public opinion pollsters commonly use this tactic when they adjust by demographic factors to better match the likely voting population, for example. While the practice can create more accurate polling that predicts behavior, it can also have the opposite effect by skewing the results inappropriately or raising questions of results tampering.

The same applies to customer experience data, whether survey results or operational performance information. If you are present in 50 countries, are all represented in your sample? If you are going to present an average result for NPS or for on-time delivery across your entire company, should your sample be weighted by the revenue in each country? Our suggestion is that it should, everything else being equal. If Brazil represents 13% of your revenue, it should have that weight in your result calculations.

One of the other factors that may need to be compensated for is data collection mode. You should do your best to understand whether collection of data via text messages, email, telephone surveys or other methods bias results in some way. In a perfect world, you should do this by so-called ‘A / B testing’. This means you randomly assign customers to different survey methods and compare the results. If there are only small differences, don’t worry about them. If the differences are substantial, they need to be compensated for in your results.

It’s very common for colleagues and executives to challenge the data from NPS programs, even when these foundational best practices are in place. Those challenges often expose the hard truth that customer experience data is not good enough. Even smart analyses and weighting strategies aren’t enough to overcome the fundamental deficits in the underlying data set. There’s no way around it: You’ll need more complete data to build a program that delivers real outcomes. To get there, download our guide, take our comprehensive training course, or read about the future of NPS.

An example of the most common questions asked by those who receive a CX report for the first time is, “I see the NPS for my business unit is 38. Is that good or bad?” Competent customer experience leaders must report the answer to that question and to many others. Your approach to that task should demonstrate an understanding of company strategy and seek to reflect and inform it.

First, consider the top-level question: what is a good score? The answer is that a good score is one whose trend is better than that of the main competitor. After all, if you improve, but your main competitor improves more, your competitor will take market share from you. If you don’t happen to have any competitive information, a good score is one that is better than your previous one.

That said, the most important effort to be made is to put the aggregate results and possibly individual subsets into the context of the overall company strategy. If, for example, the number one strategic priority the company has set for the year is the opening of subsidiaries in five new countries, it is critical to be able to report on customer experience for those countries. Otherwise the CX leader will appear to be a disconnected report card producer rather than a full team member.

But what if you don’t have any data for the new countries? This is where stories must enter into play. Talk to local staff in the new countries to understand what is going well and where they are having competitive challenges. Do your utmost to get direct quotes from customers that reflect these realities. “It is fantastic to see Acme here in Brazil. We finally have a good alternative to Cartelco.” And if it has not yet been practical to survey customers, you can still ask your Brazilian employees how likely they think customers are to recommend your company and why. Doing this will be far better than appearing disconnected from corporate strategy.

The same general principle applies to reporting on subsets of the overall corporate business. Understand the business unit or functional strategy and make sure CX reports are prepared in a way that makes them relevant.

It’s very common for colleagues and executives to challenge the data from NPS programs, even when these foundational best practices are in place. Those challenges often expose the hard truth that customer experience data is not good enough. Even smart analyses and weighting strategies aren’t enough to overcome the fundamental deficits in the underlying data set. There’s no way around it: You’ll need more complete data to build a program that delivers real outcomes. To get there, download our guide, take our comprehensive training course, or read about the future of NPS.

Your relationship survey should ask the Likelihood to Recommend question, but a few others that uncover drivers of satisfaction and brand promise insights. This should give you at least the following segmentation:

• Promoters, Passives and Detractors usually have differing driver analysis results. We suggest providing the top three drivers for each, adding color by including the top improvement suggestions seen in responses to open questions.
• It can be particularly interesting to consider repeat responder trends separately from first-time responses. If repeat responders have seen you implement the main improvements they have suggested, they should show a positive trend. Naturally, if you have done nothing with their suggestions, you should expect a negative trend.
• In B2B situations involving large customers it can be useful to separate the answers of decision-makers from those of decision-influencers and end users. Consider the example of a company that provides restaurant services for large clients. The views of the procurement leadership matter far more than the views of individuals who simply eat the food.
• Most B2B companies have customers who vary substantially in size. Presenting results for the top 50 customers in addition to the overall averages will provide interesting perspectives. When doing so, adding relevant quotes from named executives of the largest clients is particularly useful in motivating people to act.
• Demographic splits can be useful. For example, we have frequently seen that men and women give substantially different responses when asked about high-tech products.
• And don’t forget to tie survey subsets to operational data. For example, an e-commerce company could look at how responses and suggestions differ between customers who received their deliveries as promised compared to those who did not. This will also demonstrate to executive leadership that CX reports are not an isolated phenomenon but are an integrated part of your company’s performance.

It’s very common for colleagues and executives to challenge the data from NPS programs, even when these foundational best practices are in place. Those challenges often expose the hard truth that customer experience data is not good enough. Even smart analyses and weighting strategies aren’t enough to overcome the fundamental deficits in the underlying data set. There’s no way around it: You’ll need more complete data to build a program that delivers real outcomes. To get there, download our guide, take our comprehensive training course, or read about the future of NPS.

When launching a company’s first major customer experience initiative, CX leaders soon face the challenge of providing their first executive reports. It is extremely common that they fall into a specific reporting trap that in turn leads them to waste time and energy. The reporting trap is any table or graph that compares countries’ survey results with each other.

This is not intuitively obvious. Your CEO probably wants countries to compete for the title of CX champion, believing that such competition is appropriate and healthy. She sees that the NPS numbers in Brazil and Mexico are fifteen points higher than in the United States. She sees that those in Japan and the Netherlands are as much as 40 points lower. Now she knows who has to be rewarded and who has to be punished. The problem is that she is simply wrong.

There are enormous cultural differences in the way people respond to customer surveys. Brazilians and Mexicans tend to be extremely generous in their evaluations Australians, Japanese, Korean and Dutch customers tend to be extremely reluctant to give the maximum score. We have seen this play out again and again in double-blind benchmark research in various industries.

These differences apply both to your company and to your competitors. What this means is that your comparisons must be both local and external. It does not matter that your US NPS is 45 while your NPS in Korea is 3. When you are doing business in Korea, you are competing locally, not in the United States. What matters is whether your local competitors’ scores and trends are better or worse than yours.

When we have clients who have difficulty believing this we simply ask them to compare operational performance between their countries. They usually find there is no meaningful difference in such KPIs and come around to accepting that the cultural differences are real.

It’s very common for colleagues and executives to challenge the data from NPS programs, even when these foundational best practices are in place. Those challenges often expose the hard truth that customer experience data is not good enough. Even smart analyses and weighting strategies aren’t enough to overcome the fundamental deficits in the underlying data set. There’s no way around it: You’ll need more complete data to build a program that delivers real outcomes. To get there, download our guide, take our comprehensive training course, or read about the future of NPS.