Who Should Own Your NPS Tracker? CX or Insights Teams?

According to research by Forrester, 53% of companies worldwide have a dedicated CX department, while the remaining companies may integrate CX responsibilities into other departments, such as marketing or operations, or may not have a CX function at all. In some cases, customer care or customer service may be the only CX related function, but this setup often falls short of the lofty goals of optimizing the overall customer experience.

Customer experience (CX) and insights are both critical components of understanding and improving customer satisfaction. While they may be closely related, they are distinct disciplines that require different approaches and skill sets. Therefore, it's essential to have clarity about the ownership and responsibilities of these functions, particularly when it comes to measuring customer experience with NPS trackers and by analysing customer calls and messages.

CX Team
 

CX is about creating and delivering an exceptional experience for the customer throughout their journey with the company. CX teams focus on understanding customer needs, pain points, and behaviours to design and optimize the customer journey. They collect and analyse data from various sources, such as surveys, customer feedback via contact centres, and predictive analytics, to identify areas of improvement and create strategies to enhance the customer experience.

CXM – a popular acronym used in this context - stands for customer experience measurement or customer experience management. When it comes to the latter there is no doubt that the CX team is responsible for it. When it comes to measuring though the Insights team is well positioned to offer support or even own it.

Customer Experience (CX) teams are primarily focused on identifying actionable insights at the individual customer level. They typically rank customer pain points based on their frequency of occurrence and then identify both proactive and reactive solutions to address them.

Insights Team

On the other hand, insights teams are responsible for gathering and analysing data to generate insights that can drive business decisions. Insights teams use a wide range of data sources, including customer data, market research, and internal business data to identify trends and patterns, support new product development, monitor business performance, and generally inform decision-making.

Insights teams are primarily focused on discovering strategic insights that are actionable at the total market level, rather than the individual customer level.

The process of discovering a true market insight is not straightforward. It requires multiple sources of data to be integrated, an actionable hypothesis supported by synthesised data, and a little intuition and gut feeling.

NPS Tracker
 

When it comes to NPS trackers, the lines between CX and insights can get blurred. NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a widely used metric for measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. It involves asking customers how likely they are to recommend the company to others, on a scale of 0 to 10. The NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (0-6) from the percentage of promoters (9-10) while ignoring the passives (7 & 8). The score provides a benchmark for how well the company is meeting customer needs and expectations.

Both CX and insights teams can benefit from NPS data. CX teams can use the score to understand how customers perceive the company and its products/services and identify areas for improvement in the customer journey. Insights teams can use the data to track overall customer satisfaction and loyalty, compare the company's performance against competitors, and identify factors that influence customer behaviour.

So, who should own the NPS tracker if CX is a separate department? The answer may vary depending on the company's size, structure, and culture. In some cases, CX and insights functions may be combined, and one team may be responsible for both functions. In other cases, the teams may be separate, and the ownership of the NPS tracker may depend on the purpose and goals of the survey or simply where the budget sits.

CX teams, if they have the skillset, could take the lead in designing and implementing NPS surveys since they are more closely related to the customer experience. Dedicated CX teams should have the expertise and experience to design surveys that capture customer feedback effectively, analyse the results, and translate them into actionable insights for the business.

However, insights teams can also play a crucial role in analysing and interpreting NPS data. Insights teams have a broader perspective on the business and can provide valuable insights into how customer satisfaction and loyalty relate to other business metrics. Insights teams can also identify trends and patterns in the data that can inform strategic decisions.

At DMR we published a lot of articles on the importance of not just relying on a sample of customers who agree to take a survey but listening to all customer interactions using AI for natural language processing.

Conclusion
 

Ultimately, the success of a company's CX and insights functions depends on collaboration and communication between the teams. Both functions are essential for understanding and improving the customer experience, and both have a role to play in measuring customer satisfaction with NPS trackers. The roles of the two functions have to be well defined to avoid confusion and misunderstandings.

By working together, CX and insights teams can ensure that the NPS data integrated with all the other customer interactions tagged with sentiment (such as phone calls, chats, emails etc.) are used effectively to drive business decisions that benefit both the customer and the company.