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George Beaton
Nov 17, 2016

Are you moving your NPS dial?

My post asks "Are you moving your NPS dial?" because beaton wants to encourage all firms to work on doing the same! This is the first time beaton has published the extent to which some firms are improving their NPS.

 

As my colleague, George Beaton, explained in Mirror on the wall which firms have the highest relationship NPS of all? (see the post on Research. Reveal.), the beatonbenchmarks annual study, includes a question which we use to gauge respondents’ likelihood to recommend a firm on a 0-10 scale: "Would you recommend Firm X to a friend?" As many readers will be aware, this is the question made famous by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company who pioneered the NPS concept.

Three types of NPS

Bain explains there are three types of NPS, all based on the same question but asked in different contexts:

  • Relationship NPS based on a sample of a firm's clients, asking them how likely they would be to recommend the firm to friends or colleagues, and why. As explained, this post reports on Relationship NPS. This is the NPS we measure in the beatonbenchmarks.

  • Transactional NPS, aka the Experience NPS, where clients report on their experience with a particular job or matter. We provide firms with the beatondebrief service to enable them to measure and track transactional NPS.

  • Competitive NPS which gauges the firm's brand health in its market, i.e. all those clients and prospective clients who are aware of the firm. We will be introducing Competitive NPS in our 2018 the beatonbenchmarks reports.

Relationship NPS (Net Promoter Score) is the measure reported in this post.

Which firms have moved their NPS dial the most?

To answer this question, we have used a sample of those firms for which we have statistically sufficient data for each of our 2014, 2015 and 2016 studies, i.e. three years. The following parameters were used to select firms for inclusion in the analysis:

  • A sample size for each firm in each year of ≥70, and

  • A confidence level of 90.5%.

The number of firms we measure in Australia that match these criteria in three major professions is:

  • Accountancy: 13

  • Consulting engineering: 15

  • Law: 24.

Congratulations to the most improved firms!

Based on this method analysis, the firms that moved their Relationship NPS dial the most are:

  1. Law: Thomson Geer

  2. Accountancy: Crowe Horwath

  3. Consulting engineering: Wood & Grieve.

In your profession, you demonstrated the largest improvement in recent years in Relationship NPS of all the firms measured by beaton.

ROI on lifting your NPS

Bain's research shows that NPS explains 20%–60% of the variation in organic growth rates and that Net Promoter leaders (those firms with the highest scores) outgrow their competitors by a factor of more than 2x. These benefits alone warrant my question: "Are you moving your NPS dial?"

Being a leader in relationship and transaction Net Promoter scores is necessary—but not sufficient—for profitable growth. NPS measurement must be part of a whole system designed to ensure appropriate and timely responses to the feedback. This topic will be the subject of future posts from beaton.

More on NPS from beaton

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