Beyond NPS: Leveraging Milestone Surveys to Enrich the Utility Voice of the Customer

Net Promoter Score works wonders for companies. Or, does it? A number of major firms have shifted away from NPS style surveys because of challenges translating results into meaningful action in their enterprise. While it may work well for companies seeking increased market share or new customer referrals, NPS style surveys face challenges for companies like energy utilities who have a different relationship with their customers.

For US energy utilities, who have a responsibility to deliver to a wide array of customers across their service region, the standard NPS style survey can’t match the complexity of the customer experience due to some challenging limitations:

• Limited Scope of Feedback: NPS style surveys focus on gauging the likelihood of customers recommending the utility to others, which doesn't always translate to the typical utility customer experience and can confuse customers.

• Lack of Detailed Insights: The primary question of an NPS style survey is whether a customer would recommend the company or not. It doesn't provide detailed reasons for their score or insights into specific areas of the service, which is crucial for utilities to address specific problems like service interruptions or pricing concerns. Without additional feedback to align on customer context, scores can easily be misinterpreted and impact assessment value.

• Temporal Influences: Customers' responses can be significantly influenced by recent events. If the survey drops during an outage, high bill season, or unflattering media reports about energy prices, scores could drop without easy contextualization and mislead evaluators.

• Generalization of Results: Utilities often have a diverse customer base with varying needs, such as residential, commercial, and industrial consumers, not to mention an array of customer personas and segments in each category. An aggregate NPS style score may mask specific concerns unless broken out by category and classification.

• Overemphasis on a Single Metric: Sole reliance on NPS style surveys can lead to an oversimplification of customer sentiment. Energy utilities deal with multifaceted challenges, from infrastructure to regulatory compliance to renewable integration. Focusing only on NPS style survey feedback might cause utilities to neglect other essential areas of feedback or improvement.

We advocate strongly for complementing the typical NPS style survey with short and direct triggered surveys at critical milestones along the customer experience to develop an ongoing feedback loop across the entire customer lifecycle. If your utility Voice of the Customer (VOC) program doesn’t already include milestone surveys, consider adding them to critical milestones including:

• New Energy Start - A quick 2-3 questions survey about how easy (or difficult) the new energy start process functions provides insights on the critical first customer experience and lets customers know the utility wants their feedback.

• First Bill - Asking new customers “did you understand your bill?” after they get their first bill from the utility not only collects important insights on this key interaction, but also provides utilities the opportunity to direct attention to online tools and portals for better customer engagement on the bill and their energy use.

• Customer Service Calls - Always follow up a service call with a short email or text survey prompt to ask customers “would you hire the customer service representative” they just talked to. That quick question leads to powerful insights about how customers view the quality of the customer service experience, and can predict future NPS or JD Power scores for this critical CSAT component of the utility service chain.

• Mobile App Login - Survey your mobile app users with a 3-5 question survey about key features to get their feedback, as well as prompt them to try key features of the app they may not have explored yet. Consider a follow up survey if users don’t use the app at least periodically to identify why they’ve abandoned.

• High Bill - A short survey to customers following an unusually high bill, or the first high bill of the year, provides a great opportunity to capture feedback about customers’ energy efficiency awareness, and can prompt timely follow-up for customer education and energy and money saving tips.

Utilities with entrenched NPS style survey programs may be missing out on critical feedback from their customers to take important steps to improve the customer experience and their scores. While NPS style surveys can provide a helpful benchmark and useful data, they come with limitations that inhibit transformation of the customer experience. Consider adding a few clear and direct surveys at critical milestones along the customer lifecycle to enhance the quality and quantity of VoC program insights. Milestone surveys dropped at just the right time enable utility VoC programs to capture relevant and timely insights with meaningful data about the CX highs and lows at each of those milestones. VoC teams can easily translate that data into actionable intelligence on the CX for operations leaders to improve the experience and future CSAT scores.

If your Voice of the Customer program could benefit from a refresh using milestone surveys, give us a call to learn more about industry best practices and the critical events on the customer journey that lead to real time CX intelligence.