How the Net Promoter Score (NPS) Can Revolutionize Your Event

Are you in the loop with NPS?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a score that measures your customer’s loyalty. NPS was invented by business strategist, author and speaker, Fred Reichheld with research provided by Satmetrix in 2007, and has been developed into a renowned, cross-industry customer satisfaction evaluation tool. The NPS is utilized by hundreds of top companies in the healthcare, technology, telecom, financial, retail, manufacturing and travel industries, to name a few, including top brands such as Delta Airlines, General Motors, Citigroup, Lego and Paypal. But don’t be fooled because we’ve only provided large conglomerates as examples – the NPS is an ideal event management tool for helping corporate event planners and marketing managers to gauge their attendees’ feedback  to their events.

Your NPS Score comes down to your customer answering one question – just one, that’s it! “How likely is it you would recommend us [product, service, event] to a friend?” Respondees are asked to rank their response on a scale from 0-10, with 10 indicating extremely likely, and 0 indicating not likely at all. The responses are then grouped into three categories:

(image courtesy of checkmarket.com)

Promoters (score of 9-10) – These are your loyal fans, who will sing your event’s praises to their friends and colleagues. They generally account for about 80% of your referrals.

Passives (score of 7-8) – While these folks are still considered to be satisfied, they might have qualified or not-quite-enthusiastic responses to your event and could easily be lured by a competing brand.

Detractors (score of 0-6) – These people are unhappy customers/attendees who account for more than 80% of your negative word-of-mouth. They have the power to discourage new customers and create low morale among your event team.

The NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Industry benchmarks are typically available for a fee via different research companies, but you may want to start simply by collecting your own data to establish an internal benchmark.

Before your event is over, you can share this question with your attendees via email or event app push notification, to gather their responses while the experience is fresh in their minds.

So What Does This Mean For Event Marketing?

Once you have your data in hand to help you track your customer journey, you can then learn who specifically among your event attendees are your Promoters, Passives and Detractors. This, coupled with dynamic event surveys, can lead to detailed engagement with those targeted audiences.

Promoters – Ask your promoters about their favorite aspects of your event. Once you understand what is really working, you can preserve and even refine those elements of your event to make it even better in the future. These influencers are perfect to include in your post event wrap-up videos and next year’s event collateral – they can even help close new sponsors or exhibitors with their passion.

Passives – Ask your passives what would make them more excited about your event – what would tip them over the edge to turn them into promoters. Ask them about the things they hated that might preclude future support. Although some of these things may seem like small details, they can make all the difference to your attendees, and you should pay careful attention to them.

Detractors – Give your detractors an opportunity to provide detailed information about the reason for their dissatisfaction, or to suggest ways they would like to see your event improved. You may even want to consider personal correspondence to soothe any particularly ruffled feathers.

With these kinds of actionable insights at your disposal, you are now in a position to execute a plan to create your best event yet! The NPS results can be used by all levels of your team, including front-line staff, management and executives, to refine your practices and objectives going forward. Many event planners also poll their staff for feedback on ways to make improvements as part of their post-event debrief. By sharing these insights with all of your team members, you can work together to constantly iterate your process and maintain a high standard of event excellence both with your attendees as well as within your industry.

To learn more about how Attendease can help you elevate your event management practice, click here.