Recently, Jeff took his truck to a shop to have his tire repaired. Later, he noticed that two of the lug nuts were not tightened all the way. Obviously, whoever worked on his tire made a mistake. Fortunately, Jeff fixed it before he put himself and others on the roadways in a dangerous situation.
Soon after, Jeff received a survey from the shop asking how they did. He was honest, told them they did a terrible job, and explained why. To his surprise, Jeff received a follow-up phone call from the shop’s manager apologizing profusely. The manager then assured Jeff he would talk to the technician who worked on his truck and make sure he doesn’t make the same mistake again.
While Jeff had a negative experience at the shop, he could at least take solace in knowing that his feedback was heard and that it was going to be used to prevent similar issues from happening again.
This is why it can be important to send out surveys to your customers.
On a recent episode of “The Fleet Success Show,” our hosts RTA CEO Josh Turley, Fleet Hall of Famer Steve Saltzgiver, and former trucking executive Jeff Jenkins discussed the SaaS practice of using Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and why your fleet might also want to consider tracking its NPS.
Listen to the complete podcast episode.
NPS consists of a one-question survey that you send out to your customers or stakeholders:
How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend of a co-worker?
That’s it. Then you let your customers rank you from 0 to 10 on how likely they are to recommend your company, or your services (in our case, our software). Based on these scores, you can group your customers into Detractors, Passives, and Promoters.
Once you have the survey results, you can then calculate your NPS. You do this with one simple calculation – subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The number you’re left with is your NPS.
For example, if 70% of your customers are promoters and 10% are detractors, you would take 70-10, to give you a score of 60.
The goal is to score at least a 50. Fifty and above are considered good scores. Anything over 75 is world-class.
Why does an NPS matter, and why should you consider adopting this practice at your fleet?
For one, it helps promote your company and your services. The more people who promote you as a company, the more business you will get.
But it also goes beyond driving business. It helps you identify areas where you need to improve – and it can help you correct issues before they get larger, and you risk losing customers.
At RTA, Josh loves getting feedback – even if it’s negative.
“I look at it as a learning opportunity,” Josh said. “They care enough to tell me how they feel so we can get better.”
Get more insight on NPS in the full episode of the podcast.
The key to the NPS survey is that it’s easy. It’s literally one question.
How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend of a co-worker?
If they want to add more, they can also provide comments. But by keeping it simple, you are likely to get more responses. And by using this one question, then you can directly benchmark your scores to others in your industry.
You can use numerous platforms to send out the survey and collect results. Platforms like Survey Monkey can do this, as does Google, or CRMs, like HubSpot.
These platforms will then help you collect the data and analyze it to give you an NPS. However, because the mathematical equation is so easy, you can also just put the data in a spreadsheet and calculate the results yourself.
We recommend sending out the survey to your customers or stakeholders about once a quarter. This will give you enough information to make improvements without constantly surveying your customers.
“There’s gold to be found in those hills,” Josh said of the feedback he gets.
Get more information about NPS and how it can help your fleet when you listen to the entire episode of “The Fleet Success Show.”