There are dozens of reasons why your credit union should use NPS surveys. It’s one of the single most popular, well-known survey types for a reason. But NPS surveys can only tell you so much. You can’t rely on them to tell you everything you need to know.
In this blog, I’d like to offer five reasons why your credit union can’t rely solely on NPS surveys. This is not to say that you shouldn’t use them at all. That would be pure hogwash! But NPS scores offer surprisingly little information overall. They need other survey types to round them out.
The Downsides of Using NPS Scores
I’ve written plenty about NPS surveys and scores, and most of it is very positive. There are few standardized customer satisfaction metrics that carry the same weight. Yet NPS scores only tell part of the story. Here’s why you should take your NPS score with a grain of salt.
1. NPS requires maintenance
No, not maintenance like you have to repeatedly tweak your question or questions. It requires maintenance in that you can’t just measure your NPS once and call it good.
If you measure your credit union’s NPS score at 35 in February of 2017, then here’s what you know:
You know roughly how happy your members were in Q1 of 2017.
What you don’t know? How they felt about you in Q2. Q3, or Q4. You certainly don’t know how they feel going into 2020.
NPS scores must be kept current, or else they will tell you barely anything at all.
2. Understanding NPS scores is difficult
NPS surveys measure one basic thing:
How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
You can extrapolate that data to tell you about satisfaction and loyalty, but it stops there. If you get a bad score, you won’t know exactly what caused your bad score. If you get a good score, you won’t know what you did right to get that good score.
3. NPS scores don’t measure loyalty well
Although NPS scores can tell you a bit about member loyalty, they can’t tell you the whole picture. While it’s certainly true that higher scores correlate to higher loyalty, they don’t measure loyalty as well as tests like the Customer Effort Score (CES) survey.
Many organizations use NPS scores to determine their customer base’s loyalty. But they shouldn’t. They should use a CES survey to determine that.
4. NPS surveys work better with longer-tenured members
New members have had limited interactions with your credit union. Whether they’re happy or displeased with your services doesn’t exactly matter yet. There’s a good chance that they’re still getting used to their new financial institution, and they don’t have much experience with your products or services yet.
Although new member surveys are very important, sometimes relationship NPS questions are a bit hasty. New members need time to feel out your credit union, its services, and its culture before they can respond well to that query.
5. NPS benchmarking is harder than it sounds
Despite the fact that NPS scores are used in countless industries across the entire globe, peer benchmarking is still tough. That’s because average NPS scores vary across different industries.
It’s hard to find an average NPS score even within the credit union industry. Credit unions in different regions with different missions and different services may end up with the same scores, raising the question:
Are their services equivalent or not?
Similarly, two credit unions that seem exactly alike in size, strategy, and philosophy might receive totally different scores. If they’re largely identical, we might ask:
Are they all that different, or was there a disconnect in member expectations for one of the member bases?
How to Use NPS at Your Credit Union
Despite their limitations, credit union NPS surveys are still useful. Used in conjunction with other survey types and questions, they can provide a good baseline metric for customer satisfaction. They can also help you figure out if and when you have a problem that needs further investigation.
A few ways to use NPS scores at your credit union are these:
What credit unions can learn from their NPS scores
How credit unions can fix bad NPS scores
Changes credit unions have made after a member survey
If you’d like to read more about credit union surveys or survey strategy, subscribe to our blog. Or follow the links below to read more about what kind of survey questions you can ask your members to ensure the highest quality services around.
