The Harvard Business Review published A Look into Microsoft’s Data-Driven Approach to Improving Sales, which provided insight into how Microsoft completed a major redesign of its sales operation in mid-2017. The authors (both Microsoft employees) came up with a number of actionable points, one of which caught our eye.

The point in question said that relationship investments correlate with customer satisfaction. Microsoft concluded that the more time they spent with customers the more satisfied they were. One specific action was to give account managers fewer accounts to manage.

You Can be Like Microsoft

We can learn from Microsoft. If you are in Enterprise Sales, then time spent on an account and its success are probably correlated. Unlike Microsoft, most businesses have limited data on what satisfies clients and don’t have a prediction model.

You can, however, deploy software that helps your account managers decide where to spend their (limited) time.

Great excel at customer satisfaction; they have low churn rates and class the happiness of current customers as important. These businesses use a well-selected CRM to build a picture of customer satisfaction. They will track:

• Interactions – both volume and quality.
• Usage data, if available.
• The number of team members engaged.
• Complaints and outcomes.
• Engagement with content marketing or outreach.
• Any information on referrals.

These factors all help paint a picture of engagement, but for most organizations, the data is hard to collate.

This is where using the Net Promoter Score^® (NPS) can add huge value. Besides adding quantitative data it adds qualitative information as well.

If customers are engaged to provide an NPS this is proven to be a highly reliable measure of customer satisfaction and subsequently how likely the customer is to churn. Also 30 to 50 percent of customers that will give an NPS will also leave a comment with it. NPS Softwares such as zenloop can then automatically analyze these comments, label them for specific topics, and push this additional information into the CRM software of a company.

This way account managers can clearly detect where their companies’ most problematic areas are, include these into their CRM approach, and spend time solving the right customer issues, turning a poor experience into a good one.

Conclusion: By using NPS even very small organizations can obtain a clear picture of customer satisfaction and as advised by Microsoft, direct efforts towards re-engaging customers with poor scores.

Improve Your CRM Strategy with NPS

We’ve looked at how NPS can help you identify accounts that need attention, but the impact can be even wider.

Consider a CRM strategy where accounts are rated A to D to indicate the level of engagement – the strategy using the CRM may be to build automation and outreach campaigns to move accounts to a better rating (e.g. from D to C or B to A). NPS is a vital software in several ways, including:

* It helps to classify accounts into one of those ratings based on the Net Promoter Score a customer left; if a customer is in the wrong rating then they can’t be targeted with the specific tactics to engage them. The tactics to engage a B will be different from a D – it’s imperative to start with the right rating. * It can help to quantify progress. If a subset of B level accounts has been engaged over a four-week program the NPS and its development over time can be used as a baseline then post-campaign to track efficacy. This is critical in determining ROI and deciding on whether to roll out tests across the organization.

NPS is a powerful method to help the strategies you deploy in your CRM to achieve the best possible ROI.

Doug Haines