Lately, we’ve been pleased to see organisations taking their approach to customer satisfaction seriously. However, our industry is complicated, our customers often engage proxies and may have difficulties expressing themselves. Worse still, sometimes their accommodation may be under threat if they don’t toe the line. So, this begs the question, are our basic satisfaction measures effective in the NDIS?

A common tool to measure customer satisfaction is the Net Promoter Score or NPS. This tool has gained popularity because it is simple to administer and just one item: “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? Typically, conditional logic can be used to follow up high or low scores.

The calculation is simple:

(Number of Promoters — Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100

Anyone who has been incentivised by this metric alone knows that it is gameable when used on its own.

Let’s say our friends at not-for-profit disability services have 10 promoters and 15 detractors. Their NPS would be -20. After an intense effort to raise customer satisfaction, 3 detractors become promoters. Their NPS is now 4. Unfortunately, 7 of their detractors get together and find a new SIL home, with staff more qualified for their needs. Their NPS is now 45, and the Board decides to double down on an obviously effective product strategy.

Unfortunately, simply dropping detractors yields rapid NPS improvements, which is the opposite of what an organisation should be striving for. If your organisation depends on this metric alone to gauge satisfaction, it is worth reconsidering.

We also see that these surveys fail to elicit correct feedback about what our customers want. In our sector, elicitation techniques can be just as crucial as supported decision-making to assist a customer in aligning their preferences and values with what is being provided by the organisation. We often deal with people in their homes who have built relationships with team members they care about. There are strong disincentives for our customers to be forthcoming, especially in the context of potential disciplinary actions. These contexts and tools can cause organisations to miss the crucial “I really like living here, but…” conversations that can make all the difference to quality of life and outcomes.

For this kind of approach, independent professionals can often elicit crucial insight that would either be missed or conflated into broad concepts. We spoke to the team at Point Heard, independent customer advocates, who raised key points about this:

“Often NPS can be seen as just a number, and organisations can misstep if NPS replaces their stakeholder management processes. Often, we see that the NPS data can feel transactional and simply doesn’t translate well down the management hierarchy or into actionable operational change.”

“A major part of our work is understanding the client decision curve, or, the key decisions they make when deciding to work with, or stay with the organisation. Typically, this decision occurs over multiple steps with different inputs, which makes capturing it in the NPS very difficult.”

“We’ve seen in the Royal commission a culture of low trust developing between customers and management in some organisations. Sometimes a discussion with an independent advocate can elicit information that simply isn’t possible internally. Customers love to talk, and they understand their experience better than anyone else. A concerted and professional stakeholder engagement commitment is an important signal to customers that you take their views seriously and that they’re important to you. When key customer insights start changing the operational process, you’re on the way to productive change.

There is still room for quantitative measures, even after curious and empathetic advocates have triangulated some key business issues. For example, a considerable problem in our sector is that our SIL offer is working with someone’s life, which means there is an enormous number of components that can cause confusion about where and what to act on.

Thankfully, tools such as conjoint analysis can use clever regression techniques to precisely define the most important product features, including price, reputation, and even the friendliness of staff. We realise we’ve already included one formula in this article, so we won’t subject our audience to more, but please reach out to us if you’re interested.

Taking a qualitative and quantitative approach to your customer satisfaction can make a significant difference in your customers’ lives, along with how you structure and promote your products. Empathia is thrilled that the sector is moving in the right direction, and with a few tweaks, we can do even better.

About Point Heard

Point Heard specialises in independent customer advocacy, helping businesses to understand through qualitative research, how their stakeholders and customers feel about the products and services they receive.