Despite various criticisms Net Promoter Score (NPS) is here to stay and will continue to rank highly as key performance indicators for marketing teams in 2014.

NPS as a customer loyalty metric was introduced a decade ago as the ‘one number you need to grow’.  It can be as low as −100 (everybody is a detractor) or as high as +100 (everybody is a promoter). An NPS that is positive (ie. higher than zero) is good, and an NPS of +50 is excellent.

Determining a company’s NPS score is based on a direct question: How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to your friends and colleagues? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale.

In Australia, as well as globally, NPS scores are more intrinsically linked to executive bonuses and salary performance than ever before – it’s become a million dollar business. Therefore being able to accurately verify your NPS score and understand how to improve it is crucial for not only business but personal career success.

In the century of the customer, advocacy programs such as NPS cannot be verified accurate unless the majority of verbal conversations with your customers are included as a part of the evaluation process. Companies have had to rely on surveys and mine textual data to gain these insights but they haven’t been able to gather the full context and unlock customer sentiment.

With voice analytics now available in Australia, organisations can now decode every conversation their staff and customers are having and gain contextual understanding, deep insights and behavioural understanding.

In 2014, savvy Australian executives are going to want to combine NPS and other CustSAT metrics with data that provides a more complete picture. If you just average or sample these metrics on their own, then your understanding of what your customers are telling you will only be at a very basic level.

Applying call analytics to NPS means companies can add the dimension of decoding the human voice and conversational content – what people say, who’s saying it and how. Pinpointing exact details like keywords, plot generation even emotion and sentiment. Conversational structures can be mapped and companies can verify what customers, key stakeholders and staff are not only saying but importantly thinking and feeling about products, brands and service.

Here are my top three tips to help improve your NPS score:

1. Have the ability to listen in real-time to the real voice of your customer. Gain insights into what they think you do well but importantly where you can improve your service and products. Call analytics is a perfect focus group to understand the needs, feelings and behaviours of your customers. You can easily determine how to avoid caller frustration and keep conversations running smoothly. Once you understand the issue, the power to do something about it is tangible.

2. Ensure staff are well-trained and equipped with the right information to deal with customers. Many companies are recording calls for staff training and development purposes.  As training budgets are cut further across Australia, HR managers can use these tools to on-board new employees and get them up to speed quickly. Call recording software can assist HR departments with training, on the spot coaching, mentoring and staff development.

3. Provide reports to senior management that cover multiple data sources. Ensure management understand the insights from the customer. Call analytics data can unlock insights never previously known in a company providing real nuggets of gold to differentiate your brand and service from competitors.