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Do you ever find that trying to assess customer opinions can feel like herding cats?
Creating a great customer experience is all about finding the balance between getting honest insights from an audience without overwhelming people. Maybe your team wants to launch a survey campaign, but you’re unsure where to start. Or maybe you sent out a survey only to be met with crickets, or received a bunch of data but you aren’t sure what to do with.
We get it; it can feel super overwhelming.
Before you can adjust your marketing strategy or refine your sales funnel, you have to collect consumer research that directly pertains to your brand. Let’s take a look at two potential options for crafting and implementing surveys to evaluate audience perceptions: Apex Scoring System and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Both systems offer a streamlined way to identify whether customers are satisfied with your company and provide a method of identifying your brand’s strengths. Customer engagement is an essential aspect of any marketing strategy. Each of these tools provide insights that will help your brand build a relationship with your customers, foster brand loyalty, and inspire trust among you and your clients.
Apex Scoring System is a CX management platform that was created using behavioral science principles. Brand leaders, statisticians and behavioral scientists collaborated to create the platform, which derives its score from sixteen consciously crafted survey questions that identify consumer attitudes accurately.
Apex uses a robust algorithm to assess an audience’s 16 rational beliefs, emotional feelings, and the actions they intend to take with a brand. It evaluates a brand’s performance on these sixteen attributes, such as joy, empathy, dependability, respect, and relatability, and also evaluates the importance of each to the customers of that brand.
Whether a business already has an existing survey framework or is looking to launch an audience research campaign, Apex offers the opportunity to integrate its solution seamlessly. The survey results are uploaded into the Apex dashboard where the algorithm then calculates an engagement score.
Apex’s system then takes it a step further by providing a full report in tandem with the score. This report is meant to help companies get prescriptive and predictive with their score so that they can confidently explore new growth opportunities from their end-use consumers, B2B clients, donors, employees, association members, voters or patients.
Apex requires a sample size of only 50 responses for accurate results. Participants answer the 16 questions, then Apex’s algorithm analyzes the responses. A full report is uploaded to the company’s Dashboard that highlights their Apex Score and science-backed in-market recommendations the brand can take for improvement. The Apex Score represents the current state of the audience’s feelings at the time of the survey. The Potential Score identifies what a brand could achieve by analyzing and acting on the opportunities identified by Apex.
Like Apex, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an audience engagement tool built on the idea that advocacy is an essential aspect of modern business. The score helps teams evaluate customer experience and satisfaction by asking one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend [X] to a friend or colleague?”
The audience selects their answer on an 11-point scale ranging from 0-10, 0 being the least likely to recommend a product and 10 being most likely. The participants are organized into categories based on the number they select:
NPS uses an 11-point scale and uses the ratio of audience responses to a single question to assess audience feelings. A brand’s score is calculated by deducting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
NPS = % of Promoters - % of Detractors
This simple calculation helps companies identify audience satisfaction. The brand knows to stay on their current track if they have many promoters. If they have a high proportion of detractors, it demonstrates that they need to adjust their current strategy.
NPS ranges from -100 to +100, with anything in the positive showing that the customer base is mainly comprised of promoters. Brands using NPS should hope to have a score above zero, but anything above 20 is favorable and above 50 is excellent.
It’s important to note that NPS offers nothing else except this average score. While it is an effective way to gauge customer sentiment (as long as everyone answers honestly), it only provides teams with a number and without any context or guidance on how to improve it.
Teams will often use a more comprehensive solution to collect and track NPS data while getting more detailed insights into audience perception.
To field Apex results, a brand needs to survey their audience with the 16 specialized Apex questions. There are three options when it comes to collecting responses:
Once the data is collected, it’s uploaded to the Apex Dashboard, where it can be analyzed and transformed into the Apex Score and complete report.
Since NPS is tabulated from responses to one question, it can be thrown into any survey or used as a standalone pop-up. Companies will often integrate NPS on their website, in an app, or via email. The idea is to catch customers when they’re already engaging with a brand, and it elevates the chance that they’ll respond because it’s a one-click response. NPS data is commonly collected when a person closes a support ticket, makes a purchase, or interacts with a web application.
Some brands can offer a follow-up question: “What is the most important reason for your score?” This additional response option can help teams identify their strengths and opportunities for growth.
While they both provide an engagement score, the crucial difference between Apex and NPS is that Apex goes above and beyond to identify clear, actionable steps to improve audience engagement. While having a quantifiable indicator of audience perception is necessary, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Brands need more than a number to guide their way through future campaigns.
NPS is a quick, efficient way to collect data, but it’s not always accurate and it only analyzes one KPI. On the other hand, Apex considers 16 distinct attitudes and comes with a complete report to help teams understand how their customers respond to each of these attitudes.
NPS’ efficiency makes it easy to collect and analyze the data over time, but it still falls short in investigating what causes successes or drawbacks. Apex’s comprehensive system provides a much clearer picture, especially when tracking results over an extended period. Brands can set goals for specific perceptions and monitor the pulse of that particular attitude between surveys.
If one thing is for sure, it’s that customer attitudes and desires change constantly. Keeping a finger on the pulse of your audience’s attitudes can help you stay on top of what they’re thinking and feeling. In turn, this specificity will give you the guidance you need to be a better, more profitable brand.
