Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher 118: Sturdy McKee on Tracking the Intangibles with Net Promoter Score
The bigger you get, the harder it becomes to know what’s going on within your company. You may know your financial numbers, but how are you really doing? Are your people happy? How are you doing on those ‘softer’ skills? Well, you are able to track this in real terms by using a system called Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Sturdy McKee is a Physical Therapist, Entrepreneur, and Business Coach. He has been using NPS for the last five years and shares on today’s show his case study and some of his business insights on how NPS has helped grow his business and measure those ‘intangible’ metrics.
Sturdy had been in business for over 10 years before he even considered implementing NPS. He had 6 locations and over 40 employees, and he was losing touch with the frontline experience. He didn’t know how his customers were doing across the board and it was difficult trying to find this info from all of his different locations.
In the NPS survey question, business owners can ask their customers, “How likely are you to recommend this company, this product/service, to a friend or family member from 1-10?” 1-6s are considered detractors, 7-8s are neutrals, and 9-10s are promoters.
The formula works like this: Take the number of promoters minus the detractors and divide the remainder by the total surveyed and then you end up with your ‘Net Promoter Score.’ Typically this system ignores those who voted 7-8 and looks carefully at those who rated the service 1-6 to see what you can learn from them. And from those who rated 9-10, you use this data to see how you can attract more of these people and even receive a testimonial from them.
Sturdy’s company sent an automatic follow-up email two weeks after a patient’s evaluation asking the ‘Would you recommend us?’ question and sent the same follow-up question around the six-week mark, which ended up being a really good decision. For those who weren’t happy at the two-week mark, and having Sturdy’s team quickly address and fix it, they ended up changing their score at the six-week mark to a more positive one.
During this time, Sturdy discovered two things about his company. Volunteers and students studying physical therapy were observing/treating patients, but some patients did not consent to this and felt like they were paying a high cost only to be treated by an unskilled staff member. This caused Sturdy to change his process so that students could still learn and volunteers could still observe, but it was documented more effectively and the patients still felt like they were receiving the highest quality service.
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TWEETABLES:
“For people who are brand new to this, NPS is really asking one question and then leaving an open end.”
“Even from the get-go we realized it was a process, it wasn’t just a number.”
“Fortunately, we’ve eliminated specific things that were being done across the board.”
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Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles.
We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).