Dive Brief:
- Net promoter scores, which measure customers’ loyalty by asking how likely they are to recommend a brand, dropped in 8 out of 13 industries, according to a Forrester survey of more than 96,000 U.S. consumers who engaged with 221 brands.
- The luxury auto sector was the only industry that saw significant NPS improvement, Forrester found, in a report released late last month. Investment firms, airlines and utilities all saw notable declines in their NPS.
- “We saw twice as many companies see a drop in NPS, and not as many saw an increase,” said Pete Jacques, a principal analyst at Forrester and an author of the report. “One of the things that I did see for most companies that had a drop is that generally [it was] a drop from promoters to passive.”
Dive Insight:
Though NPS scores dropped in 2023, there’s a silver lining for businesses: the drop wasn’t as significant as the drop in CX quality.
“There's not a perfect correlation between the two,” Jacques said. “And what that suggests to me is that to a certain degree, the CX quality may go down a bit more in people's perceptions, but it may not impact as much their willingness to say I'm going to recommend the brand.”
Jacques attributed some of the drop to economic forces out of companies’ control: volatility in the market and rising inflation.
Southwest Airlines saw a more than 10 percentage point drop in their NPS scores — with its holiday fiasco still fresh for customers when the survey was conducted between February and April last year — but retained its no. 2 spot as a leading airline.
Companies whose NPS scores remained high and even slightly improved included Chewy and HEB. Navy Federal Credit Union saw a slight dip but maintained its position as leading multichannel bank, and USAA saw a nearly 10 percentage point drop in its scores but maintained its lead as a direct bank.
Net promoter scores dropped in most industries in 2023
Forrester found that with the top performing brands, “the CX effort really is more ingrained culturally within the organization,” Jacques said. “It's not just a particular initiative.”
While initiatives can make significant improvements in NPS scores, the top companies maintain their NPS scores through sustained effort, he said.
“Those that sustain their position that lead near the top are those that not only think about customer experience from a tactical, strategic perspective, but also culturally," Jacques said. "It's imbued in leadership, it's imbued in their strategy, how they operate as a company.”
