Episode 010: Net Promoter Score: Why Your Fleet Should Adopt This SaaS Practice

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Glad to have you guys all with us today. We've got a super fun topic. Joining me, I've got Jeff Jenkins.

How's it going?

And Steve Salzgiver.

Good to see you again, or good to hear from you again.

All right, so today topic, we're going to talk about something that is probably pretty unique to the software as a service industry, right, what we call SaaS. It's something that's really common in our industry but isn't really heard of outside this industry typically, and that's this concept called Net Promoter Score, right? We call it the NPS.

Right.

And Steve, you mentioned that, you know, like Coca-Cola uses this and a couple of the other places you've been, they've talked about NPS, you know, but Jeff, NPS before coming to this company?

No clue.

Never heard of it, right?

Nope.

Not a word.

So for everybody out there who's like Jeff and hasn't ever heard of NPS and dealt with NPS, we wanted to talk about it, explain what it is, how to measure it, why it's important. And what to do with it when you start doing it. This kind of falls underneath our stakeholder satisfaction pillar because what NPS is really about is about finding out how your customers, your end users feel about your product and service. Right. So in the software industry, you know, we ask the question, right? And this is what Net Promoter Score comes out around, is we ask the question, how likely is it that you would recommend you know, in our case, RTA or whatever your software company is. How likely is it that you'd recommend this company to a friend or a colleague? Right. And you answer, it's a scale of 0 through 10. Right. You take that score. And the way that this works is it's a percentage-based score. So you take the percentage of people that answer a 9 or a 10, right? These guys are your promoters. You know, they're the ones who absolutely believe in you. They believe in the company. They love the product. They love what they're seeing, right? They are your promoters, right? We call them, you know, like they're your cheerleaders, your evangelizers. They're the people who are in your corner. They're excited about what you're doing. They might also be your loudest critics, but they absolutely love what you have going on here, right? And they're 9 out of 10, they would recommend you to a friend or a colleague. Then you get in the middle with the 7s and 8s, and these are the passives. They're not, you know, super enthusiastic towards the company, but they're also not detracting, right? They're not angry with the company. They're not displeased. They're just kind of meh, lukewarm, right? They're on the fence. And then the last set is the 0 through 6s, right? And the reason why this set is so broad, these are our detractors, right? These are people who negatively have a negative opinion of the company or the product. Right? And the reason it's so big is because we have a bias to be more positive than we should be, right? Well, we don't really want to hurt their feelings. We want to be kinder. And so we have this natural bias, like if we were asked on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that you'd recommend this? Or if you've ever done like a, like a company or a personal review, right? We've seen this too, like employee reviews on a scale of 1 to 10. Nobody answers a 3 or a 2, right? The lowest that they'll usually go is maybe a 5 or a 6, when in reality they probably should be at the 1 or 2 range, right? So because of this bias, we put everybody that's in the 0 to 6 category as a detractor. You know, maybe to you that seems a little bit harsh, but the idea is that we don't want to overestimate the number of promoters and passives. We'd rather overestimate the number of detractors. So that we can keep working and keep improving ourselves. So the way that the NPS score works is you basically take the percentage of people that answer that were in your 9 to 10 bucket, your promoters, and you subtract out the percentage of respondents who were detractors, right? So if you had 100 people answer the survey and, you know, you had 60 respond positively. You take 60 divided by 100 is 60%. Now I'm using nice even numbers because it's easy math. But let's say that you had 15 or so that were detractors, right? They were in that 0 to 6 camp, right? So that's 15%. So you take 60% minus 15%, your Net Promoter Score would be 45. All right, so out of all the respondents, you basically just subtract out those two percentages, and that's how you come up with your Net Promoter Percentage score. World-class organizations, you know, like Southwest, Apple, Microsoft, right, like they're always aiming, they have crazy high Net Promoter Scores, 88, 80, right? I think I saw on HubSpot, they usually try to recommend for SaaS companies that you aim for like 75 is world-class. Like, it's otherworldly Net Promoter Score. A good promoter score is anything over 50, and then, you know, an okay promoter score is probably anything over a 30. Anything less than 30, and that means that you're in the low teens, you have almost as many detractors as you do promoters, and it's close to zero, right? So that's the, that's kind of the, the nuts and bolts of the Net Promoter Score. And how you go out and you just, you figure it out, right? So Steve, at Coca-Cola, how are they identifying and creating this Net Promoter Score? Like, who were they talking to? How did they send it out? Like, how did they get that question answered?

I don't know all the ins and outs of it because our marketing department did that. I just know that when I worked there, that was a huge, big deal. In fact, it was such a huge deal that We tied Coca-Cola for a long time, was the number one most recognized brand worldwide. And, uh, in 2013 when I was working there, they fell to number two and it was like people were freaking out, you know, world was ending. Yep. The world was ending. And, uh, and then the next year they fell to number three because Google and Apple surpassed them. And then Microsoft was right behind them. And so that was like a big deal.

So big tech takeover.

Yep. So that's how, that's how important this is though. It all ties to how people promote you as a company. And obviously those other companies are being more renowned and more well-known than Coca-Cola.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, and your brand— why the Net Promoter is so important is your brand is a value. There's an economic value to your brand. And the Net Promoter Score actually feeds into that brand. So the more, you know, the more people would promote you as a company, the higher your brand value goes up.

Yeah, so you've got the brand value side of it. I know for us internally, you know, we look at the Net Promoter Score as it's an opportunity for us to improve. It makes sure that, hey, are we doing things right? It's validation, right? When you're a product company or SaaS company, it's all about are we building a good product, you know, like would people recommend us to a friend or a colleague? I mean, it's such a simple question, but it tells us so much about where we stand in the eyes of our customers and how well were doing, you know, in their eyes. You know, Jeff, you hadn't heard about Net Promoter Score until you came here. You know, what was your first thought when you heard about it? You know, is it something that you think about? How would you have applied this in trucking?

Well, we did. We just didn't call it NPS. We had like customer service satisfaction scores. Obviously, you can go and you can get your Glassdoor reviews, your Google reviews, your Facebook reviews. But it's never, you know, we never sent out a survey and said, hey, you know, answer these questions to get that score for a net promoter score. Um, but I, I mean, it's handy, right? I think it's handy because, you know, uh, at least on the trucking side, you can get the feedback from your drivers. How are you doing, right? We would send out surveys to drivers. The problem we would have is most of them wouldn't fill it out and send it back. So do you really get a very good, um, set of information to tell you how you should change or what you should do differently? And usually then most everything was like, just pay us more money, right? Which whatever. But on the customer side, you know, we would do the same thing, but most people would usually rank you pretty well unless you were really, really screwing up. So it was very hard to be able to, you know, take something like that and that data and then apply it, you know, to get, hey, how's your on-time service, or, you know, how your drivers feel about you, or even your internal office employees, how do they feel. It's just not something that you know, I think what is done, it's beneficial, uh, especially if you're able to get some, um, definition behind why you get that certain score so that you can go and either replicate whatever the good promoters were, or you can address the negative issues, which I know we try and do here. And obviously you'd like to get those and address them way before they ever, ever hit back and say, hey, we're a detractor. But there's definitely value behind it.

I think that's the key is like, what do you do when you get negative feedback, right? For a lot of SaaS companies, the big thing is that you try to reduce churn, like, you know, you try to keep clients happy, you want to keep clients subscribed to the product, right? And one of the biggest predictors of churn is, you know, a negative net promoter score, a detractor on the net promoter. And so how do you handle it when you get negative feedback? You know, I think one of the keys there is looking at it as a learning opportunity, right? Approach it with some humility. We've talked about that in the culture side of it, but approach it with some humility as a learning opportunity that, okay, all they're doing is they care enough to tell me how they feel so that we can get better, right? I think there's this natural reaction whenever we get negative feedback. That we want to kick back against it. We want to be defensive. We say, whoa, you know, like, that's not true, or that's not accurate, and you start arguing with it.

You know, I've always looked at negative feedback— it's a lot easier for people to give negative feedback than positive feedback.

Much easier.

So there's sort of a built-in bias anyway. So that is one good reason why you don't get too overreactive or defensive with it, right? Because it's those people that, um, are I mean, like the Yelp reviews and all those things, people always go negative first. But I think the main value obviously is when they give that score, what are you doing about it? And how are you addressing their issue? And that's with any customer service score. And Jeff had talked about that earlier. How do you know if you're getting an accurate sample size? You might get more detractors than promoters.

The people who are angry at the rights, who are motivated to say something, right?

So you've really got to take all that in consideration, but it still gives you at least a gauge. And I think that's what you're after is another benchmark, another gauge to improving your service or improving your operation.

Yeah. And I think that's the key, right? Is we're looking for opportunities to say, like, what could we be doing better? What are we doing well? What could we be doing better? Where do we even stand? You know, how do our internal customers feel about us? How do our external customers feel about us? Right. If we are a private company like we are as a software company, you're doing external customers and you're trying to figure out like, hey, how likely is it that you'd recommend us to a friend or a colleague? Right. And I've been thinking about, well, how do I do this if I were a city fleet? How would I do this if I was a public fleet and I didn't have external customers? They were all internal customers. You know, I've got a sheriff's department if I'm a county. Some Health and Human Services or, you know, Department of Transportation as a public entity, how do you do that? I think imagine hypothetically you ask the question instead of, you know, how likely is it that you'd recommend Fleet Services to a colleague? You know, like, that's probably not the right answer, you know, but I'd like to think of it like if Fleet Services were a private company, right? And they're up there with Midas and Jiffy Lube and some of the other, you know, like your car guy that you take your car to, right? Would you take your car, your personal car, if they were a private company, would you take your personal car to them? And would you recommend them to a friend or a colleague, right? And I think you'd be surprised if you ask that question to like your police department, your fire department, like some of the public works people. It'd be really interesting to see And not just the tops, right? Not just the heads, although those, those voices need to be weighed really heavily. Right. We can talk about that. But you ask everybody that you interact with through that process. I know when we send it out, we send it out to everybody.

Right.

You know, you don't have to be the head of the organization because we want to know, you know, how does the technician feel as they're using our product? How does the parts clerk feel as they're using our product? How does the fleet manager feel? What about the admin? Right? They might not be the ones making the purchasing decision, but they definitely have a voice in it. And how are they feeling? And when we design our product, we're designing it around them. So what better way to get feedback of, you know, there's an area here or a trend. We look for trends when we're looking at negative feedback. We'll look for trends and say, look at this, we've got 7 or 8 people that are saying the same thing or something similar. The other thing we do when we get negative feedback, right, not just trend analysis, is we make it personal, right? And I think that's, you know, you talked about customer service, Jeff, but it's personal, right? It's about making it, oh, okay, well, you know, so-and-so Troy was really unhappy that we did something here. And even if we don't get any comment, we're responding to it. Hey, man, we're really sorry that we let you down. You know, how can we improve? What do we need to do better? Oh, thank you so much for those comments that you left. You know, I know that it's not easy for you to take some time out of your day to give us those. We'd really love to learn more, you know, and how we can improve this mark in your eyes.

I think it'd be kind of interesting. I know most top-rated fleets, they have some type of a customer review or something like this that they do on an annual basis just so they can have that feedback. But it'd be interesting if there's anybody out there actually using some, something similar to some form of NPS where they actually ask a question just like you promoted there. Yeah, because that, that could be, uh, that could be very interesting.

Well, the next thing about NPS, like why it got so popular in SaaS, is because it was a common definition and it was a common metric, right? Everybody could survey their customers and everybody could ask the same question and we could get a number back, right? If you're sending out, you know, like, uh, 5 different questions, well, it's impossible to benchmark yourself against somebody else asking 5 different questions, right? And because it's also a 0 to 10, it's a metric, it's a number, right? You can now quantify it, and it's really easy. It's a scorecard. Well, we're at 66. Well, that's interesting. You go talk to another company and they're at 52. Huh, I wonder what they're doing different, right? And so, like, it's an internal metric we use. It's one of our vital signs, you know, for the company health, is that, you know, like, we want it to be over 50. Right? At some point, we want to be over 75. But the idea is that we have a benchmark that we're aiming for.

I was actually looking prior to this. Top-rated companies are just barely approaching 50. So, you know what I mean?

Yeah, depending on some of the responses they get.

Exactly.

So we've seen some shifts, right? Like as COVID hit, there was definitely some shift in mentality. You know, like we've seen it climb super high and we've seen it dip a little bit here and there. It's been kind of interesting. You don't do it all the time. You might do this once a quarter and just send out an email to your, you know, your stakeholders and just ask them the question, hey, how likely is it, you know, if you're public fleet, ask that question, you know, if Fleet Services were a private company, would you take your car there? Would you recommend your friend or colleague bring their car into us? And if you are a private company and you are selling to external customers, ask them, send the survey to them. You know, how likely is it that you recommend our services to a friend or colleague, right? I think that just seeing that and knowing where you're at and hearing the feedback gives you an opportunity to improve and get better. It knows where you're at for stakeholder satisfaction. How do we improve stakeholder satisfaction? How do we make sure that the people we're serving are happy with our service, right? And not just taking it for granted that well, we're a government operation or, you know, they can't get by without us in fleet. So we just kind of do what we do and we don't ever try to improve. Right.

One thing I noticed too, I know internally on ours, we like to look at the 6s and below because those are the ones that are negatively impacting. But for a while I was looking at the 6s and 7s and above because even they make recommendations.

Yeah.

Right? Even though they rate you okay, they still have sometimes some recommendations or feedback.

Or even if they rate you great.

Yeah.

You know, the best ones will give you feedback in their comments.

Exactly.

There's gold to be found in those hills, right?

Yep.

So we like doing that. We like doing the NPS survey. We think it works really well in a fleet environment. We haven't seen many fleets doing it. I'd be curious to see if others are. If you're doing, you know, NPS in your, survey, you know, let us know, tag us on social media @FleetSuccess. We'd love to hear about it. You know, Jeff, going back to trucking, I know you've talked a little bit about some of the, the fun maintenance environments that you've been in. How do you think it would have affected the maintenance shop had they known how satisfied or dissatisfied, you know, the drivers were with their vehicles?

Well, it's a good question. I think that from a mechanic or technician level, I think that they care a lot more in some cases than the managers, because the managers knew, um, especially in the poor shop that I've referenced before about how it was run. The managers knew, and I just don't think they really cared, which was a whole nother bag of worms. But, um, the, the— I think that everybody wants to do a good job, right? You want to— no one comes to work and says, you know what, today just screw everyone, I'm going to do a terrible job, you know, I don't want to be here, so I'm just going to screw everything up. I don't think that ever happens. People want to do a good job. They want to be able to take care of what they need to take care of. And so by giving that feedback, I think that it definitely makes a difference. If you've got— well, here, let me— I'll give you an example. It's not a very good example, but had my own personal vehicle, took it to Discount Tire, right? And I got a tire change. Well, guess what? Two lug nuts weren't tightened. On that, the via that my truck. And because there's only 2, it wasn't a huge deal, right? But I, but a couple days later, I noticed that some of the lugs were further out than the others and they weren't tightened all the way. So obviously it's from Discount Tire changing my tire. Um, and they sent that survey, as luck would have it, like the day after or something like that. And so I went ahead and, you know, you guys did a terrible job, this is why you did a terrible job. Um, and someone actually called me, the guy from the store, this one of the store manager, the assistant manager called me right? And, you know, apologize profusely. Hey, you know, bring it in, we'll do something, whatever. But I just said to him, well, what do you do with that information? And his response was, well, we're going to go talk to the technician that worked on your truck to make sure that this doesn't happen again in the future. And that's really what you want to get out of it, right? You want to have that corrective action that you can take so that you can prevent any issues that are going to happen in the future.

Well, that's, that's actually a pretty big deal on tires. I mean, it is. They've got to be torqued and everything to a certain standard.

Right.

You know, so I mean, that's a huge safety issue.

Yeah.

I think what's awesome about that, though, is that they followed up with you and told you, hey, this is like what your feedback led to this action.

Right.

And we're going to try to make sure that doesn't happen again. It's not just lip service. I think that's the key, too, is that when you get negative feedback, that you don't just give it lip service and say, man, we're so sorry we heard that. But, you know, we'll try to get that fixed later. You know, okay, sure. I think we've all heard that before, right? And you know it, you've heard it when you get in the runaround or you're just getting the lift service and, and to hear, well, no, we're actually gonna go talk to this guy and we know the technician, you know, his name was whoever, you know, Jimmy or something like that. We're gonna go talk to Jimmy and say, hey, you know, you know, you left two lugs untightened and like that could have come off and killed somebody.

Yeah, I mean, it's a good coaching experience.

Yeah, great coaching opportunity.

Exactly.

You know it. And maybe that's all you find out when you do the stakeholder satisfaction survey, you know, the NPS survey, is that, you know, you're actually doing a really good job and here's like just a couple of things you need to improve. That's okay too, you know, but now you know, right? Now you don't have to wonder, well, how well are we doing? And I think what's fun is as we've done them, the comments have gotten more specific and they've gotten more— because people know we're looking at it and they know we're listening to it. And so, you know, at first you get a few responses, and then as more of them come out, you know, because you send these out every quarter, you know, we just send an email out with a little, you know, 0 through 10, like you just click a button and it rates it. Um, as we've sent more out though, we get more responses and then we get more comments. And then when we call back and we say, hey, you know, what's this? If we find that we actually have success moving people from the 7, 8 category, you know, they're passive into the 9, 10 category, right? Well, that increases your NPS score. The other thing we found is that people who are kind of on the cusp, maybe they're a 5 or a 6 in the detractor area. Well, we can get them out of the detractor category and into the passives, right? Maybe we can't make a full-blown champion out of them, but just by improving their mindset a little bit and letting them be heard, it changes their outlook on us and how we approach things. And they know that we care. And so then they become easier to work with, right? And, and I'm sure we've all had difficult customers, but sometimes just making that little extra effort helps move them out of that detractor category into a passive category. And again, by taking them out of the subtraction, now your NPS score goes up again, right? You know, that same example, let's say that I moved one passive into a promoter and I got one detractor into passive, right? Right, so the same number of passives, but I'm basically just taking one off of each end. Well, I'd have been at 61% promoters and I'd have been at 14% detractors, right? And so instead of 45, well, now my NPS is at 47, right? So just moving one up, right, or moving two into one category, I've bumped my score up by 2%, right? So I highly recommend doing, you know, surveys like that, doing a follow-up survey. Send it out to your internal departments. If you're a public fleet, you know, ask them the hypothetical, you know, if this fleet service division were a private company like a Midas or Jiffy Lube, how likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or a colleague, you know, to have them bring their car in? Right. Send that out. It's super simple. Keep it one question. That's the other thing about this. Don't ask 10 questions. There's a reason why MPS is so popular and so useful is because it's one question and I can answer it really quickly. And if I want to leave a comment, I can, right? You can use like Google Sheets, Google Forms, Microsoft has a way to do surveys. You can use SurveyMonkey. I know we use HubSpot, you know, that's our CRM, and it's got a built-in capability of doing that, you know, doing a an NPS survey, feedback survey. And so, and it does the analysis for us, but you could just as easily pop that into an Excel spreadsheet. And again, the math is really simple, you know, percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. Right. And that gives you your NPS score.

I actually think it's more adaptable to fleet than some of the other customer scores that you see.

Yeah.

It's so simple. One question. I mean, most people would be willing to answer one question. Yeah, you know, that's where, that's where it gets really complicated is when you get all these surveys and—

well, then it's 20 questions deep and you're like, oh my gosh, how much more do I have to go? Oh, here's another 20 questions. Yeah, they'll ask you based on your first 20 questions answers. You're like, I don't got time for this.

Exactly. You stop.

Keep it simple.

One question.

One question.

People can do it.

And that question is so powerful that it gives you enough insight, right? Any comments or feedback for it?

It just dawned on me that I know last time I used Delta. They said, would you be willing to stay on for one question? And of course, for one question, I said, yeah, sure, why not? Most likely, maybe that's part of their Net Promoter that they're doing.

Yeah, you know, just getting really quick, simple feedback. And, you know, that mechanism allows them to improve, to grow, to develop better relationships with their stakeholders and improve stakeholder satisfaction. Right. And that is a pillar of fleet success for a reason. So, uh, any last thoughts?

Um, I think one last thought would be you could use this, uh, the scoring mechanism too for your employees. Yeah, you know, so, you know, how likely are you to do business with Joe who fixed your car? Yeah, you know, and maybe have a very simple, easy rating system for your internal technicians.

Yeah, you know, we'll probably end up doing a whole episode on CSAT, which we'll call that one customer satisfaction. And how we use that here at RTA for that very reason.

Yep.

So all I would say is that if you don't know how you're failing, if you don't know what your deficiencies are by getting that feedback, you're never going to improve.

True story. Yeah. If you don't know what you don't know, then you'll never do anything to change it.

Exactly.

All right. Well, until next time, thanks, you guys, for joining us.

Go out.

I'd love to hear how those survey responses turn up. You can always tag us on social media @fleetsuccess and let your friends and colleagues know. How likely would you be to recommend the Fleet Success Show to your friends and colleagues? You know, definitely push it out there and we'll see you next time. Thanks.

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