How many times have you received bad service or slow response times from vendors you partner with? What about the number of service calls you have to place to get something around your office fixed? If I had to guess, you probably can’t count the number of times.
When it comes to the office copier company you partner with, how are they assisting you with the products, services, and response times you need to keep your machines up and running each day? If you aren’t sure, now is the time to listen up!
You can quickly pinpoint a well-qualified and experienced office copier company based on their Net Promoter Score (NPS). If you’ve never heard of an NPS or are curious about what it is, you’ve come to the right place.
Follow along as I explain what a Net Promoter Score is and the importance of this rating to help you gauge your current or prospective office copier vendors.
What Is A Net Promoter Score, and Why Is It Important?
As you’ve probably noticed, many companies claim they have the "Best service in the business." But, few actually have a way to measure how happy customers are.
Like us here at AOS, many companies utilize a system allowing us to capture feedback after every service call—called a Net Promoter Score system.
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that only focuses on measuring customer loyalty. Typically, a company with a high score means they have many satisfied customers willing to recommend the product or service they use.
Those with lower scores have more dissatisfied consumers and fewer people promoting their products and brand.
So, how exactly is the score calculated? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. After just about every interaction a company has with a customer, an independent third-party survey asks the customer one simple survey question:
How likely are you to recommend this company or product to a friend or colleague?
The customer can then rate their response on a scale from 1-10, with ten being 'Extremely Likely' and one being 'Not At All Likely.’ Then, the scores are broken up into three categories:
Category #1: If the score is 9-10, the customer is considered Promoters
Category #2: If the score is 7-8, the customer is considered Passives
Category #3: If the score is six or lower, the customer is considered Detractors
Although the names are not particularly important, what they represent is—those who are fanatics about a company's products, those who like them well enough, and those who would rather leave them behind.
Once the score from the customer is in, the NPS is then calculated like this:
NPS = (Responses of "Extremely Likely" - Responses of "Not At All Likely") / Total Number Of Responses * 100
Related Article: How to Calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS) - The Easy Way.
An NPS is calculated by subtracting the overall percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
An organization will want its promoters to be at least five percent higher than their detractors and their passives to be considered positive or good. Companies that are below this benchmark mean they don't have many customers who are willing to recommend them, thus signaling that there is significant room for improvement.
All in all, businesses that have maintained their high rankings can do so because they offer excellent service that keep customers so happy that they can imagine going out of their way to tell someone else how great they are.
Why Partner With Companies With High Net Promoter Scores?
Office technology devices like printers, copiers, scanners, and multifunction printers (MFPs) are essential investments for small businesses. Not only are they expensive, but their user experiences can provide sizable productivity gains when they are good or huge drops when they are challenging to use and prone to error.
I want you to think about something real quick: When you choose an office technology company based on their NPS, you're making an investment that will pay off in the future. I say this so that you won’t make the mistake of making your decision solely on price.
Instead, try and think about how much time and money you'll save by choosing quality office equipment that lasts longer while allowing your employees to act efficiently and without everyday stressors such as copy machine jams or other technological faults. These kinds of day-to-day frictions can build up in the workplace and cause considerable problems in the long run.
How To Find A Net Promoter Score
So, how exactly do you find out what a company's NPS is?
While you can sign up for expensive services that attempt to aggregate NPS scores, the fact of the matter is that every office technology supplier uses no single service. Thus, there is no single NPS aggregator that is really worth a subscription.
Instead, the right choice is even simpler: just ask.
Any time you receive a sales pitch, ask for the NPS. If you are curious about a new product you've seen, send their sales team an email asking for the NPS. And by the way… if a company voluntarily tells you their score before you have to ask, they’re probably a great option to consider.
The Final Say on Net Promoter Scores
A net promoter score is an excellent tool for buyers just like you to use as you search for vendors to partner with, such as us, AOS. Or, if you're on the fence about leaving a current technology partner, see what their NPS is—perhaps it will confirm your suspicions that the rest of their clients are as unhappy as you!
Any company that is offering a good product will be proud to tell you their NPS. (Here at AOS, we shout our NPS score from the rooftops: last year during COVID, we ended last year with a score of 96!) Since it is such a simple metric to calculate, there are no complicated spreadsheets that they need to show you or different survey methods that you need to compare across technology suppliers. It really is the one size fits all analysis tool that can help you judge a company instantly. And, of course, if you're in negotiations with a company and they refuse to share with you their Net Promoter Score, it may be time to look elsewhere. Make sure to contact us today to learn more about our products and offerings.
