Net Promoter Score Turns 20 — Is It Enough?

In 2003, Bain & Company partner Fred Reichheld introduced a groundbreaking method of assessing how well an organization treats individuals whose lives it affects — its capacity to foster enduring and loyal relationships. This assessment, known as the Net Promoter Score or NPS, has since been shared so anyone could apply it to their business.  

NPS has since been widely used amongst businesses to measure success and while it is mainly used for gauging customer satisfaction and loyalty, it has also been employed for measuring the effectiveness of corporate events.  

However, this one form of measurement is not enough when analyzing the success or impact of corporate events.  

In this article, we will look at the relevance of NPS in corporate events and why it's time to change how we measure success. 

NPS as a stand-alone measurement is not enough 

There is a common misconception about Net Promoter Scores in corporate events.  

Many believe that NPS combines factors such as customer satisfaction, advocacy value, behavior perception, and brand awareness. However, this is not entirely accurate.  

The truth is that NPS solely measures advocacy and only provides a small part of the overall picture. So while it is an excellent metric to measure to an extent, it is almost worthless when used in isolation for measuring the overall success of your corporate event program.  

NPS doesn't tell you how you can change the hearts and minds of your attendees to move them all to become promoters of your next event or increase their propensity to buy from your next customer-facing event. It also doesn't tell you which events worked for your business and for what reason.  

For your event measurement to mean anything, it is critical to understand how those who attended your event felt and how their brand perception has changed from pre-event to post-event. Only by knowing this, can you then understand the event's role in changing brand perceptions and, ultimately, increasing business revenue.  

Measurement beyond customer satisfaction 

To improve the effectiveness of your events program, you should consider analyzing brand perception and impact scores, including sentiment and behavior analysis, which helps you better understand how your attendees and customers feel about your event and how they behave towards your brand, such as, what is their propensity to purchase.  

By blending these metrics, you can build an overall event score and form a more complete picture of your event's success and effectiveness in strengthening customer relationships, enabling you to measure year-on-year and event-on-event performance better.  

To ensure that NPS can be utilized to its fullest potential in business events, you should set clear objectives and prioritize achieving strategic outcomes rather than simply collecting data.  

Evaluating customer sentiment, behavior, satisfaction, and brand perception are all important factors to consider when assessing your event's impact. Additionally, creating feedback mechanisms to encourage attendees to provide input at every stage of your event cycle, is vital for establishing an effective understanding and analysis of how to improve your event or increase your number of event promoters, a result of which you can measure through net promoter scores.

The benefits of measuring overall event scores 

By measuring overall event scores, you gain valuable insights into the health of your entire customer event program.  

This robust blended analysis helps you pinpoint your top-performing events and identify areas for improvement. You'll begin to build a better picture of how, even small, lower-invested events can deliver exceptional results with proper strategic measures in place, where they previously were considered lower-tier, underinvested events. 

Measuring your events' performance with an overall event score allows you to track the progress of your entire event program and have a clear line of sight on what works, what doesn’t, and how you can improve. By taking a strategic approach to your events, you can reap maximum benefits from it.  

How do you measure impact scores? / Where do you start to better measure your corporate events 

To improve the overall effectiveness of your events, it's essential to align the objectives of your event with those of your business as a whole as this will ensure you capture relevant data and insight to help positively impact your events business unit.  

To ensure comprehensive analysis, it is advisable to review three distinct categories of data: demographic data, engagement data, and sentiment data.  

Demographic data provides information on attendees, while engagement data offers insights on their actions such as dwell time, session scans, and clicks. On the other hand, sentiment data provides a deeper understanding of how attendees think and feel.  

To obtain this information, analyzing customer sentiment and behavior through surveys, interviews, or focus groups is an effective way to gather additional data that can help measure impact scores. 

With this information collated and analyzed, you can then create strategies to enhance your events program and develop greater opportunities to positively impact not only your events score, but your entire business bottom line.  

Cheers to 20 great years, NPS! 🎉 

Whilst we couldn't be happier to celebrate the year of NPS turning 20, and the positive impact it has had on our industry alongside many others, event planners and managers should focus on a more comprehensive approach to measure and evaluate event performance.  

This is the problem we set out to solve at Explori!

We enable event professionals across the world to better understand their overall event score beyond NPS — bringing together customer satisfaction data with brand perception and impact scores — to provide a better view into how they can drive success in their events program.

Take a quick tour of Explori website. 👇

Explori is powering the events industry with the right data and insights. See how Explori works right away!