How myday customers can use EvaSys to measure NPS

Guest blog from our friends at EvaSys

How myday customers can use EvaSys to measure NPS

The “business” of running a university or college is becoming more and more like managing a commercial enterprise, with many institutions looking to grow external income and offer ever improving services to students and staff.

So, if universities are being managed in a similar way to a company, why not adopt a key satisfaction metric used by some of the largest enterprises in the world – Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score, commonly referred to as NPS, is a tool that measures customer experience and helps to predict business growth.  NPS is calculated using the answer to one key question on a 0-10 scale: How likely is it that you would recommend (insert brand/organisation) to a friend or colleague?

Anyone who scores 9 or 10 on the scale is marked as Promoters, scores of 7 or 8 are considered as Passives and anyone scoring between 0 and 6 are deemed to be Detractors.  Promoters are loyal customers who will refer others, Passives are satisfied but unlikely to recommend and Detractors are dissatisfied and can damage brand through negative word of mouth.

To discover your NPS, you simply subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters (Passives are ignored) and you will end up with a number between -100 and 100. The closer you are to that figure of 100, the better your NPS is.

Why is NPS relevant to higher and further education?

Why is NPS relevant to the education sector? Well, students talk. To each other, their families, their social circle, their future colleagues and contacts. And if they are asked whether they would recommend their current institution or alma mater, to a potential student, an employer, an event organiser or whomever else is asking, you would hope that they would say yes.

Knowing, understanding and improving an NPS score for an educational establishment will help to predict growth.  And it’s not just about measuring student satisfaction; you could use it to understand how staff feel about working there, how satisfied external clients are with your conference facilities, or how happy industrial partners are with the results of research contracts.

In every area where you have “customers”, be that students or clients, a good NPS can be used in marketing and communications to attract more of the same.

How can I use myday to calculate my institution’s NPS?

In October 2020, myday provider Collabco announced a partnership with EvaSys – a leading provider of digital survey and assessment tools for the education sector. EvaSys integrates easily with myday to allow access to online surveys, evaluation and assessment – and automatic calculation of NPS.

Included as a question within a wider course or module survey, the EvaSys system can calculate and present the NPS at institution, department or individual course or module level, meaning that student satisfaction scores can be collected at every touchpoint and aggregated up to present an institution-wide picture.  The NPS will also appear on an Instant Feedback Report, so that lecturers, department heads or administration staff have an immediate view of feedback – and students too, if the institution so chooses.

How can I improve NPS at module, department or institution level?

It’s all well and good having the NPS number, but what if it’s not a good score? How do you pinpoint the areas that need improvement to increase that score over time?

With NPS, it’s common practice to ask an open-text, follow up question to discover the reason why that particular reviewer has given the score – good or bad.  This allows organisations to identify trends and mitigate common problems that will improve customer satisfaction.

Within EvaSys, the NPS feature is easily linked with an AI-powered sentiment analysis tool, which pulls together the themes from the open-text question and forms them into a word cloud that identifies positive, negative and neutral sentiments.  This gives institutions the ability to take an overarching view on sentiment, or drill down into each word and phrase to see the exact comments that fall within that theme, facilitating a plan for improvement.

Why should I bother with NPS at my institution?

With so many national, regional, institutional and departmental surveys already being used within higher education, it may be hard to see the benefit in introducing another.  However, NPS offers fast and frictionless feedback from students, staff, faculty and external clients in a global recognised metric. It may also be a predictor of students’ responses to national surveys such as NSS (UK HE) and ISSE (Ireland HE).

Technically, any NPS above zero is a good score, as it indicates you have more Promoters than Detractors.  Anything above 50 is considered excellent, and 70 and above is the best of the best, according to this blog by sales and marketing SaaS company, Hubspot.  In 2019, companies like Apple, American Express and Ritz Carlton scored in the 50-70 range, placing them in a high bracket for customer satisfaction.

Whatever your score, the addition of that all-important open-text question after the score will give you the information you need to enhance already good areas and start work to improve poorly perceived ones.

Using the EvaSys NPS tool through the myday platform provides instant, actionable insights around overall satisfaction levels. And when you compare the NPS of your institution with other products and industries, you might just find that you have something to shout about.