Have you ever wondered about the actual value of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in measuring your customer satisfaction and brand loyalty? If so, you’re not alone. While NPS has long been the standard relationship metric, recent trends reveal a different story. TSIA’s customer success benchmark data shows a steady annual decline in using NPS, indicating it might not be the reliable predictor we once believed.

Why, then, should you consider TSIA’s KORE Score? The answer lies in its data-driven approach to customer success. Unlike NPS, the KORE Score Framework offers a comprehensive view of customer health by focusing on the right metrics to predict critical run-the-business metrics like retention, renewals, references, and outcomes. This innovative framework leverages your existing metrics for better forecasting and includes four key relationship survey questions for companies lacking these metrics, ensuring you capture essential customer insights directly.

As you navigate the future of customer success, adopting metrics that provide a clearer, more accurate picture of your customers’ experiences and satisfaction is crucial. This metric is key to helping you defend the value of customer success. Join us as we explore why the KORE Score is set to revolutionize customer success and help you achieve better retention, renewals, and overall brand awareness.

This blog will explore:

• What’s Wrong with Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
• Introducing KORE Score: A Data-Driven Alternative
• Why KORE Score Is Better
• Calculating Your KORE Score
• Implementing the KORE Score Framework
• Your Key Takeaways

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What’s Wrong with Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a survey that captures the relationship between you and your customers. Some organizations use it as a transactional survey, commonly seen in support or professional services. A transactional survey, by nature, has a clear start and stop, such as the beginning and end of a project or support case.

You may have relied on NPS to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, it’s essential to recognize its limitations to ensure you’re using the most influential metrics for your business. The core question in NPS—“How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”—focuses primarily on brand awareness rather than operational success. 

Here are some of the critical issues with NPS:

• Mixed-use: NPS is frequently used for both relationship and transactional surveys. This dual application often leads to mixed and confusing results, making it difficult to derive clear insights from the data. You might wonder whether the feedback relates to a specific interaction or the overall relationship with your brand.
• Scale complexity: The 11-point NPS scale, ranging from -100 to +100, is too broad and complex. This expansive scale makes it challenging to compare your scores accurately against industry standards or your peers. 
• Unreliable sentiment: A high NPS score only sometimes correlates with genuine customer loyalty or retention. It’s possible to receive favorable scores while facing customer churn issues or a lack of service expansion. This misalignment can give you a false sense of security about your customers’ true sentiments and likelihood of staying with your brand, thus making it extremely difficult to forecast customer retention and expansions.
• Poor forecasting: NPS falls short in providing actionable insights into the likelihood of retention and renewals. As a customer success executive, you need metrics to forecast these crucial factors accurately. Unfortunately, recommending your company to others doesn’t necessarily translate to retention, renewal, or expansion of services—the key outcomes you need to drive your business forward.

By understanding these limitations of NPS, you can see why a more comprehensive and data-driven approach to helping run the business, like the KORE Score, is essential for accurately measuring and enhancing your customer success efforts. The KORE Score addresses these issues head-on, providing more precise area insights and reliable metrics to help you forecast and achieve your customer success goals.

Related: Critical Customer Success KPIs, Metrics, and Health Score Variables

Introducing KORE Score: A Data-Driven Alternative

As you look for more reliable ways to measure and enhance your customer success, it’s time to consider a new approach: TSIA’s KORE Score Framework. KORE, which stands for Keeping Organizational Outcomes, Retention, Renewal, and References Excellent, is designed to address the shortcomings of Net Promoter Score (NPS) by focusing on the telemetry and survey data that directly impact your business.

The KORE Score Framework simplifies the measurement process with four key questions, each targeting a critical aspect of your customer relationship. 

Here’s how KORE can help you gain more precise insights and make more confident business decisions:

• Outcome: “What is the likelihood that your company will already receive the expected value/outcomes from our product or service?” This question focuses on whether your customers are achieving the goals they set out to accomplish with your product, providing a direct measure of your product’s effectiveness.
• Reference: “Company policy aside, what is the likelihood that your company will be a positive reference for us?” By gauging your customers’ willingness to recommend your product, this question offers a realistic view of your brand’s reputation and the perceived value of your services.
• Renewal: “What is the likelihood that your company will renew at least 100% of your upcoming contract?” Understanding the possibility of renewal helps you accurately predict future revenue and plan for growth, ensuring your customer base remains stable and profitable. Remaining a customer is critical, but understanding their renewal drives forecast.
• Retention: “What is the likelihood that your company will remain a customer in the upcoming renewal period?” This question targets customer loyalty and satisfaction, providing insights into potential churn and areas where you may need to improve customer engagement.

The KORE Score Framework recommends using a five-point scale for these questions, making it straightforward to analyze. Unlike the overly complex 11-point NPS scale, KORE’s simplified approach ensures you can quickly understand and act on the data. 

By implementing the KORE Score Framework, you can replace the ambiguous and often unreliable NPS with a more precise, data-driven method for predicting retention, renewals, references, and outcomes. This shift will enable you to drive greater confidence in your predictions and forecasts, ultimately leading to better customer success and more robust business performance.

With KORE, you can make informed decisions that align with your customer success goals and propel your organization forward.

Related: The KORE Score Framework

Why KORE Score Is Better

You might wonder why the KORE Score Framework is a superior alternative to Net Promoter Score (NPS). Here are the key reasons why the KORE Score is better for measuring and driving customer success:

• Focus on business impact: The KORE Score Framework zeroes in on what truly matters for your business: value perception, willingness to advocate, and the likelihood of renewal and retention. These questions cut straight to the heart of customer success, ensuring you gain insights that directly impact your operational and strategic decisions.
• Simplified scale: Unlike the complex 11-point NPS scale, the KORE Score uses a straightforward five-point scale. This simplified approach offers clear and immediate insights into customer sentiment, making it easier for you to understand and act on the data—no more overcomplicating your analysis—just straightforward, actionable insights.
• Data-driven adaptability: The KORE Score Framework combines existing telemetry data, such as renewal rates, with survey data to create a comprehensive health score. This adaptability means you can evolve your metrics alongside your business processes, ensuring your customer success strategies remain relevant and practical.
• Actionable results: The KORE Score provides practical guidance for your customer success teams by focusing on core business metrics. The metrics are designed to be actionable, offering clear direction on improving customer satisfaction, retention, and overall brand reputation.

Calculating Your KORE Score

Ready to harness the power of the KORE Score Framework? Let’s dive into how you can calculate your KORE Score and interpret it to understand your brand and customer reputation better.

The four key KORE Score questions are ranked on a straightforward five-point scale. Here’s a quick recap of the questions in the order of importance:

• Outcome: What is the likelihood that your company will already receive the expected value/outcomes from our product or service?
• Reference: What is the likelihood that your company will be a positive reference for us?
• Renewal: What is the likelihood that your company will renew at least 100% of your upcoming contract?
• Retention: What is the likelihood that your company will remain a customer in the upcoming renewal period?

Step-by-Step Calculation

• Score each question: Rate each of the four questions on a scale of 1 to 5.
• Total the scores: Add up the scores for all four questions.
• Calculate the average: Divide the total score by four to get your overall KORE Score.

This average score represents your overall KORE Score, reflecting your brand and reputation with that customer. For those who like the NPS brand score for sales and marketing purposes, the KORE Score continues to provide this score but with better comparison results.

Flexibility is key. We made the KORE Score flexible so that if you already have data on renewal or retention, you can convert these metrics to the five-point KORE scale. Refer to the detailed charts in “The KORE Score Framework” for guidance on translating your percentages into the KORE Score format. This integration provides even greater forecasting power, allowing you to leverage new survey data and existing metrics for a comprehensive view.

Related: The State of Customer Success 2024

Implementing the KORE Score Framework

Adhering to its intended design is crucial to maximizing the KORE Score. The KORE Score is not meant for transactional surveys or as a lagging indicator. Instead, it is a leading indicator and should be used as a relationship survey, especially for those organizations without data in critical areas.

Key Recommendations

• Send surveys early: Based on your company’s complexity, distribute the KORE surveys well before renewal dates. This allows ample time to mitigate any issues, turning potential risks into improvement opportunities before the renewal.
• Target the proper recipients: Focus on sending surveys to key decision-makers within your customer’s organization. Avoid sending surveys to a broad audience, such as everyone on your marketing and sales distribution list. This targeted approach ensures the feedback is relevant and actionable, genuinely reflecting customer relationships.

Once you’ve collected and calculated your KORE Scores, it’s time to interpret the results. Unlike Net Promoter Score (NPS), where benchmark comparisons are often unclear, TSIA’s KORE Score status structure offers a clear understanding of your customer health:

• 4.3 to 5.0: Pacesetter
• 3.8 to 4.2: On-Target High
• 3.1 to 3.7: On-Target Medium
• 2.6 to 3.0: On-Target Low
• 1.1 to 2.5: Underperforming
• 0 to 1.0: Emergency

This structured approach helps you gauge where you stand with your customers and identify areas for improvement. By sending KORE surveys well before renewals and targeting key decision-makers, you can proactively address issues, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance retention.

By implementing and leveraging the KORE Score Framework, you’re measuring customer satisfaction and driving actionable insights that can transform your customer success strategy. Start using the KORE Score today to ensure your business remains competitive and customer-centric in an ever-evolving market.

Your Key Takeaways

• Enhanced predictive power for customer success: Unlike NPS, the KORE Score Framework provides a comprehensive view of customer health by integrating critical metrics such as retention, renewals, references, and outcomes. This flexible and holistic approach allows you to make more accurate forecasts and informed decisions, ensuring your customer success strategies are aligned with your business goals.
• Simplified and actionable insights: The KORE Score uses a straightforward five-point scale, making it easier for you to understand and act on customer feedback. This simplicity contrasts with the complex 11-point NPS scale, offering clear, immediate insights into customer sentiment and helping you take practical steps to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.‍
• Data-driven adaptability: The KORE Score Framework allows you to combine existing telemetry data with new survey responses, creating a dynamic and adaptable metric that evolves with your business processes. This flexibility ensures that your customer success efforts remain relevant and practical, reflecting your brand’s performance and reputation in the industry.