Colt Technology Services has been able to unlock value in a lot of disregarded NPS data by utilising machine learning to dig into and structure the many responses to open-ended questions that accompany the headline question of whether a user would recommend a brand to a friend or colleague.

“People were pivoting off the recommendation question and very little else,” Noah Roychowdhury, Global Head of Customer Intelligence at Colt, told last month’s Qual360 Europe conference, organised by Merlien Institute.

That hasn’t been bad for Colt: the “infrastructure company for digital transformation” boasts an NPS an extraordinary 49 points above the sector benchmark (64 v 15).

“We’re doing quite well out of the NPS regime,” he acknowledged, “but we’re also open to change. We are not bound to it.

“We don’t think that that score, in and of itself, is a measure of how we want to become the most customer-oriented business in the industry,” he said.

In fact, the only reasons to persist with it in a large organisation, he added, are that “it’s very simple to understand and often it’s a system that you inherit.” (For more, read WARC’s report: How NPS can be more than just a recommendation.)

But it’s a system that can be made to work better, and Colt is using machine learning to do just that – unlocking what’s hidden in thousands of open-ended questions and doing it at scale.

This process identified 75 unique attributes that define what the customer experience is like in Colt, across different customer journeys.

This process found 27 things that define the journey within the world of delivery, for example, of which 13 were good and 14 not so good. For sales, there were 21 attributes, of which 11 were positive, 10 negative.

The logic then is to focus on the attributes that amplify a brand and, in doing so, grow Colt’s NPS.

In this way, Roychowdhury has been able to identify for stakeholders where they need to be doing better in order to win in terms of customer experience.

“Mapping the territories and signalling to the business which battle we want to take on has been a huge achievement over the last 15 months,” he said.

Sourced from WARC