Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used to measure member satisfaction and loyalty by asking one simple question: "On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this club/product/service to a friend or colleague?". This NPS guide for golf clubs explains how it works.
Want to measure member satisfaction and loyalty? The secret is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Discover how NPS works, how to calculate it, what a good score is for your club, and most importantly - how to improve your member and guest experience with this game-changing tool.
What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is widely accepted as one of the best customer experience metrics. It can help you measure how satisfied your members are with the experience, service, or product your golf club provides. Or how happy they are with your club in general.
Is NPS important for golf clubs?
NPS is important because it is the only customer experience metric proven to be a reliable indicator of a company's financial health and potential growth. This also applies to your golf club.
Bain & Company, who invented the Net Promoter Score, stated that companies that achieve long-term growth score two times higher than average on NPS, while NPS leaders generally grow at twice the rate of competitors.
The NPS can also provide more information than your members' loyalty and satisfaction levels. Combining the score with other questions can help you figure out what the members see as the most important thing about, for example, your club's service, product, or general member journey.
How does NPS work?
NPS works by directly asking your members about their opinions. And the beauty of NPS is its simplicity. It asks one ultimate question, which provides you with one score. The question is usually asked in a survey on member experience, and the respondents can select a number on a scale from 0-10.
If they answer 0, it is not at all likely that they will recommend your club/product/service to a friend or colleague. If the answer 10, they will most likely do so.
Net Promoter Score and its promoters, passives, and detractors
After grading the question on a scale from 0-10, your members are divided into three distinct groups.
The respondents are now categorized in three groups, and respondents belonging to a specific group have some specific characteristics in common as well.
How to calculate NPS?
You can use different methods to calculate the NPS. If you are a golf club and use Players 1st, we will calculate the Net Promoter Score for you. The score will be based on your members' answers and the feedback gathered through our surveys, enabling you to access the NPS, benchmarks, and other feedback features automatically calculated by the Players 1st software.
If you are using your own method to ask the NPS question, you simply just need to subtract the detractors from the promoters to calculate the Net Promoter Score.
If the score is negative, it means you have more detractors than promoters. If the score is positive, you have more promoters than detractors.
The Net Promoter Score will always be between -100 and 100, and it's never at the very top or bottom. Because having a score of 100 means everyone is happy, which no one has achieved officially, and a score of -100 means everyone is unhappy, which is also quite rare.
What is a good NPS?
Many factors are involved when determining if the NPS is good or not. If the score is above 0, it is generally a good sign. It means that you have more promoters than detractors. And the closer the score is to 100, the better it will be.
A good NPS can also be a result of comparing scores with similar golf clubs. If the average Net Promoter Score in your area or at other golf clubs is 30, any score above that could be considered a good NPS. In that case, your number of loyal and satisfied members is higher, which means you outperform other golf clubs in NPS.
Even though it is difficult to interpret whether you have a good NPS or not as a golf club, you can use the following table as a general NPS guideline.
What is a bad NPS?
A bad NPS can be determined in different ways as well. If the score is below 0, there are more detractors than promoters at your golf club. Generally, a score below 0 is a danger signal. It shows that your member experience results in more unhappy than happy members – and it is probably a good idea to do something about it.
If your score has declined since your golf club's most recent NPS measurement, you could also say the new NPS is bad. The decline of the score would mean that something has happened to your member journey – or the opposite.
On the one hand, you could have done something that resulted in a negative outcome. On the other hand, you may have done nothing to adapt to your surroundings or keep your members satisfied.
How to use the Net Promoter Score
It is important to emphasize that NPS is a tracking tool, and it does not provide any insights about how to make your members happier and more satisfied – it is what you do with the score that matters.
NPS surveys and collecting feedback
The most efficient and used method to find the Net Promotor Score is by running surveys and collecting member feedback.
All of the Players 1st Surveys include the Net Promoter Score measurement related to golf clubs and activities. And the software mainly gathers data through surveys designed in cooperation with unions and enterprises in golf, which makes them specifically address golfers' needs.
As a club, you can either manually send out one of the Players 1st surveys or use one of the platform's integrations for automatic send-outs. It is also possible to use a shareable link that allows anyone with the link to answer the survey.
Players 1st surveys already have a base of locked questions that ensure high-quality data. Through the dashboard, you can customize many other questions and add your own to ensure the survey fits your needs.
When to send out NPS survey
You can measure the NPS on different occasions, and timing is often important when it comes to sending out the NPS survey.
To get valuable feedback from your members or guests, we recommend to send the survey at a time when they have had enough experience with your product or service or have just completed the experience.
How NPS works with other questions
In short, the Net Promoter Score does not answer why someone answered how they did, such as what could have affected a player to give your greens a 6 or 7 on the NPS scale. That is for the player to know and for you to find out.
By using Players 1st, you can access generated scores for each service area, such as courses, clubhouse, restaurants, and more. The survey software links these scores up with the NPS, creating a unique priority map that shows you the most significant improvements you can make in your club based on your members feedback.
Take the time to engage with the players and listen to their feedback; they will no doubt tell you all about it. One way to get started to know your players and their unique experiences is by using the Net Promoter Score and member experience management.
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