How NPS helps us turn your feedback into features

“Your feedback is very important to us”.

If you have used any digital product or service, you have almost certainly read that phrase hundreds of times — and you might be forgiven for taking it with a pinch of salt. After all, how often is it clear why your feedback is so important? Will it even be used to deliver the things you are asking for?

We want to pull back the proverbial curtain and show you how eConsult turns your compliments, comments and concerns into meaningful actions and great product features.

A new way to make your feedback actionable

Our team has always used a mix of methods to get at the heart of your product needs. We visit practices and attend focus groups; we run surveys, interviews and usability studies; and we host Q&A sessions after each of our ever-popular webinars.

Despite this, we knew we needed a continuous and responsive way to track how eConsult is performing inside GP surgeries. We also needed to understand the common issues affecting our performance over time.

This is why we now use the net promoter score (NPS) to not only capture your feedback with greater immediacy but to deliver fast, targeted support to your practice and to shape a customer-centric product roadmap.

If you use either Post Consult Message (best experienced through the free eConsult Toolbar) or our new Demand Management feature, you may have noticed we now show a pop-up poll at the bottom of some screens. You may also have seen the poll at the bottom of our email newsletters.

The poll, served via a customer feedback tool called Delighted, looks something like this:

The question we ask is always the same — “How likely are you to recommend eConsult to a colleague?” — with the answer registered as a score from 1 to 10. The score you choose as your answer is weighed towards calculating eConsult’s overall net promoter score, or NPS.

What is NPS (net promoter score)?

Why do we ask this question in particular, and what does the NPS score ultimately tell us?

The net promoter score has long been used to measure the success of user-centric products and services. First introduced by Frederick F. Reichheld in Harvard Business Review in 2003, NPS has been embraced by top organisations as a powerful metric for quantifying a product’s user experience (UX) and user loyalty. Because NPS has been shown to closely correlate with user satisfaction and usability, we can use changes in the score to monitor the impact of new features and enhancements on user experience.

In a nutshell, it’s a way for us to keep a finger on the pulse of eConsult’s performance with our customers.

What happens when you respond to the NPS poll?

The power of NPS lies in its simplicity for you as an eConsult customer (it takes as little as one click to respond to the poll) and in the immediacy with which we are able to action your feedback.

Once you’ve submitted your NPS score, you’ll also have the option to answer the follow-up question “Tell us a bit more about why you chose [selected score]”. Your answer to this question will give us crucial insight into what’s making our products and services shine, and what causes frustration.

As a final step, you may also be asked to provide your contact details. Like the follow-up question, this is optional but it does help us reach out to you about your feedback.

So that’s your part done. What happens next? The NPS score you selected is immediately streamed, along with your comments, to our customer-facing teams via a dedicated Slack channel. It is also shared with the rest of our eConsult colleagues via our “Voice of the User” dashboard.

Next, our customer team may reach out to you to offer implementation support, discuss upcoming roadmap features or get more information about your feedback.

It’s worth mentioning that if you’ve answered the poll via Post Consult Message, you won’t be shown it again for at least a few months. This helps us track your satisfaction with eConsult over time, but also ensures you’re not being shown the poll more than you need to.

Finally, any comments you submit along with your score are also organised into themes by our product insights team and shared with our product managers to help them understand which themes and features our roadmap should focus on next. In fact, this is actually how we delivered our Demand Management feature so quickly, allowing you to control when eConsult requests flow into your practice.

What about patients?

Our picture of eConsult’s performance wouldn’t be complete without patient feedback. That’s why all patients who complete an eConsult request now have the opportunity to answer an NPS poll as well (albeit with a slightly different question: “How likely are you to recommend eConsult to a friend or family member?”). Although patient comments undergo the same rigorous theming process as your feedback, we keep this poll completely anonymous.

Next steps: acting on what we’ve learned

NPS is already allowing us to shape features you’re asking for and letting us support practices when and where they need it most. In the coming weeks and months, look out for webinars and blog posts that will showcase how we are transforming the eConsult Toolbar and patient experience using your feedback.

In the meantime, if you come across the NPS poll while using eConsult or perusing one of our emails, do give it a click — your feedback really is very important to us.