The agency life is filled with both positive and horror stories. And the Internet is filled with companies complaining about agencies and vice-versa.

However, I think we must all recognize how this agency-client collaboration has changed. There aren't two separate entities anymore. Things are much more intertwined than ever before. That is... if you are interested in providing good services and making a positive impact.

If you would like to see more about how the Omniconvert Managed Services department works, you can check out this recent Meetup session where we lay it all out for you.

Now, back to the main story. Here's how it all went down.

The tools that we used: NPS + RFM.

What is NPS?

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. It is essentially a scale from 0 to 10 where, as a client, you can rate how satisfied you are with a product or a service from a company. You've probably been asked many times via email or on the website for this. It usually starts with "your feedback is important to us". Interested to learn more about this subject? Start with this Wikipedia article, but only after you've finished this post.

What is RFM?

RFM stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value. Essentially, a way to segment your customers based on when have they placed their last order, how often do they order and the value of those orders. Again, Wikipedia to the rescue.

NPS + RFM

RFM analysis can be done using your existing customer information. For large shops, it is recommended to go with the automated version. You can use a tool such as Omniconvert Reveal for this part.

NPS is usually implemented by asking your customers for feedback via a Survey. The essential part here is collecting this data and being able to associate this data not only with a specific customer, but with a specific order.

Taking it to the next level

What we've done, and we recommend this to all of our customers, is correctly setting up NPS + RFM as shown above but also implementing 2 NPS surveys. The first one is called "pre-delivery NPS". Usually, we like to post the question to the customer as soon as he or she finished the purchase (on the 'Thank you' page is a great place).

The other one we call "post-delivery NPS". And this one is sent out to the customer after the delivery has been completed and, ideally, after the customer managed to use your product or to benefit from your services.

It is a powerful combination.

If you also craft a beautiful email template and a good-looking survey that implements dynamic follow-up questions based on the score provided, then you are probably doing better than 90% of your competitors.

The data

Up until now I talked about the tools and the technology. What about analyzing the data and the results?

Why is this combination extremely useful? You can use NPS alone to get the general direction of how well you are doing. Using the power of follow-up questions, you can then gather extremely important feedback straight from your customers (not your potential ones, the ones that have already opened up the wallet for you).

Analyzing that feedback is important. However, you might end up with a lot of it regarding different aspects of your business:

• website performance
• delivery times
• packaging
• product quality
• etc.

How in the world will you be able to prioritize? You can't tackle all of them at once, right? And this is where the RFM segmentation help.

You can prioritize your issues or your areas of improvement by starting with the feedback from your most relevant customers.

Imagine you've already got some feedback collected. You have 500 people telling you that the delivery fees are too big. You also have 60 people telling you that your product variety is too low.

A sensible move, having this data, would be to focus on the problem where most of your customers complain about, right?

But if you use RFM segmenting, perhaps you will find out that most of those 60 people are among your best customers! ->insert mind-blown gif<-

Therefore, if you improve your product variety, your top customers will actually buy more from you. And they would probably recommend you further, bringing more similar-valued customers.

In essence, you can increase your margins faster by making better business decisions.

The actual results

While I can't actually disclose names and details, I think I can say this: one of the biggest online stores in Romania started implementing RFM + NPS as described, using our expertise.

Among the feedback collected (which was a lot), patterns were emerging. One of them was about how the customers were complaining about their order processing fee.

And guess what? Recently, I received an email (as one of their customers). In that email, they announced the complete removal of the processing fee!

Now this is #agency-life for you. Your work, effort and brains translated into concrete data for a business which in turn listens to their customers and actively implements changes. I can only imagine how many of their customers were happy to hear this particular news.

I took a moment to take it all in. How many people we've managed to have a positive impact upon. It is baffling.