New York – March 6, 2019 – Bain & Company has launched NPS Prism, a new business aimed at helping companies uncover actionable insights that they can use to create game-changing episodes along the customer journey.  NPS Prism addresses a crucial problem for business leaders: the lack of reliable, high quality Net Promoter Score® benchmarks for gauging competitive performance and progress against goals. Moreover, NPS Prism adds a new-to-world capability for driving those benchmarks down to each important episode of the customer journey. To deliver this unique service, NPS Prism is partnering with Qualtrics®, leveraging the company’s leading research and experience software platform to collect and deliver data.  This enables NPS Prism subscribers to prioritize interactions that matter most to their customers and provide robust data about a company’s competitive performance on each of them.

Companies increasingly compete to differentiate their customer experience as a key to earning the customer loyalty that drives profitable growth. Yet customer expectations continue to increase rapidly.  Executives need to maintain a deep, up-to-date understanding of where their companies stand versus competitors, along with clarity about what truly earns long-term customer loyalty, so they can create a superior experience in this opaque, evolving landscape.

Bain & Company, the inventors of Net Promoter System®, formed NPS Prism to provide a comprehensive, outside-in understanding of opportunities to create a superior customer experience from the consumer’s perspective, rather than through the lenses of a functional organization.  NPS Prism data uncovers insights at a far more granular level than any other study in the marketplace, revealing unique opportunities and risks.  For the first time ever, organizations can see how the critical components of their customer experience stack up against the competition, and how they contribute to their company’s overall differentiation in the minds of customers. This allows them to define and prioritize actionable improvement tactics and investments.

“NPS Prism enables companies to hear the voice of the customer clearly so they can better understand how they stack up against their competitors overall and by customer episode. It allows companies to understand which episodes matter most to their customer experience and what ‘good’ looks like in each episode,” said Jason Barro, a partner in Bain & Company’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice.  “We have a long history helping individual clients develop these tools on a bespoke basis. Now, we are excited to help democratize the data and make it broadly available so it can help companies improve the experience they deliver to their customers.”

NPS Prism is based on Bain & Company’s deep understanding of the customer experience journey and its customer episode approach. Customer episodes, each of which center on a specific customer need, such as opening a credit card account or returning a retail purchase, offer the most relevant customer-focused way to understand the customer experience. NPS Prism provides the only reliable, outside-in metrics available today to support these crucial building blocks of a truly customer-centric organization.  Driven by comprehensive customer research, NPS Prism delivers best-in-class episode benchmarks that give a company the ability to drill down and understand where a competitor outperforms on an episode level, as well as the importance of one episode versus another, making it the gold standard in customer experience metrics.

“Executive teams need a reliable way to gauge their company’s customer experience progress against the competition, and they just can’t get that today,” said Rob Markey, founder of Bain & Company’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice. “NPS Prism links the Net Promoter Score with episode-level benchmarking, giving leaders an unprecedented, reliable toolkit for understanding competitive position, progress and priorities for improvement.”

“Since we invented the Net Promoter Score more than fifteen years ago, clients have been asking us to provide reliable competitive NPS benchmarks,” said Fred Reichheld, a Bain & Company fellow and founder of the Net Promoter® System. “Finally, there is Net Promoter benchmarking data you can count on. I am delighted that we can now meet that need in the marketplace with NPS Prism.”

With its research history and trusted customer experience management technology, Qualtrics is the ideal partner to power NPS Prism, providing unbiased external data based on tens of thousands of responses in flexible, powerful dashboards. The Qualtrics Experience Management (XM) Platform™ supports NPS Prism in democratizing data.  This allows organizations to conduct analysis and modeling on their own, without waiting for a team to deliver it,  thus maximizing the  power of NPS Prism benchmarks.

“We are excited to expand our long-standing partnership with Bain & Company. Together, we are helping organizations of all sizes capture valuable customer feedback and gain actionable insights into customer sentiment and behavior,” said John Torrey, chief ecosystem officer, Qualtrics. “NPS Prism is a major milestone in building robust end-to-end solutions that enable the Net Promoter System and allow clients to drive transformational customer experiences on the only leading experience management platform.”

Initial NPS Prism data covers four financial services sectors in the U.S.: retail banking, credit cards, wealth management and mortgage.  It will expand into other categories and geographies throughout 2019.  For more information, visit:  www.npsprism.com.

Qualtrics is part of the Bain Alliance Ecosystem – a network of best-of-breed partnerships with complementary tool, technology, and service providers that accelerate delivery of breakthrough client results.  Through the Bain Alliance Ecosystem, Bain & Company clients have access to relevant new capabilities, enabling faster assimilation of new ideas, skills, and ways of working.

Editor's Note: To arrange an interview, contact Dan Pinkney at dan.pinkney@bain.com or +1 646 562 8102

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