From Data to Narrative: How Jacksonville Public Library Uses Net Promoter Score to Tell Its Story
Meet Jacksonville Public Library
Jacksonville Public Library is a large library system in Florida, consisting of a main library and 20 regional, community, and neighborhood branch locations across Jacksonville and Duval County. In 2022, the library system recorded about 2.8 million visits and circulated 4.7 million items.
Meet Chris Boivin, Director of Marketing at Jacksonville! With over 30 years of experience in marketing and communications, Chris taps into his expertise to help people and organizations communicate effectively. He is a valuable member of the Library Marketing Conference's board, founded the Library Marketing Book Club, and speaks at marketing events across the US. The Library has been on OrangeBoy’s Savannah for the past four years. During this time, Chris, one of the Library’s Savannah super users, implemented Net Promoter Score (NPS).
What is NPS?
NPS equips Savannah libraries with the tools to measure customer loyalty. By asking a simple one-question survey, "On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this to other people?”, this method can quickly identify detractors, passives, and promoters. NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of promoters from the rate of detractors, and a score of 70 is considered excellent for most businesses. However, libraries regularly achieve scores well above that, with even smaller library systems averaging an impressive NPS of 86.7. The data shows that library customers are highly likely to recommend their local library to others. By drilling down into the responses, libraries can identify trends and make data-driven decisions to improve their services and continue to exceed customer expectations.
How does Jacksonville use NPS Score?
Jacksonville Public Library has implemented a weekly email campaign to solicit feedback from library users. The survey is sent to a randomly selected percentage of cardholders who have recently utilized the Library's services, ensuring a continuous flow of recent data. Additionally, their status is reset every few years, providing them with an opportunity to retake the survey.
The Library uses the NPS survey to improve customer satisfaction to identify and reach out to users who have expressed dissatisfaction or provide a lower score. This allows the organization to understand the reason behind the score and address any concerns. The Library's strategic agenda aims to achieve an annual target NPS of 88, and monthly reports are provided to the board and leadership to track progress. Jacksonville is committed to providing the best possible service to its customers and values their feedback in helping the Library achieve its goal.
Sharing Results with Leadership and Stake Holders
When sharing the survey results with board members and leadership, Chris and his team utilize Savannah's NPS report to provide contextual information. The report, populated in Savannah, includes a word cloud of comments and feedback from the survey, and the team selects both promoter praises and detractor comments that the Library has addressed. Although Jacksonville’s NPS fluctuates month-to-month, the team looks for additional insights beyond percentage changes in the score.
Utilizing NPS as a Proactive Predictor
As an organization, keeping a close eye on your NPS is imperative, as it can reveal valuable insights and trends. Does the NPS serve as a reliable indicator of circulation figures? How does it stack up against feedback obtained from online reviews? In what ways does it correlate with gate count and web traffic? Moreover, can individual service usage and retention rates be predicted with the help of NPS?
Upon analyzing NPS against circulation data, Chris noticed a minor yet discernible trend. When the Library's NPS decreased, circulation figures also seemed to dip. Furthermore, scores closely aligned with those obtained from Google Reviews of the Library. Jacksonville began collecting qualitative data within their NPS survey to dive deeper into the prediction process.
Using Qualitative Data and Feedback from NPS
The Library has been relying on NPS to gauge customer satisfaction, but it has faced difficulties implementing feedback and gathering practical data for smaller branches. To better understand customers' opinions, Jacksonville has added new questions to the survey, such as "Why did you select that response?" and "What need were you looking to fulfill when you used the library?" These questions have provided valuable context and helped expand the library's knowledge database.
The Library has identified location and Clusters as critical factors influencing NPS scores by analyzing the qualitative data obtained through these questions. Clusters are behavior-based customer segments within Savannah that allow a library to group its customers based on their library activities.
Interestingly, smaller branches have received lower scores due to noise and children. Furthermore, teens and event attendees have given lower scores, aligning with previous satisfaction surveys' data. On the other hand, customers who learned about library services via email gave higher scores, highlighting the effectiveness of Jacksonville's email segmentation strategy using Savannah.
“The real value of NPS for libraries lies in the verbatim responses of people who give you a passive response.”
- Chris Boivin, Director of Library Marketing, Jacksonville Public Library
Analyzing the themes and sentiments present in the feedback provided by passives is an invaluable tool for libraries. They can lead to identifying pain points and areas to invest in and gain a better understanding of the community's perception of the Library. It also presents a unique opportunity to connect with these users and encourage them to become promoters. In Jacksonville, the goal is to move passives into the promoter category, and one of the ways the Library plans to achieve this is by conducting focus groups. Boivin shared, “By soliciting feedback on what was acceptable about the Library and what improvements can be made, we hope better to understand our NPS and our users' opinions. This qualitative data will help develop strategies for converting those who simply like the library into those who actively promote it.”
Predictors and Correlations with NPS
After collecting the initial qualitative data and feedback, Jacksonville began analyzing the data and its predictors to identify strategies for better understanding the needs of its customers. Interestingly, the most predictive vector of the NPS score was location, with smaller locations having a lower score. To convert more passives into promoters, Jacksonville sought to create a larger pool of responses for smaller branches. However, more responses came in initially from customers who attended larger branches. To increase the amount of NPS data for smaller branches, the Library sent out surveys to 9% of recent users from those locations while only sending surveys to 4% of current users at their more significant, more trafficked locations.
By increasing the response pool for locations, Jacksonville modeled the results of the NPS more accurately and discovered other correlations, such as age, cluster, and length of time as a cardholder. The Library analyzed these correlations to gain insight into where and what they could target to increase the score and meet the needs of their customers. Furthermore, Jacksonville integrated the most highly correlated factors into their reporting to their governance board. The data from the NPS responses allowed the Library to identify trends and correlations and informed messaging tactics, with Savannah making the process even easier.
How NPS Works in Savannah?
The NPS feature in Savannah is set up as an automated message that goes out every week. It is sent to a percentage of customers who have used the Library recently to gather continuous data to measure. This can include customerss who have used digital resources, public computers, or had activity with physical circulation. Being that the email goes out weekly, Savannah removes customers after they receive it to prevent spam and resets the status annually to allow for customers to take it again in the future. The data from the NPS is pulled into a Business Intelligence report in Savannah for measurement and comparison of scores over time, as well as the location and cluster of those who took the survey.
Telling a Story with Data
In conclusion, Jacksonville Public Library has successfully implemented the NPS to exceed customer expectations and improve customer satisfaction consistently. By utilizing the NPS survey to identify and reach out to users who have expressed dissatisfaction, the Library gains valuable insight into the reasons behind lower scores and can address any concerns. By collecting qualitative data and feedback from the NPS survey, the Library gains a deeper understanding of what customers say about the system and can make data-driven decisions to improve their services. With the help of NPS and Savannah, the Library has been able to use data to tell its story and make data-driven decisions to improve its services and exceed customer expectations in the future.
Interested in learning more about Jacksonville’s journey utilizing Net Promoter Score? Check out our latest webinar in partnership with RIPL.
Ready to launch Net Promoter Score at your library? Contact us today!
