Transparency is more than a buzzword at Approved Sheet Metal (ASM); it’s how we do business.
By communicating openly with our customers and welcoming honest feedback, we stay aware of what we’re doing well and what we can do better. To optimize our growth potential, we implemented the gold standard in quality metrics systems: the Net Promoter Score℠.
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Tracking Our Shop’s Success with the Net Promoter Score
Developed by Bain & Company, NPS® is a single, easy-to-understand metric that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty. Furthermore, it reveals how likely customers are to recommend our custom fabrication shop to others.
When you receive an NPS survey from ASM, you’re asked one simple question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?” Depending on your anonymous response, NPS assigns you to one of these categories:
- Promoters (score 9-10) are highly satisfied customers who are very likely to recommend ASM to others. We aim to make everyone a Promoter!
- Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but feel somewhat neutral. They aren’t likely to actively promote or detract from ASM’s reputation.
- Detractors (score 0-6) are dissatisfied, unlikely to recommend ASM, and may even spread negative word-of-mouth.
We calculate our Net Promoter Score monthly by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The final score ranges from -100 to +100; a higher score indicates higher satisfaction.
Example: 60% Promoters - 5% Detractors = 55 NPS
Why NPS?
Approved Sheet Metal has always been fiercely customer-focused. If you’re one of our regular precision metal fabrication customers, you’ve likely been contacted at some point by an ASM representative asking, “How was your experience with us? Did we take good care of you?”
We’ll always be big fans of personal outreach, but we recognized the need for a streamlined way to collect, measure, and comprehend our customers’ feedback at scale. That’s where NPS came in, providing us with an actionable metric and (optional) customer insights. Since implementing the Net Promoter System, we’re better attuned to our customers’ needs and how to improve.
How do we gather customer feedback?
Customers can expect to receive an NPS survey approximately one month after we ship your parts. We know you’re busy, so you’ll never receive more than one NPS survey per three-month period.
What do we do with your feedback?
We put our NPS data to work right away. Everyone on ASM’s shop floor can see our latest score as well as any customer comments—good, bad, and in between. Negative feedback, in particular, allows us to “close the loop,” meaning we follow up with unhappy customers, seek to solve the problem, and develop a strategy to prevent the issue from recurring.
We fully lean into accountability by publishing our latest NPS metric on our website’s homepage, too. Knowing that our customers can see how well we’re doing motivates us to stay at the top of our game day in and day out.
How Does ASM’s Net Promoter Score Stack Up?
You can find our latest NPS number front-and-center on our website. As of December 2023, Approved Sheet Metal boasts a Net Promoter Score of 78.
How does our score compare to others in the manufacturing industry? A CustomerGauge benchmarking report published that the manufacturing sector’s average NPS was 49 in 2020. According to TrustMary, this score increased to 51 in 2021.
Finally, in 2023, CustomerGuru published a list of individual NPS scores for several well-known manufacturing industry companies. While you can’t directly compare ASM to any of the larger corporations listed below, these numbers help bring perspective to our custom fabrication shop’s hard-won Net Promoter Score:
- 3M’s 2023 NPS: 46
- Caterpillar’s 2023 NPS: 41
- General Electric’s 2023 NPS: 20
- John Deere’s 2023 NPS: 54
- U.S. Auto Parts Network’s 2023 NPS: 50
- Wolseley’s 2023 NPS: 68
Growing Toward Greatness
We’re proud of our above-average NPS score, and we’re motivated to see how much higher we can take it! Every time you provide feedback, you contribute to the future success of not only ASM but also every customer whose parts come through our shop.
Many of America’s design engineers and product developers already trust ASM to quote, fabricate, and deliver top-quality parts faster than any other custom fabrication shop. We’d be honored to do the same for you.
Request a quote and put our Net Promoter Score to the test!
