Chip’s growth |“A story of product and brand”
How focusing on customer experience is the key to rocketing growth
At Chip, we believe in one central growth channel, and it means everything; our customers’ experience.
This may sound odd, fluffy, and completely unrelated to growth, but it’s central to how we grow our user base. We believe that by giving our customers a truly amazing experience, we will grow… and (not to blow our own trumpet) it seems to be working quite well.
There are two main factors that affect customers’ experience, but we’ll get into that in a bit. This article will fundamentally discuss how we use a customer’s experience to grow our user base, and grow it fast.
“Sounds like fluff to me”
Well, it is a bit, and that’s why we use a metric to measure our customer love.
We use something called Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure how much our customers like our product. NPS asks customers a simple question “On a scale of 1–10 how likely are you to recommend Chip to a friend”.
If you’ve ever had a product ask you that, they’re trying to find out their NPS.
As an example of NPS, Tesla (reportedly) has a stupidly high NPS of 98. Monzo has an NPS of 68. Most British Banks have an NPS of -50.
Skip boring bit of how to calculate NPS if you want:
People who scored nine and ten are classed as promoters (very likely to tell their friends about your product), sevens and eights are neutral (they are discounted from the equation as they have indifference to the product), sixes and below are detractors (they actively have a negative experience and would not recommend the product).
NPS is calculated by a ratio of promoters to detractors. So Tesla have basically entirely tens (promoters), whereas Banks (not Monzo) have almost entirely detractors (sixes or less).
Stop skipping here:
So, now you’re an NPS pro what does it actually mean in relation to growth? Well it simply means we need to “make” nines and tens (Promoters).
Promoters love your product so much that they would recommend it to anyone. Their experience with your product is so great that they would 10/10 recommend it to a friend.
Now, the job ain’t done there (we need to actually get them telling people), but it’s 50% of the challenge.
“How do we make 9s & 10s?”
Making a great NPS score comes down to two things:
- The Product
- The Brand. (Think back to Tesla whilst reading this section):
The Product
It’s really not easy to make an NPS groundbreaking product. A wise man (from Transferwise) once said “your product needs to be ten times better than the status quo to move NPS score” and that’s probably the easiest way of thinking about it.
Whatever your building needs to be ten times better than the other thing out there — and then you’ll rocket that NPS. Forget the colour of the buttons. Focus on what will make your product ten times better than what customers are using now.
We believe the status quo of ‘saving money’ is terrible. People have no way of doing it, returns are dreadful, banks have terrible UX… so that’s where we start.
How can we build the “best savings account in the world?”. A savings account that helps you save, gets you great returns & has a good UX. We’re not their yet — but we’re on that journey. And that’s how we’re raising our Product NPS.
The Brand
The second piece of the puzzle is the brand. This is generally easier than the product section (but I am a marketer 🤓). The brand is everything else around your product, the halo above it, the temple it sits in.
What tone do you want your customers to have when they think of your business? Is it exclusive? Lifestyle? Functional? (Think of Tesla). You need a brand that is clear, bold, and (most importantly) honest.
At Chip we have two main focuses with the brand. Firstly, we’re an “antibank”. We don’t talk like a bank, we don’t talk like we’re in finance. We are the polar opposite of that.
We use emojis, we use gifs/memes, and we generally don’t take ourselves too seriously. But, we have heart in what we do and we really care. I’ll do a separate article about Chip’s values but there are eight of them. We make sure they all shine through through the words we write, and the images we use.
The second element of our brand is the fact we’re a startup. We’re on a journey to “build the best savings account in the world” and we embrace that journey.
We want to take our users on that journey with us! This was amplified by our decision to run our two crowdfunds (in 2018 we ran the biggest crowdraise in UK history).
At the end of the day we’re building Chip for you, it seems only fair that you build it with us too. The amplification of the startup life within our brand enables Chip to have a greater personality, greater character and greater passion. It enables us to talk to our customers on a human level and get them bought into our journey.
“So tangibly what the hell does this actually mean?”
Well, every decision we make centres around “Will this turn a customer into a 9 or 10?”.
- How can the app deliver an experience that will turn someone into a 10?
- How does customer service deliver an experience turning someone into a 10?
- How does that blog post turn someone into a 10?
- How does that event we run turn someone into a 10?
You get the picture, we’re pretty obsessed. But, that question is everything.
“So, you have a lot of 9's and 10’s. What now?”
Well centring on nines and tens lowers churn and encourages growth. So now what? Well remember above I said:
“Now, the job ain’t done there (we need to actually get them telling people) but it’s 50% of the challenge.”
Well, the other 50% is when we go ahead and “encourage”. I’ll write a follow-up article about how we do this — but… [spoiler]… it’s viral loops.
Stay tuned until next time where i’ll write about viral loops. Maybe I’ll do another article about specific things that move and shake NPS — comment if you want to see that!
But until then ✌. Alex
Email me at: alex@getchip.uk
