Reinventing NPS: A new way to measure perceived customer value for LinkedIn

LinkedIn ran an internal NPS tracking program among customers of its B2B products. However over time, they recognized that NPS was not a true indicator of perceived value within a B2B context. Additionally, it was often challenging to show a direct relationship between NPS and business success metrics. So LinkedIn and Hypothesis partnered on a year-long mission to rethink the way the company assesses and tracks how customers perceive value.

LinkedIn has five lines-of-business (sales solutions, marketing solutions, hiring solutions, learning solutions and LinkedIn Premium), each with its own differentiated target audience. The challenge was to understand the unique needs and drivers of each audience’s experiences, while also coming up with a consistent framework that is easily applicable and understood across the entire organization.

In this presentation, we will outline how we uncovered this problem, why it was critical to solve for it, and the research approach that we undertook – which included dozens of internal stakeholder interviews, over a hundred qualitative conversations and global quantitative surveys to current and potential LinkedIn customers. We will also provide an overview of the framework that is now at the heart of LinkedIn’s new ongoing tracking.

Key takeaways:

1. To truly measure perceived value within a B2B context, we identified two key components: the delivery of key benefits (aka getting customers to their objectives) and the reduction of effort (aka reducing friction).
2. While each line of business has its own underlying drivers of benefits and effort, this framework clearly shows that the drivers of each component are differentiated from one another and that different tactics are required to move the needle on each.
3. Leveraging these KPIs within a 2×2 framework and connecting them to behavioral business metrics enables LinkedIn to develop clear prioritization strategies.