E-commerce giant Flipkart is in a spot of bother: its net promoter score (NPS) — a measure of customer satisfaction — is down to a new low. The company, however, claims it is growing steadily.
Company sources told BusinessLine that the NPS had slipped badly last year — one source said it had turned negative — because of issues with sellers. As the number of sellers grew, so did the complaints. Over the course of the year, the number of sellers went up from 20,000 to 80,000.
Among the new sellers, there were many who tried to mark up the prices on their products, only to later offer discounts. Some products and services were found to be of poor quality.
Cracking the whip, Flipkart pushed out the errant sellers, hoping to bring back quality and delivery efficiency. The Flipkart Assured initiative launched last week is one major measure designed to win back customer loyalty and inspire confidence.
A company spokesperson said Flipkart has been taking measures to return to a healthy growth rate.
“In the past few months, we have notably raised the execution game, speed of customer delivery and product quality. All this has led to a significant growth in the customer NPS score and a healthy lead over competition. However, our internal metrics are confidential and we do not share these figures externally,” he said.
Mihir Kittur, Co-founder at analytics firm Ugam, pointed out that NPS is measured on a scale of 1 to 10, with a score of 10 indicating high customer satisfaction and loyalty. He said a company usually keeps tabs of how many customers have returned a score of eight or above, and tries to improve that percentage over time.