Glossary of Terms

Deepen your understanding to drive your expertise, and share with colleagues to enlighten ideas and inspire innovation. This glossary of terms will help to elevate clarity, and guide conversations that bridge gaps across teams of shared interest in customer centricity.

What is a Detractor?

A detractor is a customer that is highly dissatisfied with a business and may engage in behavior that harms the business financially. For example, detractors often write bad reviews, criticize brands on social media, and tell friends and family not to buy from the company.

In addition to negative word-of-mouth activities, detractors impact the bottom line in other ways. Detractors turn over at high rates – they often make just one purchase before they churn, making for a less profitable relationship. They make fewer purchases and are more price sensitive than satisfied customers. Detractors can also be more expensive to serve because they are inclined to contact customer service. All-in-all, detractors are a drag on business growth.

Detractors are identified by their Net Promoter Scores® (NPS®). A Net Promoter survey asks one simple but insightful question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?” Customers answer the question using a 0-10 scale where zero means not at all likely. Anyone whose response is zero through six is a detractor.

To lessen the negative financial impact of detractors and recoup their acquisition and service costs, companies should focus on turning detractors into promoters (the other end of the NPS spectrum). Unlike detractors, promoters are highly satisfied customers that recommend businesses and products to friends and colleagues. To change negative perceptions, organizations should focus on optimizing CX and the customer journey. In particular, businesses should close the loop with individual detractors and address their grievances with positive action.

About NICE Satmetrix

NICE Satmetrix is the leading global provider of Voice of the Customer (VOC) software used by the world's most forward-thinking companies to analyze and transform their customer service interactions. Our Customer Journey-based solution combines and analyzes customer interactions, solicited feedback, and operational data at enterprise scale to uncover blind spots, increase customer satisfaction and improve agent performance.

With consumers reaching out to contact centers for more reasons than ever before, providing consistent and optimized experiences is central to fostering loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. NICE Satmetrix VOC enables businesses of all sizes to grow the value of customer service touchpoints and operationalize customer feedback.

With NICE Satmetrix VOC, the top VOC solution for contact centers, contact centers get access to:

Integrations with NICE inContact CXone and the NICE portfolio of contact center solutions

  • Superior analytics
  • Digital omnichannel and hassle-free IVR integrations
  • Customer Journey-based design
  • One-stop-shop for all your contact center VOC needs

NICE Satmetrix is the co-creator of the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), one of the best indicators of customer loyalty and predictors of business growth. We've instilled our deep knowledge of consumer behavior into our VOC software to make NICE Satmetrix holistic VOC a true one-stop shop for Voice of the Customer with a self-service solution that meets the needs of organizations of every size.

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