Navan Is the Only T&E Company That’s Transparent About Its NPS. Here’s Why.

As a user-first company, Navan is sharply focused on customer satisfaction and engagement. After all, when travelers, spenders, and managers are happy, it encourages better adoption and stronger program performance. That’s why Navan openly shares its rolling Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and a Net Promoter Score (NPS), on its Trust & Transparency page. In November, the average NPS score for Navan was 49 and CSAT was 91%.

But where do those scores come from and how are they calculated? Let’s dive into the numbers.

To track the customer experience, CSAT and NPS are the two metrics that Navan watches most carefully—and they’re numbers that travel and expense decision-makers should also consider when choosing a T&E solution.

At Navan, CSAT scores are collected at the end of each agent interaction and are a straightforward measure of how travelers and spenders interact with the company.

Collecting and calculating NPS is a more nuanced process, so it’s worth spending some time to share how Navan processes and shares this data.

Net Promoter Score is effectively a metric that indicates how willing customers are to recommend a company to peers. In other words, promoters are happy enough with the product and experience—using an iPhone, eating at a pancake house, or working with a travel and expense program—that they’re willing to recommend it to their peers. Detractors take the opposite stance, and neutral parties take no stance.

NPS data at Navan is collected at the end of each trip or expense experience. Here’s what happens: Customers using the technology are sent an email and asked to rate the interaction on a scale of 1–10. Those that rate the experience as a 9 or 10 are categorized as promoters; others that leave an 8 or 7 rating are neutral, while anything below is filed as a detractor. Subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters yields an NPS score. (To go deeper into the process, check out this excellent interactive guide from Delighted, a tool that calculates NPS for many companies like Navan.)

At Navan, a third-party tool automatically collects and calculates NPS and sends that number to the company’s Trust & Transparency page, along with CSAT, support response time, average hotel savings, average time to book, and average speed to answer. Sharing this data actively and openly helps keep Navan accountable to its support commitments and also sets the bar for the broader community; few competing travel and expense operators share this data.

Active NPS scores at Navan are also validated by third-party data. Earlier this year, Skift and Navan produced an annual research report called The State of Corporate Travel & Expense 2022, which included a survey distributed to more than 1,600 corporate travel and expense managers and travelers. Within the survey were two key questions:

• What company do you use to manage corporate travel?
• How happy are you with your current travel solution?

Based on that data, corporate travel and expense decision makers and business travelers combined give Navan an NPS of 47—a value in line with the self-reported data on the Trust & Transparency webpage.

These rolling data sets, of course, are always fluid; some months, storms throughout the heartland could push response times around or affect support responses. Hotel savings can always slide based on the economy and new inventory that Navan brings into the platform.

But by continuously publishing NPS, CSAT, and other data publicly through the Trust & Transparency page, Navan aims to shine a light on metrics that customers and potential customers should know—and raise the bar for all parties in the T&E world. It’s a standard that all corporate travel and expense decision-makers should demand from their vendors.