March 12, 2020
Net Promoter Score (NPS) should be much more than just collecting scores from your customers. You should, of course, keep track of your score and any changes - but the most important and often overlooked element of NPS is the qualitative feedback that gives you the why behind the score, analysing and responding to this feedback allows your business to truly hear the voice of your customer.
NPS is a customer satisfaction benchmark that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your business. Typically the NPS rating scale is sent to your customers accompanied by the question “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?”. Customers then click on a number and are asked for comments on why they chose the score they clicked. The responses are then categorised into three groups:
Promoters: Customers who answer the question with 9-10
Passives: Customers who answer the question with 7-8
Detractors: Customers who answer the question with 0-6
To calculate your company-wide NPS score, you should add up how many responses you earned in each category, and subtract your detractors from your promoters. Passive responses are left out of the equation because they are neither a promoter or a detractor and sit in the middle. The key to achieving a high NPS is having a much greater number of promoters than detractors.
For example, if you surveyed 100 customers and 40% were detractors with 50% being promoters, your NPS would be 10 (50% - 40% = 10). Whereas, if you surveyed your 100 customers and only 20% were detractors, your NPS score would jump up to 30 — representing a 20% greater chance your customers will recommend your company.
In this post, we will discuss 6 actionable ways to not only improve your NPS response rate but also allow you to gather an accurate understanding of how your company, product or service is perceived by your customers along with collecting actionable feedback to improve your NPS score.
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First and foremost, just like in face-to-face conversations, the wording, tone, and phrasing of a survey question can have a large impact on someone’s response. Therefore your choice of words is crucial to ensuring your customers respond.
Typically NPS is sent as an email, which often drops into your customers Inbox and is simply ignored. Many companies are now opting for alternate ways to deliver NPS within their application. Your customers are much more likely to respond to a pop-up message while actively using your application than they are to an email that drops unexpectedly into their mailbox. A company leading the charge on in-app and dynamic ways to collect NPS is AskNicely.
If you do have to collect NPS via email ensure the email is personalised to the customer you're sending it to, greets them by name and has a clear call to action (CTA) in the subject line.
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Sending an NPS to your customer seven days after they onboard with you will not provide you with an accurate score as they won't have spent sufficient time using your product/service and interacting with your various teams yet. Whilst it's good to gather your customers feedback on their onboarding process, this should be done via a specific survey and not via NPS.
Similarly sending out an NPS survey to all of your customers at the same time simply means you won't be able to collect actionable feedback as you will have too many responses all at once to work through. Instead, look to send NPS out to a set number of your customers every month, expect around a 5-10% response rate. Ensure your teams can handle that many responses and have the capacity to look at each one, gathering actionable feedback from each and responding to the customer where applicable.
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Once one of your customers clicks an NPS rating from an email or in-app message, don't just ask them for "Any other comments" - it's not reflective of their score and will lead to an extremely low response rate for comments.
Instead use an NPS tool that allows you to dynamically change the message the customer sees after clicking a score, for example, a customer clicking 1 as their NPS score should see a message along the lines of "We're really sorry we haven't met your expectations here, please let us know how we can improve and we will ensure one of our team follows up with you in the next 48 hours", and a customer leaving a score of 10 should see a message similar to "Wow, thanks! We're really pleased you're enjoying using our product. If you'd be happy to be contacted for a case study, please let us know".
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Just like with many other forms of communication, your customers want to be acknowledged. Once they submit an NPS score, respond to them to thank them for taking the time to share their feedback and also acknowledge any comments they have added. For example, if they've said they would have submitted a higher NPS score if a certain feature was developed, then let them know you've added it to your feature request tool (if it's a public tool, share the link with them so they can also see it). Most importantly follow up with them, when the feature gets released be sure to let them know - it will almost definitely affect their next NPS response.
Your customers will be significantly more likely to respond to another NPS in the future if you respond to them after they share their feedback. If they don't hear anything back from you, they are almost certainly going to ignore future requests for them to submit NPS.
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Clearly paying your customers to submit NPS is not what we're recommending here, this could easily be seen as paying for NPS scores, and that is something that should never be considered. By incentivising we mean giving your customer a reason to submit NPS, a great way to do this is by donating a specific amount to a chosen charity for every NPS response you receive, that way you will receive a higher number of NPS responses than with no incentive and a charity (or multiple charities) benefit also.
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NPS is not just a statistic that should be shared within your Customer Success department; it should be shared with the whole company as the NPS score is a reflection of your entire business. An easy way to do this is by creating a dashboard which all employees have access to, the dashboard should show your rolling (current) NPS score, along with a historical view to see trending, and a breakdown of NPS per region if your business is global. The dashboard should also show the latest NPS responses and their comments so your employees can see the context behind the latest scores.
You should also consider piping NPS responses into a Slack channel; it's a great way to celebrate the promoter scores with your teams and equally powerful to set actions & followups on detractor responses.
Of course, NPS is directly linked to your customer's experience. Negative customer experience will result in an equally negative NPS response (detractor), you can ensure your existing customers remain delighted with their experience whilst you concentrate on growing your business by partnering with The SaaSy People, contact us today to find out how!
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