Almost every company on the planet vouch for providing an excellent customer experience. “Customer satisfaction is our top priority,” they all claim.
But how does one even measure customer satisfaction? Should you rely on the feedback and reviews customers leave upon successful project completion?
Well, the reviews are helpful. But they do not necessarily point towards issues or business operations that require much improvement. That’s precisely where the Net Promoter Score or NPS comes to the rescue.
The gold standard of customer experience metric, NPS, is a customer satisfaction measurement tool. In this extensive guide, we will discuss the ins and outs of the Net Promoter Score and help you improve your NPS score over time.
Let’s cut to the chase and dive right in, shall we?
What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
Let’s first define Net Promoter Score.
NPS or Net Promoter Score is a customer satisfaction measurement metric that is essentially used in customer experience programs. This is applied across business operations to measure customer loyalty, especially with a brand.
NPS scores are usually compiled after sending single-question surveys.
Net Promoter System was first developed in 2003 by Bain and Company and since then, it has been used by millions of businesses to generate customer feedback and identify issues in their business operations.
NPS helps consolidate and segment between poor and positive feedback through a simple question — “How likely is it that you would recommend (company/brand/product/service) to a friend or colleague?”
Respondents will usually rate the products or services between 0 and 10, 0 being “not at all likely to recommend” and 10 being “extremely likely to recommend.” Depending on their response, the respondents can be classified into three categories —
Promoters
Promoters are customers and respondents that are in awe of your products and services. These will usually respond with a score of 9 or 10. Such customers show the most loyalty and are the most enthusiastic customers ever.
Passives
Next on the list comes passives. These are customers that are satisfied with your products and services. However, they aren’t impressed enough to become loyal customers. Passives will respond with a score of 7 or 8.
Detractors
Detractors are the customers you should be wary of. These customers are least likely to recommend your products and services to other customers.
They will usually respond with a score of 0 to 6. These are unhappy customers that are unlikely to buy from you again.
What can you measure using Net Promoter Score?
By now you must have realized that you can measure customer loyalty using the Net Promoter System. But what do you precisely measure that helps you determine the state of customer loyalty?
The first thing you should know is that you can measure almost anything in a customer journey or business operation of your organization using an NPS score. The Net Promoter System will definitely help determine the overall NPS of a company.
But in addition to that, you can use NPS to track scores for products, stores, web pages, departments, employees, and more.
You can even implement NPS into marketing campaigns and refer to the NPS benchmarks to figure out how you perform vs. the industry.
In other words, Net Promoter System gives brands the opportunity to understand the target audience and market better and implement a feedback-driven system for business growth. The end goal is to gain as many loyal customers or promoters as possible.
Why does NPS matter? Importance of Net Promoter Score
There are several reasons why you should invest in developing Net Promoter Score surveys and questions. Indeed, there are several other customer satisfaction measurement tools at your disposal.
But, NPS prioritizes recommendations and reviews that push other customers or trigger a trickle-down effect — influencing more and more customers to make purchases.
Net Promoter System helps determine the reasons why detractors and passives don’t like your products. Dissatisfied customers can negatively impact your business revenue.
So, collecting feedback from them and reassuring them of better services help alleviate the situation.
This customer satisfaction measurement tool matters because it gives you an accurate state of customer loyalty. It shows which parts of the customer journey buyers like or dislike — allowing you to make significant changes to the business operations.
This goes a long way in making impactful referral marketing campaigns and boosting customer retention. Most importantly, NPS scores help companies gauge customer expectations, changing customer behaviors, and market trends.
Top tips to improve net promoter score
Now that you know how Net Promoter Score can help you grow your business, you should take action to improve your NPS score. Your goal should be to track NPS and take steps to improve it.
This will often resonate with growth and improvement in overall customer experience. Here are some practical tips you should follow to improve your net promoter score.
1. Get into the statistics
Note that the Net Promoter Score system makes it a little problematic to follow each and every response. Take the scoring pattern of detractors, for example.
Now detractors are customers that rate the services or product on a grade of 0 to 6. Even if the survey registers a bump in the detractors’ responses, it won’t be reflected in the overall NPS score.
So, what should you do to track the progress in customer satisfaction? Well, we suggest you always look at the average scores of all three — promoters, detractors, and passives. Track them consistently and use the average scores to make conclusions.
2. Invest in follow-ups
Customers love providing feedback, especially if it’s about their favorite brand. Did you know that 77 percent of customers will develop a positive impression of a brand if asked about their feedback?
So, don’t take that away from them. At the same time, sending NPS surveys won’t just cut it. You will also have to show the customers that you care about their feedback. This can be done by conducting follow-ups.
We all know that detractors and passives are the customers that are more likely to contribute to your company’s churn rate. Connecting with them through a round of follow-up questions will show that you care about them as customers.
If possible, reach out to them personally. Do that without fail if the customer is a detractor!
3. Make the most of promoters
Indeed, you would want to make sure detractors and passives fall in and help reduce the churn rate. But, as experts say — you should focus more on your strengths and less on your weaknesses.
We suggest the same.
Address the detractors but make sure you make the most of the promoters you already have. Promoters are people that already love your product and find it easier to work with your business.
You should reciprocate by helping them spread the love and showering them with exclusivity, the best features, promotions, and products. You can even bring them on board and make them test your beta products.
You should ask them to write reviews on review sites, refer your products to other customers, and be a part of your social media family. The idea is to build a good relationship with the promoters by engaging with them and providing value.
4. Nail the NPS survey timings
Timing is everything when it comes to sending Net Promoter Score surveys. If you are late, customers might not have a fresh impression of the transaction. This will lead to them not giving an accurate response.
Therefore, make sure you nail the “when” of NPS surveys. More importantly, timing is important because you want to check the progress of the responses over time.
At the same time, you don’t want to survey the customers too frequently and annoy them. So, precisely when should you send the NPS surveys? We suggest you send quarterly NPS surveys.
5. Couple NPS with CSATs
Experts claim that NPS alone cannot provide companies with the correct picture of their customer experience. And we second that. NPS surveys are useful. But they aren’t the holy grail of customer satisfaction measurement.
For example, customers falling in the category of promoters or passives might find some part of the experience or product problematic. But they might like your company or business overall.
This is why we suggest you couple NPS with event-based CSAT survey questions. These can be thrown in whenever customers make a purchase or take related actions.
Doing this will help you develop better and stronger business-customer relationships and address the issues.
6. Communicate with product teams (often)
Products make up a large part of the overall customer experience. Therefore, it only makes sense to cater to the product-related problems identified by customers through NPS surveys and follow-ups.
How can you address product-related issues? The simplest way to do that is by working closely with the product teams. You should communicate with the product teams by establishing effective routes for communication.
However, sharing feedback could be an issue. So, first, focus on building rapport. Once you and the product team are on the same page, go ahead and share the feedback and start working on it.
Not just that, you should develop a process or use a tool that helps you track the work being done to rectify the issues.
How to create an NPS survey?
Creating NPS surveys isn’t rocket science. It’s relatively easy, especially if you use NPS templates available on the internet. However, you should focus on generating more and more responses and determining how you’ll use the data.
Moreover, we suggest you use NPS software to create and send surveys. The software helps generate practical insights that will provide you with a comprehensive view of your customers.
But, how will you create the survey questions?
We highly recommend you follow these tips to write excellent questions —
1. Start with demographic questions
Most NPS surveys begin with companies asking demographic questions related to age, gender, location, income, and more. Why? This is because the response can help implement proper segmentation when you conduct research and analysis.
However, you don’t necessarily have to ask demographic questions. Ask them only if you need more data to feed into the systems like CRM.
2. Ask the Net Promoter Score question
The Net Promoter Score question will make the core of the NPS survey. We have already discussed what an NPS question looks like. Your NPS score will be determined primarily by the response you get to this question.
So, why use other questions? Well, NPS alone does not paint the whole picture. Coupling it with other questions helps with easier data analysis.
3. Question the reason behind the response
Next comes an open-ended question asking the reason behind the response. You can ask the customer the primary reason behind scoring your products or services.
However, the responses to these questions can be long and convoluted. So we recommend you use JustFeedback to segment the responses and save yourself a lot of time.
4. Ask follow-up questions
The last part of the process is asking follow-up questions. These questions are mostly asked to detractors and passives as they contribute most to your reducing churn rate.
This is where you try resolving the issue directly with the respondents. The idea here is to reassure them and do whatever it takes to make their experience better.
Final thoughts!
There you have it.
We have shared everything you need to know about Net Promoter Score. NPS is a customer satisfaction measurement tool that companies should certainly use.
It helps them fathom customer loyalty and determine the problems and issues leading to poor customer service. However, one should not solely rely on Net Promoter Score to come up with conclusions.
Remember, NPS is just one of many customer experience metrics. We highly recommend you couple Net Promoter Score with other customer experience metrics to develop a solid customer experience strategy.
Did you find this guide helpful? Then, don’t forget to check out other informative posts on the blog!