Your company's long-term success is built on a loyal customer base. If you want to encourage your clients to stay for the long haul, you need to provide a stellar experience. But how do you do that? It starts with understanding what customers and clients like and dislike so you can make appropriate changes.
Surveys are a good way to gather essential feedback from your customers. Specifically, a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is a simple, effective way to gauge how customers feel about your company.
Although the Net Promoter Score by definition is simple, it’s still crucial to make sure you’re following best practices when implementing NPS. Read on to learn how to use NPS to gather meaningful insights.
Understanding Net Promoter Score Fundamentals
Net Promoter Score is one of the most popular customer satisfaction metrics. It uses a single question to measure a client’s sentiment toward a brand.
Here’s the standard NPS question: “How likely are you to recommend [COMPANY NAME] to a friend or colleague?” It’s usually posed in a survey with numerical responses from 0 (not likely) to 10 (very likely).
Even though this question is simple, it can be extremely effective. Because it’s phrased to focus on the respondent (not the company) and doesn’t take long to answer, more people are likely to submit an answer rather than skip it.
But asking this survey question is just the first step. The real value comes in using the responses to calculate the overall Net Promoter Score. Before you can do that, however, you need to know that each response falls into one of three categories.
Detractors
As the name suggests, detractor scores range from 0 to 6 and represent customers who are dissatisfied. These customers will probably switch to one of your competitors and may even be unhappy enough to write a negative review, which could discourage others from working with your company.
Passives
People who answer the survey question with a 7 or 8 are counted as passives. They’re probably satisfied with your product and not motivated to leave for a competitor. Passives aren’t part of the NPS calculation.
Promoters
Loyal customers are called promoters — they’re the ones who answer the question with a 9 or 10. These clients are very satisfied and are likely to make recurring purchases, write a positive review, and recommend your company to peers.
Calculating NPS score
The NPS score is between -100 and 100. It’s calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The NPS formula is:
NPS = %Promoters - %Detractors
Timing and Frequency of NPS Surveys
The best time to send an NPS survey, and how often you should send them, depends on what you want to measure. Customers’ overall satisfaction with your company or their experience with a specific interaction they had with your company will influence when your NPS survey is sent.
Relationship NPS Survey
If you want to know how customers feel about your brand in general, use a relationship NPS survey. It’s usually best to send this type of survey at regular intervals, such as quarterly or annually.
Transactional NPS Survey
Are you more interested in customer feedback tools that offer insight into specific interactions with your customers? Then consider setting up a transactional survey instead.
This approach gathers feedback following a customer interaction, such as making a purchase or interacting with a customer support representative. For a transactional survey, you could consider changing the wording of the question slightly.
For example, if you’re asking for feedback after a purchase, you could ask “Based on your recent purchase, how likely are you to recommend [COMPANY NAME] to a friend or colleague?” Following a customer support interaction, you could ask “How likely are you to recommend [COMPANY NAME] based on your experience with our customer support team?”
No matter which type of NPS survey you’re using, avoid the temptation to ask for feedback too often, which can give customers a negative impression of your brand and reduce response rates.
NPS Survey Questionnaire Design
The basic NPS survey is a single question. You can choose to include additional survey questions following this first numerical response. For example, you could add open-ended questions:
- “What’s the main reason for your score?”
- “How can we improve your experience?
- “What do you like most/least about [COMPANY NAME]?”
- “What’s one thing we can do better?”
Adding these open-ended questions gives your customer the chance to provide valuable quantitative and qualitative feedback. Although there are countless questions that could provide valuable insights, you don’t want to add so many that your survey becomes ineffective. Make sure you word the questions as clearly and concisely as possible so respondents don’t get distracted, bored, or confused by a long list of rambling questions.
NPS Survey Distribution channels
How should you send your customers NPS surveys? There are several options, each with pros and cons.
Email
This is one of the most popular options for sending NPS surveys. Most email providers and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms offer integrations and automation tools that make it easy to distribute NPS surveys. If you choose to send your survey via email, take the time to create a strong subject line that encourages the recipient to actually open the email.
Text messages (SMS)
Another approach is to send your NPS survey to a customer’s phone. This option can work well if your customers are part of a younger demographic — most younger consumers prefer to communicate with brands via text rather than email.
If you choose to send your survey via text, use concise language and include a very clear call to action. For example, you could ask the basic NPS question and follow it with “Reply with a number between 0 and 10 to rate your experience.”
In-app
You can also deliver your NPS survey directly in your app or software platform. Sprig’s In-Product Surveys allow you to gather real-time feedback from users while they’re actively working with your product. In-app surveys tend to have very high response rates, showing you how customers feel about specific aspects of your product.
Sprig’s Feedback tool is also specifically designed to track NPS. Feedback enables you to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty on autopilot by capturing “always-on” feedback right in your product.
Ways to Increase NPS Survey Response Rates
When conducting surveys, it’s important to get as many responses as possible. A larger sample size gives you more actionable customer insights you can use to inform customer retention strategies.
One of the best ways to get the responses you want is to keep your survey short and simple. NPS surveys, by their very nature, already meet this definition. Most customers will opt out of a survey with numerous questions, especially if they’re open-ended. They’ll be more likely to respond if it’s clear that doing so won’t take a lot of time or effort.
As discussed earlier, in-product surveys tend to get more responses. If you choose to send email surveys instead, consider incorporating some methods from personalized marketing strategies, such as including the recipient’s name and tailoring the content to reference a recent interaction.
You may also consider incentivizing customers to take your NPS survey — just make sure it’s clear you’re offering a reward for taking the survey, not a bribe for a good score. A small discount on their next purchase or a free month’s subscription could work well. Another option is to enter survey respondents into a raffle for a prize, which may be more financially sustainable than giving discounts to every respondent.
Analyzing and Acting on Feedback from NPS Surveys
While it is a customer loyalty measurement, your NPS score by itself isn’t extremely useful. You’ll learn more by comparing your score to the benchmarks for your industry. For example, in 2022, the NPS benchmark for the IT industry was +39. In the same year, the benchmark for SaaS/Computer Software companies was +41.
You can also monitor your relationship NPS scores over time. Hopefully, you’ll see those scores go up as you evolve your products and refine your brand. If you see scores start to dip, look for potential causes — maybe a new product or pricing change wasn’t received well.
If you also included follow-up questions in your NPS survey, don’t forget to evaluate those responses. Your customers’ answers to open-ended questions can be an extremely useful source of information about your brand and products.
For example, if you see a high percentage of customers giving low NPS scores after an interaction with your customer service team, that’s where you should look to make improvements.
Sprig’s AI Analysis tool makes it easy, automatically applying proven feedback analysis techniques to filter through responses and identify key insights. In the words of Sprig’s client Ramp, “Sprig AI saved our team hours of work trying to understand which types of users are giving what feedback and what the themes are.”
Challenges of NPS surveys
Although NPS surveys can be useful to support data-driven decision-making, they’re not without problems. Some of the most common challenges are:
- Low response rates: Using the wrong channels and sending surveys too often can result in low response rates. Try using a different distribution channel and/or surveying your customers less frequently.
- Inaccurate responses: The NPS survey isn’t perfect — you’ll still get some biased responses that don’t accurately reflect consumer behavior trends. That’s why it’s important to gather other types of user feedback beyond just NPS scores.
- Lack of context: NPS numbers alone may not offer as much insight as you want from your customers. Adding one or two engaging follow-up questions can help you gain context to understand how those numbers relate to specific aspects of your company or products.
While NPS numbers are important, they aren’t everything. It’s essential to augment this type of quantitative data with qualitative responses. With Sprig’s Replays tool, you can view clips of user behavior and gain insights into specific issues that aren’t obvious from NPS ratings.
NPS vs. CSAT
A CSAT (customer satisfaction) score is an alternative to NPS. While NPS can offer insights into long-term customer loyalty, CSAT is usually a better indicator of short-term customer sentiment.
Like NPS, CSAT relies on a simple question: “How satisfied are you with our product?” You can request numerical responses between 1 and 5 or between 1 and 10. Consider adding a couple of open-ended questions to learn why customers chose their numerical score.
CSAT responses are divided into just two categories: positive and negative. Positive scores are 4-5 (5-point scale) or 8-10 (10-point scale). Lower numbers are negative.
Your CSAT score is the percentage of satisfied customers. Calculate it by dividing the number of positive responses by the number of total responses. What’s a good CSAT score? In 2022, the benchmark for software and SaaS was 78.
CSAT can be a better option than NPS when you want to know how your customers are feeling at the moment or about specific products or aspects of your company. A customer may find it easier to answer whether they’re satisfied with a specific product than whether they’d recommend it to a friend.
Get real-time survey input from customers
As helpful as NPS is, it’s not the only kind of customer feedback you need. In fact, in-product surveys outperform external surveys. That’s why Sprig allows you to send customized surveys to targeted customers and to see snapshots and recordings of real-time user behavior. Additionally, Sprig’s AI Analysis tools can take all of that data and analyze it for you, saving time and providing you and your employees with accurate, applicable insights.
Are you ready to gain a better understanding of your customer base — by actually getting the feedback and data you need? Start your Sprig free trial today.