What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a concept to measure client engagement and loyalty. It is a method of measuring how willing your clients are to recommend your company and products to their friends or colleagues.
NPS Calculation
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is calculated based on the response to one question: “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?”. Responses are divided into three categories:
- 0-6: Detractors – Clients who are highly dissatisfied with your organization and spread negative word of mouth.
- 7-8: Passives – Clients who are neither emotionally invested nor disengaged.
- 9-10: Promoters – Clients who are extremely loyal to your business and spread positivity.
NPS = Number of Promoters – Number of Detractors / Total Number of Respondents X 100
Tips to Administer NPS Effectively in your Business
Ask a follow-up question | Quantitative + Qualitative
NPS is a simple and effective measure of your customer experience framed around how likely your customers are to recommend your services to others. However, an equally important component of your NPS strategy should be to prompt the user to provide more clarity around their sentiment - "What prompted you to provide that score?"
Asking the second, open-ended question should provide critical information needed to understand the customer's sentiment and reasoning behind providing the NPS score/rating. Without the follow-up question, you'll have the NPS Score rating, but no clue what to do with it.
Focus on all the responses, not just Detractors
The responses indicating that the customer is NOT likely to recommend your services (Detractors = 0-6 on the NPS Scale) are potentially problematic for your brand. Not only are these customers a threat to spreading negative word-of-mouth but they can also be quite draining for your employees to deal with regularly. Resolving the elements that have caused a customer to become a Detractor are essential and a key benefit of the NPS survey (and subsequent follow-up question) can help you do so.
However, it is also important to focus on the other two categories to nurture your customers that are Passives (7-8 on the NPS Scale) and Promoters (9-10 on the NPS Scale). You should spend time with your customers who have indicated they are a Passive, spending the effort to move them into the Promoter group.
Promoters can also be a great source of enhancing strengths within your business and customer experience process to attract new customers.
Don't inundate your customers with too many surveys
NPS survey should be sent to your customers no more frequently than quarterly. This will provide enough data to see trends, while also allowing yourself more time to evaluate feedback and institute change. Sending the survey too often will certainly be an annoyance to your customers and will provide you less time to correct anything necessary to improve the score.
Give them a heads up
The most effective way to increase any survey response rates is to ask. The most effective time for this discussion is when you speak to your customer stakeholders. If you have regular check-ins with your customers, you should leverage this time as an opportunity to explain the NPS program you're looking to put in place. Let them know what the NPS survey is gauging, and how frequently you plan to send to them.
It is important that they know what to expect, as well as what you plan to do with the feedback. Let your clients know that in addition to your CSAT Surveys (individual ticket-by-ticket interaction), you are aiming to measure their general sentiment about working with you. Communicate to them that you will capture the feedback and review any issues with them. As long as your customers feel that they're being heard, and that the feedback is being taken into account and actioned, they will be more likely to provide you timely feedback.
Consider segmenting your Customer groups
You may want to segregate your customers into different tiers based on contracts, revenue or tiers of support that you provide. Different tiers of customers may have different experiences with your services and thus can provide different outlooks.
You can set up multiple NPS Campaigns and group your customers to measure and track separately. Ex: If you have a Bronze, Silver and Gold tier of customers, you may find that customers in your Bronze tier are more likely to be unhappy more frequently. You may also find that while you hope all of your customers are happy, you truly care more about the Gold tier package as they have agreed to work more closely and invest in your organization.
Send it at the same time in each customer's journey
Consider beginning the NPS survey with a customer after one of two defined trigger points: Either after a certain amount of time or after a certain event. Ex: Send the first Quarterly NPS Survey to a customer after they have completed your onboarding program (Event) or send it after 90 days of working with you (Time).
This will ensure that your customers have a relatively similar experience across the board, and thus the answers provided on the NPS Survey can be considered somewhat consistent/neutral.