What do different customer groups think of your brand or products? How loyal are they? Do they like your brand enough to recommend it to their friends or colleagues? For a marketing/communications manager, these are important things to know about your customer base.
Sending out a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to your customers is a powerful, yet simple, way of gauging your customers’ loyalty to your company and the value of your brand.
This benchmarking survey is used by companies large and small across all industries. Examples of larger users include Walmart, Costco, Exxon Mobil, Berkshire Hathaway, General Motors, Amazon, Google and many others.
What is NPS – An Overview
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that seeks to measure not just customer satisfaction but whether customers like your company enough that they’d recommend it to others.
The index is derived from a calculation based upon answers to a simple question, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Customers rate their responses from 1 to 10 and are grouped into three categories: “detractors (0-6)”, “passives” (7-8), and “promoters” (9-10).
You can compute your own NPS by using a simple Net Promoter Score calculation. Or better yet, you can use an NPS Survey Template provided by several online survey platforms such as SurveyMonkey (our choice), Zoho Survey and others, which will calculate the data for you and provide results in a user-friendly format in real-time.
Anything above zero is considered acceptable, but comparing your score against the “global benchmark” (currently 41 NPS, SurveyMonkey) tells you if your score is in the “good” range. Wherever you are on the scale is your company’s baseline for measuring future customer satisfaction improvement.
NPS as a Motivating Force
If used properly in your organization, NPS is more than a static tool of measurement. The results of the survey can be used to motivate your staff, inform product improvement, inspire new product development and, ultimately, grow your sales.
1. Inspire your team to greater heights
Too often, the results of customer service surveys remain stuck near the top of the ladder, never filtering down to other levels of the organization. Informing people within the business about what NPS is and how it affects the company can improve the way your company operates. If your NPS score indicates customer service or sales is below expectations, this could motivate them to push harder. Consider running competitions to give departments additional incentives to improve the service they provide to your customers.
2. Pinpoint areas of improvement or opportunity
In the purest sense, NPS is a single “would you recommend?” question. But most marketers use this as an opportunity to ask the obvious follow up, “why or why not recommend?”, and to dig a little deeper with a few additional questions.
Questions can be multiple choice, performance rankings in specific areas of focus, or open-ended. The key is to keep the list of additional questions focused and brief. The survey shouldn’t take up more than 3 or 4 minutes of their time or response rates will drop off.
Good follow-up questions to ask include:
- What is the primary reason for your score?
- When looking for [your product or service here], how likely are you to consider our company first?
- How would you rank [your product or service] performance in the following areas when compared to our competitors?
- How can we improve your experience?
- Which features do you value/use the most?
- What can we do better to earn your loyalty?
Answers to these questions provide revealing insights into which aspects of products that your customers value the most, while uncovering pain points that need to be addressed. This is valuable input for product managers and their teams as they work to improve the current lineup and launch new products.
3. Send Thank-You Messages
If you think of the NPS survey as the beginning of a dialog with your customers, you will understand why it is important to respond with a “thank you” tailored to the specific category they fall in – Promoters, Passives, Detractors.
Now is the opportunity to show them that you care about their needs and that you are listening. Thank them for taking the time to share their feelings about your products and services and tell them that their input will be critical to ongoing improvement.
“Thank you” messaging ideas:
- Promoters – Thank them for being a fan of your product and let them know you’ll continue to strive to improve the customer experience.
- Passives – Let them know that their suggestions will play a major role in helping your company identify opportunities to improve.
- Detractors – Tell them that you value all input – positive and negative – and that you appreciate them taking the time to share. Also, you could mention that you might be reaching out to them again to learn about how you can further improve your products and services to meet their expectations.
4. Turn NPS Detractors into Promoters
It’s a good idea to go beyond “thank you” when it comes to Detractors. Launching a program to “flip” Detractors into Promoters will encourage your customer service team and product managers to actively engage with disaffected customers to address their concerns and learn how to rectify them.
5. Engage Influencers on Social Media
Becoming a thought leader in your industry means staying on good terms with key social media influencers. Identify influencers and maintain a positive conversation with them online. Their followers will see the conversation, which could impact their perception of your brand and, ultimately, your NPS score.
Contact Us to Get Started!
NPS is only effective if it sets in motion a process of self-analysis and continuous improvement. It’s not a one-time thing and it needs to be shared throughout your organization to leverage its power.
Heinzeroth can help you set up and maintain yourNPS surveys and provide reports that help you put results into action. Contact us today to learn more.
