01*)%&0 - get.asknicely.com · we know first-hand how valuable net promoter score® (nps) data...
TRANSCRIPT
Happier, morevaluable customers
With NPS®
We know first-hand how valuable Net Promoter Score® (NPS) data is to customer facing businesses.
We wanted to do something useful with that knowledge, so we’ve pooled it together with our customers’ experiences to come up with this ultra-comprehensive guide to NPS.
If you want to know how your customers feel about your business, then this is the guide for you. Whether you’re a CEO, finance leader or a customer service legend, we’ve included useful information to help you make the most of your NPS program.
Aaron, John and the AskNicely Team.
Basically, the most complete guide to NPS you’ll find anywhere.The definitive nps®
contentsIt’s all about customer happiness 4
A quick intro to Net Promoter Score 12
NPS: the nitty gritty 20
Making NPS happen in your industry 34
Understanding your NPS insights 44
Using NPS for happier customers! 59
The NPS bonus round 67
It’s all about customer happiness
Do you havecustomers? Do you want
morecustomers?
You’re going to need to know what’sworking for your
current customers
You’re goingto need some
As you grow,you’ll need to
know what newcustomers are liking
and not liking
Then you’ll needto work really hard
to look afterthe ones you’ve got
Chnaged your mind?Really do want
more customers?
YES!You need to measure
customer satisfaction
STARTHere to figure out ifyou need to measure
customer satisfaction
DO I need to measurecustomer satisfaction
Decision flow-chart
Customer happiness
Before getting started it’s a good idea to take a step back and think about what you want to get out of the process – what business needs are you trying to solve for?
No doubt you’ve got your own ideas, but there may be other stakeholders who you need to get onboard and ultimately, the more impact you can make with your customer happiness program, the stronger it will be.
Whether you’re making your first move into measuring customer satisfaction for your business or supplementing tools you’re already using it’s important to get everyone on the same page right from the start.
This isn’t just about winning everyone’s approval of your idea at the board meeting and getting funding. Even if you’re the CEO, you’re going to need more than just sign-off on the expense to make your NPS program successful. That’s why it’s important to establish some clear objectives at the start.
Think about your relationship with your customers across the business and pay special attention to areas where it seems that visibility into the customer relationship is lacking. Different businesses will have different challenges and different areas of the business will have different needs in terms of data they want out of your customer happiness measurement.
Later on in this guide we’ll dive into specific needs for different industries and different areas of the business.
To start with though, this section goes through our top six customer happiness challenges. These are general challenges that businesses have in understanding their customers to help you look for additional wins you might be able to make with your program. These are general business challenges and definitely not only measurable using NPS®, but in section 2 we’ll look more specifically at the NPS framework and why it’s the most effective method for measuring and understanding customer happiness and satisfaction.
Building your business case
With the explosion of digital technology - in particular mobile – peoples’ attention is becoming increasingly divided and brands need to work harder to stay front-of-mind. Forward thinking, tech savvy brands like Uber, Apple, Google and Amazon make huge investment in optimizing every customer interaction to make dealing with them and using or purchasing their products as easy as possible.
The flow-on effect of this that customers become used to a certain level of ease of interaction and what was once considered outstanding is now simply the expectation. And regardless of what business you’re in your customers will measure you against the quality of experience they expect from these digital powerhouse brands.
Whether you need to make tiny improvements or massive changes, perfecting your customer experience starts with understanding what’s working for them and what’s not.
Furthermore, you want to ensure you’re regularly collecting feedback, because in this age of rapidly changing expectations you can’t rest on old data – one year’s leading edge is the next year’s middle of the road.
The changing level of customer expectations
Nowhere are these heightened customer expectations more prominent than in the younger generations - in particular the millennials (Gen-Y) who are now making up a large part of the customer base and workforce for many businesses.
For Gen-Y, feeling important is important – they don’t just want to tell you what they think, they need to know that their opinion is valued and your brand is going to listen to what they say.
So gathering feedback from Gen-Y is not only important to ensure you understand how you’re meeting their expectations – the act of asking is itself part of the experience they expect (just make sure you listen!)
There’s no shortage of horror stories that illustrate how one poor customer experience can end up online, go viral and tarnish a brand.
Ideally you’ll avoid these types of negative experience ever happening BUT… If someone does have a bad experience, it’s important that they feel they can come directly to you or your customer support team to resolve their problem before they take to social media.
By regularly collecting customer feedback, you have a good chance of reaching a customer with your feedback request before they go global. And by acting before a problem occurs, you’re creating an understanding that the feedback loop is there and open to customers. This helps to increase the likelihood that they’ll contact you first in the case of any issues.
Those pesky millennials
The social media effect
Being able to identify which customers are at risk and which are your biggest fans is not only useful for predicting business growth, it’s also very useful for marketing as well.
As digital channels have evolved over the past few years, marketing has become more and more personalized. Marketers have the ability to segment and target marketing to individual groups based on a wide range of data points to make sure their message is seen by the right people.
By understanding how happy each customer is with your business, you give the marketing team the ability to also group customers based on their level of satisfaction. This can make marketing campaigns much more effective and less costly.
Forecasting & modelling
and all that important business stuff
If you’re not measuring customer satisfaction regularly, then you’re likely to be getting skewed feedback from only a small part of your customer base.
Unfortunately most people won’t take the feedback initiative unless they have a really bad or really good experience. And it’s more often people who have a bad experience that feel the need to talk about it.
This is what creates a bias in your results if you’re only collecting feedback on an ad-hoc basis as and when customers send it your way. The impact can be bad for businesses as a relatively low number of negative experiences can seem much worse without the context of an overall rating to keep it in perspective.
Just because you don’t actively seek feedback out, doesn’t mean customers won’t give it to you – whether that be publicly via social media and review sites, or via direct contact.
Not every customer is always right
A quick intro tonet promoter score
You certainly don’t have to use the NPS method to collect customer feedback, and it may not be the only measure you use (we’ll get to that later) but there are a number of reasons why it’s become one of the most popular approach around.
A (very) brief history lesson.
The Net Promoter Score framework was developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company and was released in the Harvard Business review in 2003. The framework was created following extensive research into customer satisfaction and looking at a range of existing techniques companies were using to measure levels of satisfaction.
NPS: what’s the big deal?
An NPS survey always consists of a single question asking the respondent how likely they are to recommend your business/brand to a friend or colleague. Generally, respondents are given a scale of 0-10 on which to respond where 0 = not at all and 10 = very likely.
It’s common practice to then follow with an open-ended question asking for feedback on what they think you could do to improve their rating in the future.
We’ll get into some of the nitty gritty
on how to structure those questions in the collect chapter shortly.
Responses are then categorized into three groups:Promoters (9 & 10)Passives (7 & 8)Detractors (0-6)
Putting the Net in Net Promoter:
Once you’ve collected your rating out of ten from as many customers
as you can, the NPS framework gives us a way to roll-up that data to get an overall rating.
This is done by calculating the percentage of total respondents that were in each of the groups (Promoters, Passives and Detractors). Then taking the Percentage of detractors and subtracting it from the percentage of promoters.
This gives an overall figure which can then be used to monitor satisfaction across all customers.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Detractors Passives Promoters
The NPS survey format has been carefully designed to be as easy as possible for customers, while also giving you the most useful data possible at the other end.
As we’ve already established, there’s definite value in collecting customer feedback. The biggest problem most businesses face when setting out to do this is simply getting customers to complete a survey in the first place.
With so many businesses now looking to measure satisfaction, customers are becoming bombarded by constant surveys. Compounding matters, people are becoming more and more precious about their time in general.Even the word “survey” or “questions” is enough to scare some people off. And if they make it past the first hurdle of agreeing to participate,
every question you add beyond the first two can lose you 30-50% of your respondents.
When you’re trying to get the best picture of your overall customer satisfaction, it’s crucial to collect feedback from as many customers as possible. However, you also need to collect enough useful information to give you something meaningful to work with. So you need to walk a very fine line between maximizing your response rate and maximising the value of data you get out of the survey.
And that’s where NPS strikes a perfect balance: the simple one-click initial question makes it easy for customers to provide you with an answer, while the rating scale gives enough detail for you to understand more about how they’re feeling.
customers, every question beyond the
Why so simple?
zappos
tony hsiehZappos
While seemingly simple, the question itself has been carefully designed to give you the most reliable and thorough data possible.
Asking customers about whether they are likely to recommend your business/product/service has a strong correlation to their overall satisfaction. Yet, asking them to consider whether they would recommend you removes some of the emotion from a flat-out “how happy are you with our brand?”
This ultimately gives more consistent ratings because customers think more about their overall experience
when recommending a business to a friend rather than focusing just on a recent outstanding experience (either good or bad).
The more complexity you add to a survey question, the higher the likelihood of introducing bias that may influence your customers. A simple survey question leaves less room for misinterpretation or unintentional bias.
And by adding a second open-ended question as a follow-up, you give your customers a chance to add more detail to their responses. This is where you can gain valuable insight on an individual level.
What’s in a question?
how likely Are you to recommenDus to a friend or colleague?
When it comes to the answer having a numeric scale - in particular a 10-point scale is important for a number of reasons. First of all, using a plain numbered scale as opposed to points labelled with words further helps to reduce ambiguity and bias in the responses.
Most importantly though, a consistently numbered scale makes it
easy to measure change and overall rating. Without the numeric scale, it would be much harder to roll up into an overall Net Promoter figure.
So you’re probably still wondering why the detractors group includes ratings all the way up to six? This is a deliberate feature of how the framework was designed. Extensive research was done comparing NPS
ratings to other key indicators of satisfaction and data from lengthier surveys. And It’s for people who give a rating below six that we start to see other strong indicators of negative potential value from that customer.
Having the groupings some-what biased towards the bottom end of the scale also helps companies look at the results a little more conservatively.�
By the numbers
NPS checklist
NPS is a great measurement tool for most businesses, but isn’t right for everyone – go through the checklist and make sure you can tick off at least half of the boxes:
Does your business rely on word-of-mouth and referrals for at least some of your customer growth?
Is gaining insights quickly a priority when talking about customer satisfaction in your business?
Do you want to monitor trends in customer satisfaction over time?
Do you have contact details for your customers (ie to send a survey out)
NPS: the nitty gritty
Collecting Data
If you’ve made it to this point you’ve probably already figured out NPS is a good fit for your business. We’ve got the basic survey format, but there’s a few other things to consider about how you’re collecting the data and these are really important to look at when selecting the platform that you’ll use to send and manage your survey results
Scheduling surveys
Yes, getting results sooner rather than later is great. It’s part of the reason you selected NPS after all, because you know it’ll get lots of responses quickly.
BUT! First you need to think about exactly when the surveys are going out and to whom. There are two main methods of deciding when to send
which also affect how your survey is positioned slightly – Relationship and Transactional surveys.
Making NPS happen
This is the batch n blast, gather a whole lot of feedback at once method. Very useful when you’re kicking off your NPS program and also helpful to include on an ongoing basis. A relationship survey goes out to a large number (or all) of your customers. Because of the wide focus, you would ask a broader question focusing on their whole relationship with the business or brand.
When thinking about when to send a relationship survey, think about how it fits into your overall communication flow – it’s basically just a matter of fitting it around anything else routine that you’ve got going out to your customers.
It’s important to ensure that any tool you use will let you segment
customers for the purpose of sending out relationship surveys so that you can easily profile a certain group within your customer base.
Segmenting your customers to select who you’re sending to is particularly important when you first start with your NPS program. If you have a large customer base that’s built up over a long time but have many customers that have not purchased from you or dealt with your company recently it may be counterproductive to send those customers a survey.
You also need to make sure your system gives you the ability to schedule send times for batch invites so that you’re not sending things in the middle of the night...
Relationship surveys
A transactional survey is triggered off a particular event. Because the survey closely follows an event or customer engagement, you will often get much better response rates with this method as the customer has the experience (and your brand) in the front of their mind.
When looking at triggering transactional surveys, consider what events you can get useful information from:
PurchasesRenewalsCustomer support requestsMajor new product updates/ releasesPlan upgrades
Transactional surveysDepending on what you’re using as a trigger, you will want to set the length of time from the event to when you send the survey – for example, if you want to measure satisfaction following a particular product purchase, make sure that you allow enough time for the customer to actually use the product before you ask them if they’d recommend it.
The really important piece to transactional surveys is ensuring that you can actually plug the necessary systems together to trigger the survey automatically, because sitting there hitting the send button every time someone buys from you isn’t really anyone’s idea of scalable.
The AskNicely tool integrates natively with a number of systems and also plugs into Zapier which has pre-built integrations with over 500 different apps and web services.
Think about how you could use your existing systems to identify those events you want to trigger a survey from:
CRMAccounting SoftwarePOSERPHelp Desk SoftwareEcommerce Systems
Make sure your NPS system can limit how often you send a survey to any given customer so you don’t overload them with survey requests – something that can cause more harm than good to the value of your brand.
This is particularly important when looking at running transactional surveys because you are likely to have multiple events that can trigger a survey. If your system is not properly equipped to handle and multiple triggers, then it can become a disaster to manage.
Don’t overdo it...
Email is not only the cheapest and most environmentally friendly way of sending out survey requests, it’s also by far the most effective way of reaching the customer at a convenient time where they are likely to fill out a survey.
People tend to react best to emails because they check them at times that are convenient to them. More intrusive methods like push messages or SMS that demand more instant attention and are likely to be ignored if they don’t arrive at a convenient time for a customer.
Arguably the most important reason for using email is to give you the ability to match the customer feedback back to your database automatically. An email address is a perfect unique identifier for a customer, giving you a common reference to be able to save data back into your CRM or other system if desired.
Of course, it’s not as simple as just sending an email – you need to think carefully about what you’re sending out. Here’s our top advice for making sure your email catches a customer’s attention and convinces them to give you feedback.
It’s all about deliveryIt’s not just when you’re sending your survey that will affect the quality of the response you get. How you send it out is also very important.
Depending on your business you may want to choose either your company name or a persona at your company to send from.
If your customers regularly deal with a single point of contact and know that person by name, then that’d be a good idea to use. However, if your customers aren’t going to be familiar with one point of contact, then it’s best to stick with the company name.
Using your normal company email domain also makes the message more trustworthy from the customer’s point of view rather than receiving an email
from an address like [email protected]!
Also, sending from an address that goes back to a real person is an important opportunity to collect additional feedback. Some customers may feel more comfortable simply writing a reply message – ideally, you want to encourage them to give feedback via the NPS survey so that it can be tracked and collected for all the good reasons we’ve just discussed. BUT, if you don’t give them the option to reply, it could be a missed opportunity.
If you’re sending out a lot of survey requests (which hopefully you are!) it may pay to look at using an alias that allows you to separate out email replies from normal email traffic rather than going back to the sender’s main inbox. You may even want to have the ability for a few different people to receive responses.
Use a real email address
What a customer sees in the first glance they take at an email can be the difference between them opening it or sending it straight to junk!
The first two pieces of information the customer sees are the subject line and the first one or two lines of the email (depending on their email client, they may see this in the preview).
So make sure your subject line is clear and catchy. You want the customer to open your email, but there’s no point using a sensational subject line if it doesn’t relate to your survey (so resist the cute kittens in the subject line).
Using a customer’s first name is also a great way to improve your connection with them. You should open your email by greeting them by name either in the subject line or the first line of the email.
First impressions count
{{customer’s first name}}, a quick question about {{your business name}}
{{customer’s first name}}, would you recommend {{your business name}}
{{customer’s first name}}, how are we doing?
{{customer’s first name}}: we’d like to know what you think.
{{customer’s first name}}: a quick survey from {{your business name}}
{{customer’s first name}}, can we ask you some questions about your experience with {{your company name}}
{{customer’s first name}}, have you got 2 mins to tell us what you think of {{your company name}}
Do this: Not this:
Make your email look the part when someone opens it! The customer has to trust that the survey request is genuine and is actually coming from your company. With an ever increasing number of phishing attempts and scams around, customers are likely to be wary of clicking anything that looks less than legit. Furthermore, if your brand isn’t present anywhere, it can create confusion and you’re missing out on a chance to strengthen brand awareness and connection with your customers.
So make sure your logo is on the email and make sure the colours match your brand.Beyond the branding, there are a couple of other elements that are really important in gaining a customer’s trust.
With security being a concern too, it’s important to ensure that anywhere you send your customers from the email is via a secure connection because you’ll be asking them to input information in the next step.
Be professional & trustworthy
Ensuring your email meets legal requirements is important. You need to give recipients the option to opt-out or unsubscribe from receiving further emails.
lego group
broaderthat they could use to evaluate its products and that the
rob markeyBain & Company
A good NPS survey email should give a brief intro and explanation as to why you’re conducting the survey and then get straight to the point. One of the beauties of email is the ability to include the initial survey question input right there in the email. By giving the customer the ability to click on their chosen rating straight from the email, you remove an extra step and a chance that they’ll get distracted and move on. It also ensures you capture that initial ranking even if they decide not to provide further feedback in the follow up question.
Note: it’s important to understand that this doesn’t mean the whole survey is conducted from within the email – once the customer clicks the first link, they’ll be transferred to a website to submit any further feedback – this is necessary because of the way email clients work.
Capture feedback directly from email
Just because you’re choosing email to send out survey requests, doesn’t mean that you won’t be reaching customers on their mobiles. The amount of time people spend on their mobile phones for email and web browsing is constantly increasing. Over half of emails are now opened from a smartphone!
So this means you need to make sure you’re thinking mobile when you send out your NPS survey. This starts with the format of the email – a well-constructed email should read equally well whether someone opens it on their computer, a tablet or smartphone.
The most important piece of the email of course is the NPS survey input itself – the numbers should be visible in the width of the screen – making a customer scroll across select the right rating is not ideal. At the same time, the numbers should also be large enough on a mobile screen to be easily clickable without introducing error by customers accidentally clicking the wrong button!
And it’s not just the email that should be mobile friendly – when a customer clicks on that first number to give their rating and then goes through to a web page to enter any further feedback, they should be easily able to enter data on any device.
Design for mobile
emailchecklist
You should make sure that whatever platform you select can let you do the things below to give your customers the best experience and give you the most chance of having your survey filled out:
Use customer details - name or company name in
Set the sender details - name and address
Brand the email with your company logo and colours
Collect the NPS rating directly from clicking the
Send mobile friendly emails
Make click-through links via a secure connection
Making NPS happen in your industry
The follow up question is an important part of the NPS survey. So even though we’ve put lots of effort into capturing that initial input it’s important not to neglect the follow up question.
The most recommended option is to have a single follow up question which is open-ended. While it’s a great opportunity to collect additional feedback, you should also make sure the customer knows their initial rating has already been captured and that further feedback is optional. Simply starting by thanking them is a great way to do this:
Asking why a customer chose the particular rating is an ideal way to structure the question because the question is the same no matter what the first rating was. Compared to something like “What could we have done better?” which doesn’t really make sense for someone who just gave you a 10.
A question like “What could we have done better?” also potentially skews the customer’s response to focus on the negative aspects – not so great for an 8 or 9 rating where you’ll probably get just as much value out of knowing what’s working for them.
The follow up question
Thanks! Can you tell us why you chose 8?
There’s a bunch of stuff to get right to ensure you get the best possible response rate for your survey and if you have a good NPS survey tool, it should take care of most of the technical stuff for you. But, assuming you get all that right, how many survey responses should you expect?
NPS produces significantly higher response rates than multi-question surveys so you can expect better than the 8-15% such tools tend to deliver.
A common benchmark is 20-40% is a good range. We see an average across all customers of 37% response rate, but do see some customers achieve over 75%.
It’s obviously good to have a high response rate and the response rate does have some indication on how engaged your customers are with your brand. However, you also need to consider when you last dealt with customers when evaluating your response rate – if you’ve just sent out a survey to your entire customer base and have some customers that you haven’t sold to for over 12 months, you might expect a lower response rate from that group.
Meeting expectations
Multi -questionsurvey(8% - 15%)
NPS®survey(Average20% - 40%)
Commercialmarketingemail clickthrough rate(4% - 7%)
(Exceptional20% - 40%)
AverageResponse Rates
This is why you’re far better offsending a dedicated email for your NPS survey than just tacking a survey on to a marketing email!
annette franz
listen, close
and communicate
The simplicity and flexibility of the NPS framework means it works well across a wide range of industries. However, there are a few things you should think about for different business types – here’s a few insider tips:
One Size fits all... mostly
SaaS businesses have some specific needs because they typically have a long on-going customer relationship. They also often have varying levels of users and customers.
Think about your user levels – you’re likely to have customer contacts who were the original decision makers in the buying process, then you may have other contacts who are the owners within the business. Then you have some who are just simply users and have no vested interest in the purchase/renewal process.
It’s important to consider these different groups when sending out your surveys – there can be a difference between the voice of your customer (the owners and decision makers) and the voice of your users.There is definitely value in collecting
feedback from all groups, but it’s important to make sure you can separate their feedback. Also think about when you’re sending surveys to different groups – it may not make sense to ask users as often as owners or decision makers. Or maybe users
Timing of sending out your survey is an important consideration for SaaS businesses – think about the usage cycle and on boarding for your product – there’s no point asking customers what they think too early on in their use of the product if they haven’t had a chance to really get into using it.
Some key triggers you might consider using to send surveys out to give you key insights into different areas of the business:
If you have an onboarding or training period send a survey to anyone who was involved in that process to evaluate that experience specifically.
How often does your support team interact with different levels of users? Send an NPS survey following a support call to evaluate sentiment immediately and see how effective your team is.
If you have customers on annual contracts or longer, send surveys to key decision makers before the renewal date to identify at-risk customers.
Software as a service
Product vs company:
It’s important to distinguish between whether you’re asking if the customer would recommend a particular product they purchased, or whether they’d recommend your company in general. This will affect how you word your initial question and you’ll also need to think about how you trigger each type of survey.
You may well want to run both general brand surveys plus product specific surveys if you have certain high value product that you want to collect data on separately.In either case, you’re probably going to use a purchase as a trigger – but you’ll need to think about timing after a purchase to actually send a survey out. If you’re asking people if they’d recommend a product, think about how long they need to accurately
gauge whether they’d recommend the product. If you’re asking them if they’d recommend your brand/store in general, you still want them to have at least had enough time to consider their purchase.
Some key things to consider are:
How often do customers typically purchase from you?
What’s the average size of a purchase (both in terms of $ value and number of products)
For individual products, what is the lifecycle of the product and is there a learning/discovery phase where the customer starts to use it or do they just jump straight in?
For either product or company based NPS surveys - and particularly if you’re going to mix both – it’s
very important to make sure you restrict how often customers will be contacted with a survey. You don’t want to be sending a general company survey one day and then a product specific one the next, or sending surveys every time someone shops with you!
Think about how to collect data:For online retailers, this is easy – most will have email addresses of customers entered as they checkout. For bricks n mortar retailers, however, it’s not always the case. That doesn’t make it impossible though. Think about how you can use your loyalty program or maybe offering e-receipts (a receipt sent to a customer’s email address rather than printed) to encourage customers to give you their email address and linking that to their purchase.
E-Commerce and retailers
As a service provider, you potentially have a couple of different measures of satisfaction you’ll want. Asking the customer if they’d recommend your business as a whole is the most common but then for some businesses it may make sense to also ask in reference to a single appointment whether someone would recommend a particular member of staff or a particular team.
Eg: A hairdresser may choose to survey customers once per quarter shortly following their appointment and ask them specifically if they would recommend the stylist they had the appointment with. But then they might send every second survey out asking if the customer would recommend the Salon to a friend.
It’s important for services business to think about the timing of sending a survey in relation to how often a customer uses your business – for a service where a customer comes to you on a weekly basis, the timing is not so critical because you’ll be fairly fresh on the customer’s mind at any time. However, for say a plumbing firm who would generally only service customers occasionally sending out a survey closer to the time of service is important.
Even for a business with regular service, timing more of a concern if sending a survey in relation to an individual team member as it relates more specifically to the most recent appointment rather their experience in general.
Service providers (B2B and B2C)
NPS is a particularly important measure for utility companies because while they have a long ongoing relationship with their customers, they tend to have relatively few actual engagements with customers. Even the monthly bill is becoming less of a contact point as people move to automated billing and email notifications.
The most common time that a utility company engages with their customers is when they have a problem. And that’s not ideal for
gauging how happy your whole customer base is! However, it does mean that your customer service team is one of the most important parts of your business to evaluate.
For utility companies, it’s well worth running a regular NPS survey asking how likely customers are to recommend their business. However, it’s also worth looking at running some triggered surveys following interactions with your customer support teams.
Surveying customers based on anniversary date can be a good idea to establish a regular cadence, but you might also like to look at historic data to establish whether there are particular times of the year, or particular events that cause your customer base to be more at risk of leaving you and time surveys just before that period to identify and react to dissatisfied customers proactively.
Utility companies
surveychecklist
The act of collecting data needs to be smooth and fast from the customer’s point of view to make sure you get the most responses possible and the most usable data out of the other end. Here’s our quick list of must-have features for an NPS survey:
Send out survey requests via email
Make the whole process mobile friendly
Have the ability to send out surveys in batches to
either your whole customer base or a portion filtered
on customer details.
And be able to send out surveys based on individual
triggers
Should be able to integrate with other systems to
trigger surveys (CRM, ERP etc)
Understanding your nps insights
1. The overall NPS rating – this is the value that should be output by your NPS survey tool in real-time. It’s the percentage of total responses that were detractors (0-6 rating) subtracted from the percentage of total responses that were promoters (9 or 10 rating). This will be a number from -100 to 100.
2. Individual NPS survey ratings – these are the ratings that each customer gave you as a response to the question “How likely is it that you would you recommend our company/service/product to a friend/colleague”. These ratings have a range of 0 to 10.
3. The additional information entered in the post survey question. Assuming you’re following our best practice guide and giving just a single open-ended question, this data will all be different, so is harder to roll-up into high level analysis in real-time than the NPS ratings, but can still be very useful in deeper reviews and understanding your results.
4. The overall response rate. The number of people who actually respond to your NPS survey is also very important in helping you measure how engaged your customer base are. Brands who have more engaged customers generally see higher response rates.
NPS Results - basics
First of all, there is no universal line in the sand defining good and bad. Your results will always be relative to your company and others in your industry. That said, it’s always important to benchmark yourself and it can be particularly hard if this is your first time measuring NPS and have no results to compare against.
Generally speaking, if you’re getting anything positive, you’re doing alright! A positive score above 40-50 is outstanding and anything negative below -50 is a cause for concern.
So what’s a good result?0-100 +100+50-50
Publicly reported NPS values across all industries
Wondering how average ratings vary across different industries?We scoured the web for ratings across a range of different businesses from 2013-2016 – here’s the average rating for each industry.
En
tert
ain
men
t
0
20
40
60
80
Tel
cos
FMC
G
Au
tom
oti
ve
SaaS
Ret
ail
Insu
ran
ce
On the face of it, the standard follow-up question can seem hard to measure or quantify because of the fact that it’s open ended. While it’s critical to make this question open to make the survey as easy as possible for customers to fill in, it’s also important that you get the most useful data out of it.
You’ll find a lot of responses fall into various categories. It can be a good idea to routinely collate responses and have someone go through and tag them. Exactly what tags you use will depend on your responses and the data that you want to focus on, but consider using some of these as attributes to tag:
General tone of the response: constructive, angry, friendly, upset
Suggestions for improvement: product, service, customer support, pricing, delivery
Particular problems raised: product, service, customer support, pricing, delivery
Length of response: Short, Medium, Long
For retail or ecommerce businesses – the particular department referenced in comments.
Following up on that follow-up question
CRM
For most companies, this will be the most important data source to connect – your CRM will most likely hold information on demographics, location, purchase history and/or data on support queries. By pairing this data with the results collected from your NPS surveys, you can start to look at the ratings given by different groups or segments of customers.
CRM – B2C
B2B businesses can consider breaking down results by geographic region – are any areas letting you down?
Or you could investigate whether there are any age groups with whom you perform better. This sort of demographic analysis is valuable. It helps marketing teams decide which groups to focus on in advertising, and also uncovers the most effective content. It’s also helpful for customer service and support planning, revealing both audience size, and where queries will most likely come from.
Purchase history is particularly useful for retailers or consumer goods brands. Understanding whether a product or category has either a positive or negative affect on customer satisfaction can help provide valuable insight.
For businesses with a large numbers of products, it can be helpful to start by tagging purchases into certain categories. Look across categories for trends and then drill-down to a product level where needed.
CRM – B2B
In B2B there are two sets of data you will look at – company level data and individual level data.
For an individual, Job title and/or department are important. Where someone works within a company can have a major impact on their interaction and satisfaction with your business. This helps your sales team
A deeper understanding
understand how to better address different stakeholders in the sales process. It also helps your marketing team create content and documents for particular areas of the business, and helps your support team be more proactive in addressing likely issues with different users.
At a company level location is also worth looking at - it’s useful to see any geographic areas where you perform better or worse. For global businesses, particularly in SaaS, this is valuable in helping plan support coverage and hours.
Another company level metric that is useful for most businesses is industry. Identifying particular industries where you have a stronger or weaker NPS rating helps define strategic
direction. Focusing on easy to please ‘low hanging fruit’industries where word-of-mouth referral is high can be a great growth strategy for an early stage company. At a later stage, addressing those underperforming industries may be more of a priority.
And have a think about other useful data you may have (or that can be easily obtained) such as number of staff, number of stores/locations and revenue.
Beyond CRM:
Depending on your business, there will be other systems that may give you valuable data to help analyze NPS responses. Which ones you decide to
use will likely vary based on which are easiest to integrate with. Take a look through the list below and think about which of these you could easily integrate. And remember, you don’t have to start with everything integrated to get useful data – think about how you can create a staged approach by starting with the basics, then adding systems as you go.
Accounting
Support ticketing
Ecommerce platform
ERP
Booking
Guest management
Point of sale
Introduce a regular feedback loop
Monitor NPS survey responses and pull out relevant feedback on a daily or weekly basis at stand-up meetings. Raising feedback with the team in real-time helps address issues quicker and also reduces negative impact of hitting your team with a a wall of feedback which can be overwhelming if done infrequently.
Guide your roadmap
Help prioritise new features in your roadmap by looking at feedback data and evaluating which features address areas that are causing the most unrest for customers.
Identify issues
By matching NPS survey ratings to your customer database, you can look at which areas of your product or which feature sets customers have access to. Being able to look at overall NPS ratings for users in different areas can help identify if you have particular weak points in products.
NPS & your product team
Predict Churn
By understanding how many customers are giving you the lowest NPS rating, your finance team can build forecasts on how many customers you might expect to lose in a given period. Additionally, by looking at low scores along with revenue data from either your accounting system or CRM, you can more precisely look at the dollar value of that group of customers.
Predict word-of-mouth referral
This is the one the accountants will like – by knowing the number of people in the top promoters segment, your finance team can predict how many organic referrals you are likely to get.
Identify potentially costly inefficient areas of the business
Your customers make a perfect barometer for the performance of different areas of the business. Increased negative feedback around particular areas can indicate inefficiencies or particular points of the business that could be costing you customers.
NPS & your finance team
Build a customer centric culture
This is probably THE most important output you can get from your NPS – because the top-level metric is so simple, easy to measure in real-time and easy to make visible to the whole company, it makes a great tool to help you focus company culture around customer advocacy and satisfaction.
Dashboard high level metrics
The total Net Promoter value is an ideal metric for creating a high level overview of customer health.
Quickly drill into individual areas of the business
By surveying at key touch points, tagging individual feedback and linking data sets it’s possible to create individual metrics for key areas of the business, meaning that problem areas can quickly be identified from a high level.
NPS & your CEO & Exec Team
Sales, Support, Customer Success,
jason lemkin
Measure individual support team member performance
By triggering surveys after a support request, you can gauge how satisfied customers are immediately after. This can help identify strong and weak performers and drive a continuous improvement culture within the team. It can be helpful to talk about the really positive experiences from recent surveys at team meetings.
Identify potential problem areas
By using the data collected across other areas of the survey, you can proactively prepare your team to be ready for certain issues based on what you know is causing difficulties for customers.
Identify at-risk customers
By referencing individual NPS ratings as customer support requests are received, you can identify at-risk customers with low scores and instantly escalate or give priority service.
NPS & your customer support Teams
NPS & your hr team
Identify potential training issues
By using data collected that ties back to individual areas of the business, you can identify particular teams that need additional training or upskilling.
Help drive company culture
Similar to the CEO and executive, the HR team can use NPS as a tool for driving a continuous improvement and customer focused culture. Consider using NPS feedback as a way of pulling out specific pitfalls teams should be aware of, or to highlight exceptional performance.
Improve onboarding services
If you have onboarding period, sending surveys at strategic points can provide valuable insights into how new recruits are serving customers.
Understand brand strength
A lot goes into valuing a brand, but the NPS figure on its own can provide a good high level measure. When combined with other historic data such as share of voice, the score can help you keep a constant measure of brand value, predict and counteract potential falls.
Measure different campaigns and audiences
By linking NPS ratings with the original marketing campaign or acquisition channel, you can discover which campaigns are delivering the most value. If one campaign is driving fewer customers, but a high proportion of promoters, you could boost that campaign in the future.
Build customer referral and retention campaigns
Customer referral programs drive additional revenue from your existing customer base, but they can also be costly to kick off. Targeting promoters makes building your program (and cheaper)! A customer’s NPS rating can also be used to effectively target marketing campaigns. Deliver surprise and delight rewards to top promoters, or send high value offers to detractors to win them back before they churn.
NPS & your marketing Team
useful datachecklist
This is our quick list of must-have features for getting useful data out of your NPS surveys:
Link survey results to individual customers using
email address or another unique identifier
Automatically roll individual results up into the
overall Net Promoter Score
See overall score over time to identify trends
Easily plug-in data from other systems to help
segment and analyse results
Show overall NPS rating to the whole business
(eg. Put it up on a nice big dashboard or the
company intranet)
Create multiple surveys at different customer
touch points with different triggers.
Using NPS for Happier customers!
So you’re collecting great data from all your customers and it’s clearly visible across the business. Now it’s time to take that data and turn it into action!
The best way to turn around any negative customers and get that rating up is to show your customers that you’ve heard and and understood their feedback. If they see changes, you’ve got a good chance of winning them back to your side.
So time is often of the essence here. Think about the quickest changes you can make and look at tends coming out of the survey data to give you an idea about which will make the biggest impact.
action!
Nominate an owner
Make sure someone (or a team of someones) in the business owns the overall NPS rating and the output of the survey process. Without a clear owner, you risk NPS becoming ‘just another metric’.
The NPS owner doesn’t need to be responsible for every area of the process, but should make sure any feedback filters through the right channels of the business and is followed up on.
Beyond the main owner, you should also define contacts within each department. While they may not be responsible for any day-to-day tasks, they are defined escalation points or regular reporting points for information that relates to each department.
Establish guidelines for follow up
It’s also important to have clear guidelines around actions to be taken with different types of followup. You should also define timelines – consider creating an internal SLA around how quickly feedback will be responded to, and measure yourselves against that.
You might want to look at creating automated alerts for certain types of feedback so that visibility is elevated within the organization.
Spend time on the positive
Measuring NPS is not all about addressing problems, so it’s important to also focus on the positive stuff that comes out of surveys. This should be done both internally and externally.
Look at comments from promoters to see if there are any quotes you can share (with permission!) Attributing quotes using just first name and location can be a good idea. For B2B business, remember that if you want to put a company name against a quote, it can prolong the process as other approvals are likely to be needed.
Seeking permission to share quotes gives you a great opportunity to engage and reward top promoters.
telstra australia
rob markey & chris harropBain & Company
of cost over the past four years, even as it delivered dramatic
An unexpected reward can really help to bolster that relationship and encourage referrals.
Don’t just restrict rewards to people who you want to quote – it’s a good practice to get the most out of all your promoters - rewards don’t have to be high value.
Customer referral programs
A customer referral program is a fantastic way of formalizing the process of following up and rewarding promoters. It can also be a great way of engaging those with less than stellar results – giving some sort of reward or incentive for referral will often get people moving.
Be personal
Following up feedback isn’t all about internal processes and automation; giving your company a personal face is also important. Engaging personally with respondents is not only good for strengthening your relationship with them, but also gives you a good chance to understand more about what’s working (or not working) for them.
While your NPS owner will typically follow up on the majority of the feedback, you can also take the opportunity to engage the CEO or senior management in the process. They don’t have to be involved with every piece of feedback – don’t make it an unmanageable process for already busy people. But do make sure you pass on both positive and negative comments for follow-up!
Keep your eye on the big picture
While the individual ratings and feedback are important for selecting customers to follow up with personally, it’s important to keep focused on the overall Net Promoter Score.
Make sure you’re tracking and reporting on the figure regularly across the whole company. If it starts to dive or climb noticeably, use this as a trigger to start an audit to look at the results in more detail to find out what you’re doing right or wrong.
While it’s a great health check and ongoing measure, NPS certainly shouldn’t be the only measure of customer satisfaction you ever rely on. If you have identified a problem, NPS ratings can be a useful tool for selecting customers to send more detailed survey requests to.
This isn’t about choosing the people who will give you the best ratings, it’s about choosing those who are most likely to give you a response. By targeting people who have given feedback as well as an NPS rating, you’re
engaging with an audience that is already more likely to give you further feedback. You may also want to talk to a more tailored audience if you’ve identified a very specific issue – you may consider targeting based on keywords in the survey responses.
If you are sending out more detailed surveys to target groups, make sure you take that into account when reviewing the results; you’ll introduce some bias in selecting who you send surveys to.
NPS isn’t the only measure
actionchecklist
Think about using these techniques for making survey follow up quick and effective:
Assign owners for follow up
Make results visible to the whole company
Follow up personally with respondents
Share follow up responsibility all the way up to the CEO
Strengthen referrals with a customer referral program
The NPS bonus round
Optimizing responses
There are a range of factors which can affect the response rate of your survey. While just distributing surveys and getting some initial feedback is important, once you’ve got that data it can be worth taking a look at some of the finer details. This is particularly relevant for larger organizations with lots of customers, as they’ll have a larger number of surveys going out and therefore will be able to make a bigger impact with incremental improvements.
Language of the survey question
Try varying the text you use in the survey question. Try things like adding a little bit of pre-text about why this information is important to you or how you plan on using the data collected. Even little details like whether you use “would you recommend to a …” friend, colleague, co-worker etc… can affect response rate.
Email subject
This is a big one – the best practice given in this guide is a good starting place, but you may find something that works better for your particular business and industry. Consider the formality of language – do you want to be casual or serious? Or maybe somewhere in between? Are emoticons a step too far or are they an important part of your communications?
Taking NPS tothe next level
That follow up question
This is another big one – changing this question can give you much better responses. While we’d recommend sticking with an open ended question, you might like to try changing the language or adding another one-click question or rating to help you quantify results better.
In any case, it’s important to randomize recipients of your modified survey, and always keep sending the same format to a control group – that way you have something to measure against. Higher responses to a new survey can be misleading, because response rates can also vary on different days, at different times, or in response to other conditions outside your control.
Recruiting
Some companies use an NPS survey to keep an eye on how their recruiting process is working. Send a follow up survey to unsuccessful candidates after an application or interview process along the lines of “Sorry it didn’t work out this time. Please tell us, if another role came up with [company name], would you consider applying again?”
Staff
While it’s certainly not a replacement for regular performance conversations, NPS surveys sent to
staff can give you a good overview of satisfaction levels. When it comes to staff feedback, you should consider making responses anonymous to encourage honest feedback. Knowing what they really think is often more useful than knowing who said what.
Suppliers
Measuring supplier and partner satisfaction can be helpful for identifying potential issues. External tension with a given supplier or partner can indicate a problem in the department they work most closely with.
Beyond the customerIt’s nice knowing customers will recommend you, but what about your own staff? How about suppliers, partners or even job applicants? Because NPS scores can be measured on an ongoing basis, it’s a great way to continually provide feedback for other areas of the business.
When it comes to making your NPS rating a company-wide focus, take a look at how social media and video games create buzz around achievements and updates. Consider creative ways of sharing your NPS rating within the company to generate some incentive for improvement.
A thermometer with incentives at different levels can be a great way of getting the whole company behind the NPS rating. Consider using a measure of the last X months NPS, rather than all-time, which will help make improvements more visible. The time period will depend on how many surveys you are sending out and how frequently – just make sure there’s enough responses in the given period to make the net value relevant.
Another great idea is for boosting awareness within the company if you have different teams interacting with or looking after different parts of your customer base: Split your NPS survey results up by area of the business and calculate the overall NPS value for each area independently. You can then create a leader board so teams can see whose customers are loving them the most. Then consider having monthly or quarterly awards for the biggest improvement, the highest overall NPS or special awards for individual feedback.
By being innovative, you can really boost the awareness of the NPS program and create a customer centric, success focus culture.
Have fun with it!
Referenceshttp://wordofmouthindex.com/womi-scores/top-100-brands/http://www.thestreet.com/story/13095775/1/blackberry--who-knew--wins-most-improved-from-us-consumers.htmlhttp://wordofmouthindex.com/womi-scores/top-100-brands/http://insideevs.com/automakers-take-notice-data-points-love-affair-electric-cars/https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-lego-came-back-from-brink-refocusing-consumers-rob-markey?trk=mp-reader-cardhttp://www.netpromotersystemblog.com/2015/10/08/brick-by-brick-rebuilding-lego-by-rediscovering-customer-centricity/http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/transforming-a-company-by-learning-to-love-customers.aspxhttp://netpromotersystem.com/videos/trailblazer-video/zappos-trailblazer.aspxhttp://www.cx-journey.com/2012/01/key-components-of-voc-initiative-links.htmlhttp://www.cx-journey.com/2012/03/using-nps-to-segment-customers.htmlhttps://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-customer-experience-strategy-killers-you-need-get-walters-ccxp?trk=prof-posthttps://www.saastr.com/i-was-wrong-nps-is-a-great-core-metric/http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-open-click-rate-benchmark#sm.0091ngbj10h2egs111n1o3zmsqh0b
