Like your employees, your customers are the force that keeps your business going. Without them, your brand likely wouldn’t exist. So, making sure your customers are always satisfied is essential to your success. One way to do this is to gain customer feedback.
When you learn what your customers say about your business, you can identify what you’re doing well and where you can improve. You’ll also become more familiar with your customers’ pain points and frustrations. On their end, they’ll appreciate that you took the time to improve your product or service based on their feedback.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular way to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty and their willingness to recommend your business to others. Let’s dive into how to use NPS feedback to gauge customer satisfaction.
What is the Net Promotor Score (NPS)?
Net Promoter Score is a metric that measures customer loyalty and how likely your customers are to be “promoters” of your company. These promoters are the ones who can help you grow your business through word-of-mouth marketing and user-generated content.
For example, VRAI is a company that sells engagement rings for women, and they make use of their promoters as the ones who’ll rave about the beautiful and sustainable rings made from lab-grown diamonds to their friends and family.
They leave reviews, share raving testimonials, and even take pictures with the rings to tell others about their positive experience.
The above screenshot shows VRAI’s “Refer a friend” page. This referral program allows the brand’s promoters to share their experience with friends or family. No fuss, no muss. Plus, it’s a win-win for both the brand and its promoters. The brand scores better word-of-mouth and higher sales, while the promoters (and their friends) receive $100 for their purchase.
6 Tips for Creating an NPS Survey
Your NPS survey can either be part of your website or a standalone survey you share with customers via email. Either way, you need specialized software to gather the answers, store NPS feedback, and calculate your final score.
For example, an NPS survey tool like UXtweak can do all the work for you. All you need to do is input your questions and customize your survey based on your needs. UXtweak even allows you to add your brand’s logo, font, colors, style, and more. The tool analyzes all the insights for you and puts them into a handy “Results” dashboard and PDF reports.
UXtweak also offers you help with recruiting the participants for your study, providing you with Onsite Recruiting Widget that converts your real visitors into survey respondents. It also allows you to add an NPS question after any other research study, to maximize the amount of quantitative data you collect.
Using an NPS survey tool is a quick and cost-effective way to gather and analyze NPS insights. Don’t believe us? Try it yourself!
Here’s a quick, step-by-step rundown of how to create an NPS survey.
1. Create a title for your survey
This step is mostly for you and your team. The more descriptive the title, the easier it’ll be for you and your team members to go back and reference it.
2. Add a brief description so that customers understand what you need them to do
Your survey description should tell customers why you’re conducting the survey and what you need from them (e.g., We value your feedback. Let us know how we did!).
Here’s a simple example from Delta Air Lines for inspiration:
3. Input your question(s)
There are many ways to ask an NPS question. You could ask your customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to friends and family using qualitative descriptors like “very likely” or “very unlikely.”
Or, you could ask them, on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely they are to recommend your brand to others (as T-Mobile does in the example below).
How you frame your question will depend on what you want to know. For example, you could ask about a specific product or service, or you could ask about the customer experience. Want customers to elaborate on why they chose their response? You can ask an open-ended, follow-up question to learn the ins and outs of why they gave that particular score.
Then, give them a chance to share how you can improve their experience.
4. Add a “thank you” page
After customers have entered their responses, they should be redirected to a “thank you” page. This small detail shows that you appreciate them for the time they’ve taken to answer your question(s).
5. Choose how you’ll distribute your survey
How will your customers access your NPS survey? Can they go directly to your website? Or can they answer questions via your app or email?
6. Think about how often you want to conduct NPS surveys
Ideally, you should avoid only conducting net promotor score surveys once and calling it a day.
Consider doing so regularly, every two to three months, to help you track changes in the NPS score and customer satisfaction levels.
And keep new customers in mind. Don’t survey them too early, or you may get unreliable results. Wait until they’ve had enough interactions and experiences with your brand before sending the survey.
For example, Marriott sent this survey to a guest who stayed at their hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, four days after they checked out. It‘s enough time to avoid spamming the recipient without impacting their ability to recall their experience.
How to Calculate Your Net Promotor Score (NPS)
NPS is usually calculated by asking one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or family?”
Customers can respond between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely). Based on their response, they’ll be divided into three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors.
- Promotors: Select a score of 9 to 10. These are your more loyal, enthusiastic customers.
- Passives: Select a score of 7 or 8. They’re typically content with your service but aren’t happy enough to recommend your business to others.
- Detractors: Select a score of 0 to 6. These customers are unhappy and are unlikely to buy from you again.
To calculate your NPS, you must know the percentage of detractors and promoters. Once you get those numbers, subtract the %detractors from the %promoters.
So, let’s say that 5% of your survey respondents are detractors. 10% are passives, and 85% are promoters.
This means your NPS is 80 (85 – 5 = 80).
That’s a pretty good score. NPS scores range from -100 to +100. So, 80 falls within the green range.
What to Do With NPS Feedback?
In a 2022 survey, customers said that only 3% of companies put them at the center of their leadership, strategy, and operations.
That means that there are quite a few businesses that don’t conduct NPS surveys. And the ones that do, don’t take action on the feedback they receive.
You can set your business apart by analyzing NPS survey results and taking immediate action, especially if your results aren’t where you want them to be.
Let’s look at an example.
Hims — an online platform that connects patients to licensed healthcare professionals — has a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 39.
Here’s how Hims effectively leverages this score and customer feedback:
- Identify promoters and detractors. Hims uses NPS feedback to identify who their loyal advocates (promoters) and dissatisfied customers (detractors) are. This segmentation helps the brand target specific areas for improvement.
- Engage promoters. Promoters are your brand advocates. Hims reaches out to them, expresses gratitude for their loyalty, and encourages them to provide reviews or refer friends and family. Hims can use positive customer feedback on products such as generic Viagra, minoxidil or other hair loss products as testimonials and social proof to attract more customers.
- Address detractors’ concerns. Detractors’ feedback provides valuable insights into areas that need improvement. Hims proactively reaches out to detractors to understand their concerns, resolve issues, and turn them into satisfied customers. By addressing their feedback, Hims can prevent customer churn and improve its NPS score.
- Monitor trends. Regularly tracking the NPS over time can reveal product feedback and trends in customer satisfaction. If the score increases, it indicates that Hims’ efforts to enhance the customer experience are paying off. Conversely, a declining score signals the need for immediate action.
4 Practical Ways to Improve Your Net Promoter Score
Are you ready to enhance your NPS? Use these four tried-and-true tips for the best results.
1. Send NPS Surveys at the Right Moment in the Customer Journey
Don’t send NPS surveys immediately after a customer purchases or uses your service. Asking customers about their experience too early may yield unfavorable results because they haven’t learned how to use your product yet.
Give them time to get used to your product/service and develop an opinion on how they feel about it. You’d be surprised at how much your NPS improves with this simple change.
2. Engage With Your Detractors
Single out your detractors and take some time to figure out their pain points. What’s driving their dissatisfaction? What can you do to improve their experience? Making things better for your detractors can increase your NPS significantly.
Imagine that your company has an app, and you want to learn why your detractors aren’t having a good experience.
You can use a mobile analytics platform to dive deeper into user behavior and interactions within the app to identify areas for improvement, further enhance customer satisfaction, and get feedback.
This combined approach can inform data-driven decisions to optimize and track the mobile user experience and drive higher NPS scores.
3. Convert Your Passives
Because they fall right in the middle, passives may not be a priority in your customer experience strategy.
But by converting them to promoters, you might see a huge difference in your net promoter score.
Take an ecommerce business, for example. The game-changer with these brands often lies in their ability to deliver the products in perfect condition to their customers and not a day later than the promised time frame.
Let’s say one particular company has a ton of passive scores (7 to 8). One reason could be that delivery times aren’t as punctual as possible.
The company invests in equipment tracking software to help streamline the delivery process and catch shipping delays before they become a bigger problem.
Using an asset tracking system like CalAmp can increase the chances of customers receiving their orders promptly and in perfect condition. Every time.
This level of consistency can turn passives into promoters. By monitoring and optimizing every step of the product’s journey, from the warehouse to the customer’s doorstep, this ecommerce business can now enhance the overall customer experience.
4. Create an NPS Report
Collecting customer feedback is just one step to improving the customer experience. You must be able to scrutinize, analyze, and implement that feedback to build a stronger brand.
Creating an NPS report can help you do this. Many NPS survey tools, like UXtweak, offer this as a part of their services.
Make sure your NPS report includes information like your overall NPS, segmentation among promoters, passives, and detractors, and a chart that shows how your NPS changes over time.
There should also be an easy way to visualize follow-up responses to questions like “How can we make things better for you?, or “Why did you choose that score”?
Having these insights visible in one place can help you easily access the information you need to take action.
The Power of NPS Feedback: Wrapping Up
Your customer feedback is the key to unlocking better customer experiences. By gathering feedback, you can turn negative survey responses into positive outcomes.
Those positive outcomes translate to happy customers (read: loyal customers) who are likely to spread the word to others, resulting in even more customers for your business. Say goodbye to unhappy customers for good and add NPS surveys to streamline your retention strategy!
Not sure where to start? UXtweak is here to help! Register for your account and create your first NPS survey today 👇
