How to Put Net Promoter Score to Work for You
Anybody and everybody who wants to win big in the world of customer experience is rushing to climb aboard the NPS bandwagon.
The big excitement over Net Promoter Score (NPS) is now an open secret. Anybody and everybody who wants to win big in the world of customer experience is rushing to climb aboard the NPS bandwagon. And why not? Imagine you could get all the information you need from just one question -- wouldn’t you want to ask?
The basics: NPS, or Net Promoter Score, asks a customer how likely they are to recommend the company/product/service/whatever in question. The answer’s given on a standard 0 to 10 scale, with 0 being least likely and 10 being most likely. From there, participants are identified based on their choice: Detractors chose 0-6, Passives chose 7 or 8, and Promoters picked 9 or 10. To calculate overall NPS, the percentage of Detractors is subtracted from the percentage of Promoters.
The more Promoters, the better. It’s obvious. The higher the NPS, the better. Simple enough.
While you can find a professional survey tool that makes it easy to collect feedback and calculate NPS, the real question is this: What are you going to do about it?
Here are three quick tips to boost your NPS:
Make Answering Easy: Even customers who love you don’t have much time. Participation needs to be simple and appealing. This might look like embedding the NPS question right within an email, and it might mean delivery at exactly the right moment. Ideally, the question should reach the participant when he or she is primed to respond and the introductory text, formatting, and accessibility should inspire a response.
Ask Why: When participants give you a low rating, add a follow-up question that asks why they chose such a low score. You can do the same for high scores, too, of course, if you want to hear some good news, but it’s the negative feedback that can really help you drive positive change. If someone gives you a score of 1 then explains/complains that you don’t have some critical feature, that’s good to know. (And really, if you do have the feature and your customer just missed it, that’s probably even better to know!)
Follow Up: If you’ve just found out a customer is unhappy that you don’t have a feature that you actually have, take a minute to follow up. A phone call or even a quick email is a smart investment in an improved NPS. The next time you ask, your customer is going to know about the feature, and he or she will also remember that you went above and beyond to improve customer experience. That’s worth a few points at least!
No matter how you roll out NPS, be sure to plan for regular feedback collection, systematic follow-up, and internal reviews to ensure you’re both collecting the data as efficiently and engagingly as possible and also learning from the results as you go.
