Leveraging data gathered by NPS surveys to build better software
Net Promoter Score® uses a simple two-question survey: How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend and why. Tens of thousands of companies from Apple to mom and pop shops use NPS® to track how their customers, visitors, and clients feel about their products and brands.
Get maximum value from the comments
Use a tool, most commonly Excel or a database, to categorize each piece of feedback by the information in its comment. This can be done in an automated fashion by identifying several keywords for each category then using search to find all comments containing those keywords. Alternatively, manual curation of comments is an option that we’ve seen applied successfully. Customers took the time to share this with you. It’s natural for them to expect that a real human will read what they wrote.
Filter, segment and analyze
Once categorized or tagged, create a list ordered by the number of feedback items that fell into each category. This should give you a clear picture of what most of your customers expect from your product. Narrow your focus by removing promoters and passives from the list so that you’re only looking at categories for detractors. These are people who have decided to fill in the survey but are unhappy with your product in some way. Understanding their expectations and desires can help dramatically in prioritizing upcoming features.
Analyze surveys alongside other customer data
While the NPS system has only two questions, it’s likely that you have additional information about each customer who completes a survey. Leverage this additional data to find trends among different customer types.
As an example, imagine you’re a SaaS company. One thing to try is splitting results along different pricing tiers. Imagine the overall NPS is a 35 but the enterprise NPS is just 10. This indicates that enterprise customers gain less value. The survey comments among enterprise customers are likely to be a gold mine of data for how to deliver more value to these customers.
Take positive feedback with a grain of salt. Focus on passives and detractors
From an NPS perspective, the most effective way to grow your value proposition, to increase the number of people telling their friends about a product and to better understand what’s currently lacking in your offering is to focus on detractors. Figure out how to get detractors to become passives or promoters.
Use the data to follow up 1–1
Always follow up with people who take the time to give you feedback, especially constructive criticism (detractors). If you’re a small company you can manually follow up 1–1 by email or phone. If you’re a large organization that gets thousands of NPS surveys per month, you should probably use a carefully crafted canned email.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
