What factors affect your Net Promoter Score?
The simple answer is that anything and everything that your customer experiences while using your product/service can affect your Net Promoter Score.
This can also include external factors, such as social currency (in other words, the customer’s perceived value of either endorsing or not endorsing you to a friend or colleague).
This is a big reason why your overall NPS score, absent of additional context, is largely meaningless.
The key to extracting the value out of the number and understanding the factors behind the score requires two things:
Customer attributes: These are additional points of data that can be associated to your customer. For example, these attributes can include: location, age of the account, job title, industry, plan type, etc.
Pairing this data with your NPS score allows you to filter your results to narrow in on the segments or cohorts that are having the greatest impact on your results.
As a bonus, this process can also help you identify the common characteristics between your most loyal customers and biggest detractors.
If you want to know how to best use this information to clone your best customers, check out this post.
Trending data: While filtering your score with customer attributes will help you narrow the scoring results, in order to understand the key factors behind the numbers, you’ll need to include trending data as well.
This is arguably the most important part of the equation. Trending data is the qualitative component within NPS. It helps you understand both the reason (factor) behind the score, along with individual sentiment for that factor.
For example, you may have someone who has identified themselves as a passive customer, however within their verbatim feedback, they may indicate to you that they’re neutral on price, but positive on customer service.
In this example, it’s important to distinguish the sentiment between the two, because on the surface, the passive score alone would have indicated that neither price nor customer service is a factor in their decision.
Combining these two critical components will allow you to not only understand the biggest factors that are driving your score, but more importantly, the specific cohorts that are driving the greatest impact.
If you’re curious how this looks in practice, check out this case study with Agree.com.
