What are NPS Surveys? Answering Your Top Questions

What are NPS surveys? Better yet, what are the best practices for conducting them, and how do you go about creating them in the first place? These are just a few of the questions we’re going to answer in this post, so don’t miss out!

Answering Your Top Questions About NPS Surveys

Before we get into NPS surveys, let’s talk about NPS itself. This acronym stands for Net Promoter Score. This important customer service metric is scored from -100 to 100.

As defined by Medallia:

“The Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It is used as a proxy for gauging the customer’s overall satisfaction with a company’s product or service and the customer’s loyalty to the brand.”

What is an NPS survey?

An NPS survey is the simple, one-question survey that asks customers one important thing: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s product or service to a friend or a colleague?”

Sound familiar? Chances are, you’ve taken part in your fair share of these surveys over the years.

Customers choose from one of 11 options (the numbers 0–11). Based on their response, they are grouped into three categories.

What are NPS survey categories?

If a customer selects six or lower, they are categorized as a detractor. This means they aren’t likely to recommend the product or service, and they could potentially harm the brand with word of mouth.

When a customer selects seven or eight, they’re considered passives. This means they’re fine with the product or service, but it wouldn’t take much for them to switch to a competitor.

Finally, we get to promoters. These are respondents who select nine or ten from the responses. They’re more likely to be loyal to the brand or product. These enthusiastic customers are more likely to help you build your brand by word of mouth.

How do the world’s biggest brands rank?

As nice as it would be to get a perfect NPS score, this virtually never happens. Particularly with big brands who poll hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, in Forrester’s 2020 Net Promoter Benchmark findings of NPS scores from 250 brands in 14 industries, scores topped out at 59.

To give you an idea of the NPS scores of some of the world’s biggest brands, take a look at these stats from 2020:

- Apple: 47

- Google: 11

- Microsoft: 45

- Facebook: -21

- McDonald’s: -8

- Amazon: 25

- Disney: -7

- AT&T: 15

Why do I need to know my net promoter score?

Your NPS score serves as an important benchmark. It’s helpful to conduct these surveys at least once or twice a year and watch how the results change. Based on the results, you’re able to determine if what you’re doing is working, or if it’s time to pivot.

Additionally, conducting these surveys demonstrates to your customers that you care about their feedback and improving your offerings.

You can also choose to expand upon your basic NPS survey with follow up questions. In addition to having respondents select an answer from zero to ten, you can also ask them to expand on their answer with an open-ended question. This gives them the opportunity to explain why they responded the way they did.

Then, you can take these results to further strategize to improve your customer service, products, and offerings.

What are the best practices for creating NPS surveys?

When it comes to creating surveys of all kinds, there are certain best practices to keep in mind. Otherwise, you risk getting inaccurate results, low response rates, or other survey challenges.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for conducting NPS surveys:

- Customize your survey: Any time you can customize your survey with your own colors and branding, take advantage of that! This streamlines your messaging and promotes your brand all at once.

- Give your customers a heads up: Let your customers know you’ll be distributing an NPS survey soon. This could be in the confirmation email after they make a purchase, for example. Giving them this advanced notification tends to boost response rates.

- Time your survey appropriately: Survey timing can make or break the success of your efforts. We break down everything you need to know about survey timing for optimal results and engagement rates in this post.

- Respond to participants: Regardless of how they respond, it’s incredibly important to acknowledge each respondent for NPS surveys. Let them know you appreciate their time and how important their feedback is to you. If you don’t include follow up questions in your survey, you can also do so in a thank-you email. Depending on how they respond, you can ask them to elaborate what they love about your service, what could make it better, or where you went wrong.

With the feedback you get from an NPS survey, your organization will be empowered to move forward in a direction that not only benefits your business, but satisfies your customers all at once.