What is NPS (Net Promoter Score)?

Let us try to understand what is NPS (Net Promoter Score) and how it had helped us to build strong relationships with our customers. Also, download the free NPS Calculator

Posted by Sumit Kumar Uzir, Certified CSM

Net Promoter Score or NPS is a customer experience metric. It has been an exceptional tool to track the effectiveness of Customer Experience Programs. We have used NPS surveys to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers to measure loyalty, identification of customer champions, key improvement areas in the processes and business, at-risk accounts or users.

Designing a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey

Designing an NPS survey is quite simple. We had designed NPS surveys depending on what we were looking to measure. You could also create one with the right mixture of the NPS questions, demographic questions and other open-ended questions.

Administering a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey

Over the years, we have invested in only two types of administering options - In-app survey tools and generic survey tools. There are other options like NPS Softwares and Customer Experience Platforms available in the market which might assist you with a better survey experience and reporting.

NPS Survey Questions

The below question is supposed to be the base question and you could add a few open-ended questions in the questionnaire that would allow you to summarize your findings better.

On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend “Name of your SaaS Platform/Business Name/Services etc” to a friend or colleague?

Additional Questions:

What is the primary reason for the score you gave us today?
How could we improve your experience?
Would it be okay for us to follow up to serve you better?

NPS has been a great instrument to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback together and it is also very widely used. The first question gives a clear picture of the quantitative statistics and the later questions are supposed to capture the triggers of the score.

Calculation of NPS

Once administered and as the responses keep coming in, the respondents of the survey are categorized into three buckets.

Promoters: The score band of the promoters are 9-10
Passives: The score band of the Passives are 7-8
Detractors: The score band of the Detractors are 0-6

Promoters:

This set of customers are considered loyal to your offerings and also enthusiasts who will ideally keep purchasing from you. They would also influence customers and good word of mouth. This set of customers generally help in long term growth.

Passives

This particular set of customers are satisfied but to some extent, they aren’t enthusiastic enough to become a promoter. If your product has a low switching cost, this particular set could be easily lured away.

Detractors

This set of customers are unhappy with your product or services. It is also very unlikely that they will be purchasing again. They might also negatively influence other customers.

NPS = % of Promoters - % of Detractors

NPS can range from +100 to -100, which means the desired result would be closer to the positive maximum.

Types of NPS Surveys:

Transactional Surveys:

These NPS surveys are generally conducted after a customer had engaged with you, for example,

A ticket had been solved during a support call by your support team
A customer successfully reached a success milestone by himself for the first time
A customer did a purchase etc

Relationship Surveys:

A relationship survey however would be shared strategically over a specific time period. We had run relationship NPS surveys every quarter. This helped us to understand the customer sentiment over the year. This collectively with monitoring adoption rate has proven an efficient early churn indicator for us in the past.

I hope you will be able to find a healthy amount of Promoters from your next survey. I would also like to emphasize that what matters most is what you do with this information. Post our surveys we tried to have more communication and engagement with the promoters and the passives, to begin with. This really acted like feedback to our Customer Success Management process.

Download the Free NPS Calculator:

Free NPS Calculator

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