If you’re wondering how to improve your Net Promoter Score (NPS) or ensure your initial surveys come back positive, then you need to consider these four important factors.
Related content: How do you calculate a Net Promoter Score?
1. Short questionnaires
You’re having a busy day at work, and you’re sent an email with a questionnaire of 10 or even 20 questions. It may be from a company that you like and have a good relationship with, but how likely are you to fill it out?
The more questions you add, the less likely it is that you will get a high response rate.
The more questions you add, the less likely it is that you will get a high response rate
You need plenty of responses to get a firm grip on your NPS, and people failing to respond could result in an invalid outcome. An inaccurate NPS percentage is even worse than not knowing it at all.
The solution? Keep it short. The “would you recommend?” NPS question is all you need in addition to a simple follow-up question such as: “What’s your reason for giving that score?”. Afterwards, you can apply additional measurement to your answers to seek out the reasons for the highs and lows.
2. Rapid follow-up
Sending out an NPS survey but not having a plan behind it is often the biggest mistake people make. You need a plan for how to follow up with your Detractors quickly to try to mitigate the damage to your NPS percentage.
The easiest way to do this is to have pre-created basic templates on all 11 possible NPS scores.
The easiest way to do this is to have pre-created basic templates on all 11 possible NPS scores.
These should include the potential for customisation with the customer’s name and ideally something related to the reason for their score. This makes following up on your NPS survey much more manageable.
Make sure that you follow through in good time. This will ensure that your investment in NPS is effective.
3. Respondent selection
If you send all of your customers the same survey simultaneously, it only gives you a single snapshot view. What if you add new features to your product? It could be up to half a year before you discover how that changes your score.
If you drip feed NPS over time, you will capture sentiment more accurately.
If you drip feed NPS over time you will be able to capture customer sentiment more accurately.
The key here is continuous NPS. Try sending out a portion of your surveys every day (or week, depending on your business) in order to get a rolling view and manage feedback more effectively. One more thing: don’t keep sending the survey out to the same people, no matter how high their response rates are. This isn’t just going to skew your results, it will also annoy your valuable, consistent respondents.
4. Company-wide effort
Sending out the surveys and gathering data can be a one-person job. But subsequently using the insights from the surveys to improve the company’s customer experience needs to be a company-wide effort.
In order to fully leverage NPS, it needs to be a company-wide initiative.
In order to fully leverage NPS, it needs to be a company-wide initiative.
Involve more employees in the project, and create a few NPS “champions” in each team. Creating a cross-functional group and reporting back on the findings can also be an effective way to go about it.
Regardless of your methods, your ultimate goal using NPS should be to make your company customer-focused. To do that, everybody needs to be on board.
How does your NPS measure up against your industry average? Download our free benchmark reports for New Zealand and Australia to find out!
