Just Getting Started on Net Promoter Score? Here's Where to Begin

If you’ve decided to take the plunge into measuring and assessing Net Promoter Score, congratulations! You’ve made an excellent decision–joining some of the most successful companies in the world (like Apple, Verizon, and Charles Schwab) that use NPS to gain rich insight into their buyers and to strategize on delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Getting started on Net Promoter Score isn’t complicated, but it does require some strategy and forethought. In the following article, we’ll cover the bases of creating an NPS system that works for your business–helping you to measure and assess customer behavior...and ultimately, help you generate enthusiastic customers that buy more, stay with you long-term, and refer your brand to others.

Why Net Promoter Score?

Before getting started on specific strategies for collecting, measuring, and assessing NPS, we’d like to remind you of how valuable Net Promoter Score can become to your business.

First and foremost, Net Promoter Score is a metric for measuring customer loyalty.

Most likely, you’ve got a mix of customers. Some are long-term members or followers, who make frequent purchases and routinely engage with your brand. Others are occasional buyers. Still, others are one-time customers that seem to churn after a single purchase.

Customer behavior may seem random, but in reality, it’s often the direct result of how successful you’ve been at encouraging loyalty.

By asking customers, How likely are you to recommend this brand to a friend, family member, or coworker?, a Net Promoter Score survey gives you powerful insight into their loyalty. Ultimately, NPS is also an excellent indication of how likely buyers or members are to stick with your brand for the long run, how much profit they will generate, and finally, how many referrals they could potentially generate.

Your ultimate goal with NPS is to learn how to create more customers who are thrilled with your brand–Promoters. Additional goals are to prevent Detractors (unhappy customers) from churning, and convert Passives (neutral customers) into Promoters.

But in order to do so, you’ll need to be strategic from the start.

Here are a few key principles for getting a great start on Net Promoter Score–helping you to build a foundation for this powerful measure of customer loyalty.

Start with NPS software.

NPS software lays the groundwork for deploying surveys, calculating your results, storing data, and evaluating your feedback. Without this tool, you’ll need to assemble a slipshod mess of software to do the work of collecting, tracking, and assessing NPS. And even then, you’ll need to make sure everything is integrated together properly to produce accurate results.

NPS software, on the other hand, gives you a single, streamlined tool for:

• Deploying targeted NPS surveys to your customer base
• Calculating your results–and storing data over time
• Filtering and assessing open-ended feedback from your surveys
• Generating clear reporting to produce richer insights
• Comparing scores from different customer segments
• Creating custom fields for NPS insights
• And more...

As you’ll soon learn, NPS software will become foundational to getting the most out of this powerful metric–giving you rich, trackable insights into how customers really feel about your brand.

Choose a “sending” strategy.

Creating your first Net Promoter Score survey requires more than writing a couple of questions. After all, if no one actually responds to your survey–or if only a few respond–you’re not going to produce accurate or measurable results.

That being the case, think carefully about how you want to send your survey to get the best results. What kind of survey deployment will work best for your business? An email? A pop-up on your website? A link on social media? Or another type of integration?

Again, NPS software is a critical tool in this step–helping you to deploy your survey in a way that works best for your business. Good software should give you a variety of options for sending, as well as the ability to customize your survey to align with your branding.

Keep tracking your score.

Rather than focusing primarily on comparing your score to industry benchmarks to assess your success, keep tracking your score over time to compete with yourself. Depending on the size of your customer base, you’ll want to deploy surveys daily, weekly, or monthly to continue generating results (Just make sure you don’t survey the same customers more than a couple times a year).

You can also send surveys at strategic points in time to measure response to a change in your product or service, website, or customer experience. Doing so allows you to assess how successfully specific changes are impacting customer loyalty.

Remember, Net Promoter Score is ultimately a tool that is meant to help you improve your own level of customer loyalty–and in turn, generating higher-value customers and reducing churn.

Don’t ignore your open-ended feedback.

As explained above, a Net Promoter Score survey begins with one question:

How likely are you to recommend this brand to a friend, family member, or coworker? Please provide a rating from 0-10, 0 being extremely unlikely and 10 being extremely likely.

As you’ve already discovered, this one simple question delivers a single trackable metric that can give you powerful insight into customer loyalty. That being said, the question above is virtually incomplete without the follow-up, Please explain your rating.

Your customers should then be provided a field to provide an open-ended response.

Open-ended feedback can be intimidating to assess, but this step should not be skipped. Why? Well, your customers’ open-ended responses are powerful clues to their answers. If a customer gave you a “10,” you’re certainly going to want to know what it is that made her so thrilled with your brand. Likewise, if a customer gave you a “4,” you’re going to want to know why she’s disappointed.

Assessing open-ended feedback gives you action steps to “closing the loop” on your Net Promoter Score survey. For example, if your open-ended responses indicate that your unhappiest customers have experienced issues with shipping and returns, then you’ll want to take action to improve that process. Or, inversely, if your most loyal customers repeatedly refer to a single product, then you may want to take action to leverage that product in your marketing.

NPS software can help you organize and assess your open-ended feedback by allowing you to filter feedback by score, date, or another custom field. It should also allow you to directly respond to customers who have provided feedback (such as a customer who has had an unresolved issue or disappointing situation).

Thermostat: Your best solution for Net Promoter Score.

Thermostat is an NPS software solution that helps you get the most out of this powerful metric, by:

• Allowing you to send an NPS survey in a variety of formats–in an email campaign, link, pop-up, or integrated with another platform via Zapier
• Giving you unlimited data storage–allowing you to track your Net Promoter Score and generate results based on an infinite amount of time
• Displaying critical information on a single screen, so that you can stay organized and informed with one click
• Filtering open-ended feedback according to categories of your choice, and giving you the option to adjust questions and responses for Promoter, Passives, and Detractors
• Giving you the ability to customize your surveys to align with your unique branding
• And much more

If you’d like to get started on measuring Net Promoter Score with Thermostat, click here to create your free account today.