Word-of-mouth remains an integral part of attracting customers and increasing sales. In fact, 83% of customers say they trust brands that are recommended by someone they know, such as a friend, family member, or colleague.
But in a market with many competitors, do you know how likely your customers are to recommend your products and services to their peers? In other words, do you know if you have loyal customers?
A good NPS score would tell you just that.
NPS surveys allow you to collect information about customer satisfaction and the likelihood of them recommending your services. It can have a significant impact on your company's success, acting as a gauge of how well you're catering to the needs of your audience.
To help you get the most of what it has to offer, let's take a look at what a good NPS score is, why it matters, and how you can improve it.
What is an NPS Score?
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widely-established measurement that's used to determine customer loyalty, engagement, and satisfaction with your brand and customer experience. It's measured through a single-question survey that's considered the gold standard for understanding how your business is perceived and whether you're meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
The question itself is simple: it asks the survey takers to rate, on a scale from 0 to 10, how likely they are to recommend your company to friends, colleagues, and family. The specific formulation of the question may differ, but the fundamental idea behind the question remains the same across the board: to provide you with a clear picture of whether your audience is satisfied with your products and services.
Based on their overall scores, customers are categorized as one of three options: Promoters, Passives, or Detractors. Typically, a Promoter is someone who gives a score of 9 or 10 and is considered a loyal and engaged customer, a Passive is someone who gives a score of 7 or 8 and is generally considered satisfied but won’t actively promote your company, and anyone who scores a 6 or below is a Detractor and you should keep an eye on their comments.
You then tally up your responses and subtract the percentage of Detractors from the Promoters. The result you get is your NPS score, which can show you whether you need to make improvements. The median NPS score across organizations is +44, but the best-performing companies can often achieve scores at or above +70 in terms of the positive percentage of respondents.
Why Does NPS Matter?
Figuring out what a good NPS score is can be tricky. Even more challenging is finding ways to improve it. Therefore, you may be wondering whether making an effort to enhance your NPS score is worth it in the first place.
To help you understand the value that a good NPS score can bring, let's go over some of the biggest benefits it offers below.
Shows Growth Potential
Since word-of-mouth is such a considerable driving force for growth, the Net Promoter Score is the perfect and the simplest way to better understand how likely you are to benefit from people recommending your services.
If the majority of the respondents rate the likelihood of recommending your brand to others highly, that means you are not only doing a good job at delivering an exceptional customer experience and support but are also positioning yourself as a company that's worthy of a recommendation.
While it may not be as helpful for measuring satisfaction with specific products or services, it's a great indicator of brand loyalty, which can give you a good idea of whether you can expect more business to come your way from happy and eager brand ambassadors.
Simple and Accurate
Few surveys can compete with the NPS in terms of simplicity and accuracy.
Since a Net Promoter Score consists of just one question, you get a clear and unambiguous answer about whether people like your company enough to recommend it to others. And if the score turns out to be different than what you expected, that can be a great eye-opener and put in motion constructive conversations across the company.
Every department can learn something from an NPS score, and if you discover it to be lower than you'd like, it can help nurture new ideas about how you could improve, moving your company in the right direction of providing extraordinary experiences for your audience.
For instance, when you know the specific customer journey step where the survey took place, you can gain insights into how to improve customer satisfaction by looking at each of the interactions the customer had with your brand. You can also build on the initial NPS survey, ask for detailed responses from similar customers to better understand the specific problems that might have caused a lower score.
NPS will allow you to see if the strategies you're implementing to make customers happier are having the desired effect, which can be measured in an increase of your overall score.
An Excellent Benchmark
The average NPS for your industry can serve as a benchmark for discovering how well you're doing in comparison with others.
While it's impossible to cater to every customer and make everyone happy, you should at least strive to be on par with the industry standard or better than your main competitors if you want to stay competitive, retain customers, and turn customers into advocates.
It's Quick
Finally, unlike some of the more comprehensive surveys you could run, measuring the Net Promoter Score is incredibly simple and doesn't take a lot of resources.
In fact, you could run regular customer feedback surveys, continually tracking how your score changes over time and linking those changes with developments and changes you might be implementing.
How to Improve Your NPS
Learning that your NPS score is not what you'd hoped it would be can be disappointing. But the good news is that there are ways you can improve it, especially if you're willing to invest the time in building a strategy that changes your customers' opinion about your brand.
Let's go over some of the most effective strategies you could try out below.
Time Your NPS Surveys Properly
When it comes to Net Promoter Score surveys, timing is everything. Since it's a single-question survey, the amount of detail you can get from the feedback from customers is a bit limiting. Therefore, you must create additional context by timing your survey accordingly, which can give you a better idea of what event or action had an impact on the customer's opinion.
For instance, you could time your NPS surveys so that they align with the recent actions the customer has taken. If they've recently bought a product, had an order delivered, or have returned for a repeat purchase, these might be good times to get them to fill out an NPS, which can reflect how happy they were with their recent customer experience with your brand.
Keep it Short and Simple
NPS surveys are concise by nature. But while it may seem limiting, it's exactly why they work so well, so make sure that you stick with the original format and steer clear from trying to enhance the survey by adding questions, follow-ups, or making the initial question too complicated.
You don't need much more than a simple request to rate the likelihood of recommending your business, as that will provide you with the big-picture insight through which you can dive into the details. What's more, having an NPS survey structured in such a simple way means that it will require minimal effort from the customer. When you're trying to get as many responses as possible, keeping it simple will be a crucial ingredient.
Personalize the Invite
When trying to incentivize customers to respond to your NPS survey request, every little nudge you can give them matters. And sometimes, all you need to significantly boost the completion rate is a little personalization, which can help get your email opens and clicks.
Start by addressing your audience by name and creating a compelling copy that draws them into the email and gets them to read your request. Also, make your ask as simple as possible and thank them for taking the time to help you.
Make It Easy
Since you want to maximize the response rate of your surveys, you must consider whether the process itself is easy and convenient for your customers.
When you direct them to the survey page, it needs to be immediately obvious where they should click, what they are being asked to do, and how to finalize their answer. Ideally, the entire process shouldn't take more than a few seconds.
Understand the Score
The final part of improving your NPS response rate and scores is taking the time to understand them. We already talked about how the timing of the survey can have a significant impact on the types of results you get, but that's just one way to analyze the score and draw valuable insights.
You must develop a process for making the NPS a key CX metric your team uses to gauge performance. Since NPS surveys can be organized at every stage of the customer journey, the potential insights you can collect that will tell you whether you're doing a good job are abundant.
Remember, simply measuring the score isn't good enough, rather, you must have a consistent method for identifying potential issues, and implement changes that can be verified with subsequent NPS surveys to keep improving.
Bottom Line
A good NPS score is one of the best indicators of how well you are meeting customer expectations and whether they are happy with the customer experience. And because of that, you should use it extensively throughout your relationship with your audience to collect information through which you can make actionable changes.
The strategies listed above should help you optimize your NPS survey process, ensuring that more people take the time to respond and providing you with a blueprint on how to get insights you can actually use.
