Track Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) to Improve Your Customer Retention

The best way to retain customers and get more referrals is to fully understand what your current customers think of your business. You need to understand what you are doing well and what you are doing poorly to improve.

Understanding customer satisfaction can be difficult, but you should use as much data as possible to boil the information down to actionable data. The Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is one metric that any business can use to track their performance over time.

What is the Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is is calculated off one simple question:

How likely are you to recommend [brand or company] to a friend of family member?

This question is scored on a 0 to 10 basis. 10 is highly likely to recommend and 0 is extremely unlikely to recommend.

Using this scoring method, it is possible to break down the respondents to your Promoters, Passive customers, and Detractors.

• Promoters: score a 9 or 10 and are extremely likely to recommend your company to a friend or family member. These are the people who you should harness to get positive public reviews and serve as brand ambassadors for you.
• Passives: score a 7 or 8 and are generally indifferent to your company and the experience they had. They probably had a decent experience but may not fully recommend your company to other people. You can focus on improving the experience of these people to bump them up to a Promoter to benefit you in the long term.
• Detractors: score a 6 or lower and they did not have a good experience with your company. They will usually leave negative online reviews and will be more vocal in sharing their poor experience with others. These people should be followed up with immediately to minimize negative impact to your business reputation.

How to Use NPS to Help Your Business

Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an essential metric that any business can use to become more profitable. It allows companies to see what customers think about their experience and make adjustments to improve it.

The idea is to send out a quick, one-question survey to customers to get their feedback on their recent experience. It should ask to rate their experience on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best. Of course, you will want to have the majority of your customers responding with scores of 9 and 10 to show that they had a great time.

Even the best companies will occasionally have customers that did not have a great experience, for whatever reason. Maybe they were having a bad day or one of your employees weren’t able to answer all of their questions. In these cases, they may give a lower NPS score.

This is completely fine, as long as you’re tracking your NPS and taking steps to continuously improve. The danger is when companies are not aware of customers that have had a poor experience and do not try to improve.

Building Net Promoter Score Surveys

To get started, you will need a system to be able to track your Net Promoter Score. You could do this with a simple survey on your website or through a Google Form.

An easy way to create and track your NPS is to use a survey builder that tracks everything for you. We use our own NPS survey builder and you’re welcome to use it for free, as well.

Simply sign up for a free account and start creating specialized NPS surveys to send out to your customers. Here is an example survey for Growth Launcher:

The GL Survey Builder actually is able to create survey funnels that can extract more information from customers by asking additional questions. Take the opportunity to ask for as much feedback as possible, if your customers are willing to leave it. This will only help you make better business decisions based on aggregate data and trends.

Using a survey funnel format with smart routing allows you to naturally filter customers that had a positive experience from the ones that had a negative experience. Knowing this information, you can then take steps to follow up accordingly with them.

Sending Out Your NPS Survey

Once you create your survey, you’ll want to start sending them out to your customers. Try to get the survey to your customer as quickly as possible so that the interaction is still fresh in their minds. If you can get them out the same day or within a few hours of your customer interaction, you’ll have better luck.

Timing is important since it will give you the opportunity to follow up to fix any negative customer experience right away. If they experienced poor customer service or didn’t come away feeling good about your company, you’ll have a chance to make it right. That could be by giving away coupons or discounts, or just listening to their concerns and making them feel understood.

If the customer has had a positive experience, it is just as important to follow up quickly with them. You can use a NPS survey to determine who your promoters are and then ask them for referrals or to leave public reviews to improve your reputation.

The surveys can be sent out through email, text message, or direct mail. Businesses that have apps could use those to effectively reach out to customers. If you have an online store, you could include an NPS survey at the end of the checkout process to get their feedback immediately.

The key is finding which communication channel works best for your company. Email may work well for some companies but not for others. Or, you may need to use a combination of tactics to get their attention, such as sending an email immediately and following up with a postcard to their house.

Collect and Act on NPS Survey Data

As you start to get responses back from your customers, keep track of the data to make your company stronger. Looks for trends in responses to see if there are certain employees, departments, or processes that cause issues for customers.

Employees will occasionally have an off-day or a supplier might be late on a delivery, affecting the customer experience. While this could impact a few sales, the larger problems occur when these issues turn into trends that happen chronically. By identifying those trends from NPS surveys, you’ll be able to better implement fixes.

Also, you should track your customer experience over time and continuously so that your business can improve. As you get more data, you can see if there are any trends throughout the year that could relate to annual periodic cycles. There may be other macro economic factors that affect your business that you otherwise might not notice.

Once you have the NPS data, you’ll be a more powerful company by being able to harness the power of your promoters. You can also fix the areas that may need some improvement.

Ready to get started building your NPS surveys? Sign up for free today.