How to Improve Your Net Promoter Score & Why It’s Important

If you’re a business owner you have likely spent a lot of time, money, and energy on your sales funnel. You’ve created marketing strategies, promoted your product, moved customers along the funnel, and made your first sales. Forgetting about NPS scores monitoring?

Recent data has found that 92% of consumers would trust word-of-mouth from their family, friends, colleagues, etc. over any form of advertising. What this means for you, is that you can’t just think about making the sale!

The customer’s experience with your product, your service, and your ongoing customer care will all impact the future sales of your product. Customers are talking about your product right now online, and their impressions could make or break sales for you.

So how do you measure that sentiment? In this article, we will discuss how to use NPS (Net Promoter Score) to measure it with product marketing platforms like Beamer, and how to improve Net Promoter Score for your business with actionable examples.

This is our 2022 guide to NPS Score!

What is a Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a tool that companies can use to measure the enthusiasm, satisfaction, and loyalty of its customers. In order to get your NPS, you need to survey your customers with a simple question: ‘on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product?’.

With some of the best NPS tools like Beamer, this process can be automated with multiple survey widget formats that can be easily integrated into your app, email, or link sharing. By using a tool like Beamer you can ensure you have the most coverage possible for your surveying.

Depending on the answers provided, you will divide your customers into the following groups:

• Promoters (with scores of 9 and 10).
  These customers are your most dedicated and enthusiastic group. These people will be more likely to recommend your product to others, become brand ambassadors, and give positive reviews.
• Passives (from scores of 7 and 8).
  These customers are more neutral. They may not be actively promoting your product but they also won’t be publicly commenting negatively about it. Neutral customers don’t count towards your NPS calculation.
• Detractors (with scores from 6 or below).
  These are the customers that are most concerning for a business – they can be unlikely to recommend you to their friends, family, and colleagues, or they can be actively dissuading potential customers from your brand.

Calculating Net Promoter Score.

The method for calculating NPS is fairly simple; you take your percentage of promoters and remove your percentage of detractors. The number that is left is your NPS! It’s important to create a ‘benchmark’ NPS the first time you take these statistics so that you can measure whether your NPS is moving up or down.

Once you have your general NPS, you can also break down your NPS by user groups or target market segments, to see which of your users is most or less satisfied. You can then use this information to create targeted marketing campaigns for those user bases and their specific relationship with your company.

Why should you care about NPS?

“Are my customers happy with my business and my product?” is a huge question, and you might think that you would need to track many different metrics and do many different calculations to get a good handle on your overall customer sentiment.

However, as simple as it is, the NPS is a complete snapshot of your customer sentiment, and using it can give your marketing team clear objectives for future campaigns. If you can achieve a higher NPS then you will be receiving free promotion and a higher likelihood of returning customers, and new customers from referrals.

How to improve your Net Promoter Score.

If you’ve calculated your NPS for the first time and you’re not happy with the result, never fear! With these actionable tips to improve your NPS score, you’ll have happy returning customers in no time.

1. Create segmented campaigns.

If you’re using an NPS tool like Beamer, you will be able to see unique NPS numbers for your different key marketing segments. This will allow you to create different campaigns depending on which end of the NPS scale they are sitting on.

For example, if you have two segments, segment A and segment B, and segment A is a promoter but segment B is a detractor, then you might approach your two marketing campaigns in different ways:

Segment A.

A loyalty campaign based on rewards for loyal customers and incentives to refer your friends or family

Segment B.

A ‘surprise and delight’ style campaign, aimed to give unhappy customers an unexpected gift from the company, encouraging them to continue on as customers.

2. Seek out customer feedback.

While it can be difficult to hear negative feedback, you will never be able to improve your relationship with your customers if you don’t know exactly what it is that they are unhappy about. And while a NPS is a fantastic tool, you can dive even further into the details.

For example, by utilizing tools that allow you to receive comments and feedback on product updates, as well as talk directly to your customers in a chat format, you can gather data on the most common pain points of your customers.

This data will then be able to inform your product development, customer support, and marketing teams to ensure that they are all working as closely as possible with your customer base to remove your customer’s specific pain points.

You can also decide which feedback to action depending on important customer segments or markers. For example, if a particular complaint is common in your highest paying customer segment, then that might have more weight than a segment of more casual users.

3. Continuous improvement based on feedback.

As part of your NPS surveying, it can be incredibly helpful to ask customers what product or feature they would love to see from your company. By keeping track of these suggestions, you can prioritize new releases based on what your customers actually want.

And while it’s great to be working on these items in the background, what can really increase your NPS is giving your customers visibility of that pipeline and process, so they know that their voice is being heard.

For example, using a Roadmap and Feature Request tool, you can give your customers real-time updates on key features, and have 1 on 1 interactions with them on their ideas and suggestions. This will help you gain trust and a closer relationship with your customers, ultimately improving your NPS. Read our blog “10 Tips for Collecting Meaningful Customer Feedback” to learn the best practices.

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4. Decrease your support response times.

We’ve all been there before where we have an issue with a product or service, and we raise the issue with the support team only to hear nothing back for days or weeks at a time. It is an incredibly frustrating experience, and can turn an already annoyed customer into an active detractor.

Often customers who are scoring very low on NPS have already tried to reach out to resolve their issues in the past, and haven’t been satisfied with the response that they received. This might have been because of the support avenues available, the timing of responses, or even how clear the information is displayed on the website.

Slow customer service response times make the customers feel undervalued, frustrated and disinterested in your product or brand. So investing in your customer support pipeline is critical for increasing your NPS.

Some items that you could implement to increase customers service satisfaction are:

• Add more call center staff if you are finding that high-value customers prefer phone support
• Create online knowledge bases with answers to common questions or problems
• Introduce chat features like ZenDesk to connect with customers in real-time
• Review your support ticket pipeline to ensure there aren’t any bottlenecks causing tickets to be delayed

5. Encourage customer referrals.

While it’s important to improve upon your relationship with your detractors, it’s equally important to nurture your relationship with your promoters! For these customers, you can make them feel appreciated by creating special rewards just for loyal customers that encourage referrals.

For example, you may run a promotion where a user gets 3 months of a free subscription to your product for every customer that they refer that signs up for 6 months or more. This encourages your most positive customers to go out and spread the word about your company to friends, family, and colleagues, helping to create new customers and improve your overall NPS further.

Track and improve your NPS with Beamer.

Your Net Promoter Score impacts your strategy for marketing, customer support, your product development pipeline, and just about every other element of your business, so tracking your NPS thoroughly with an app like Beamer can be the difference between gaining new referred customers or having potential customers scared off by negative reviews.

But if you’ve received a negative Net Promoter score and you’re feeling worried, the points covered in this article will help to move you in the right direction. The key is transparency with customers, open communication, and a willingness to listen to feedback.

And the fantastic thing about NPS numbers is that they can always increase! By focusing on the most important elements, and knowing what is important to your user, it may only take one super speedy customer service experience, or one unexpected ‘surprise and delight’ marketing campaign to turn a detractor into a promoter.