• Read Time 5 min
Answers to All Your NPS Questions
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Last week we hosted a well-attended webinar on NPS and how to use it to drive improvement. The topics discussed included:
- How to administer and calculate NPS surveys
- Who you should be surveying and how frequently
- Strategies to help increase survey response rates
- Recommended follow-up actions for each segment
- Methods to supplement NPS for enhanced customer feedback
- How to integrate your NPS with health score, alerts and campaigns
No worries if you missed the webcast, we’ve got you covered. You can now view the webinar on-demand here.
The audience also engaged in a great Q&A session, and we wanted to share that with you as takeaway. Below is a recap of the webinar Q&A.
But before we jump into that, let’s first just level set with a quick definition of NPS.
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. It’s a customer satisfaction benchmark that measures how likely your customers are to recommend you to a friend or colleague. It is the answer to the question – “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [Company] to a friend or colleague?”
Webinar Q&A Recap with Abby Hammer, VP Products, ChurnZero
Q: Is NPS limited to the company as a whole or can it be used for more specific feedback on an individual product or service?
A: Depends on how you set up your NPS campaign. So, my customers that have multiple products might do different NPS campaigns. For example, certain customers- I’m going to ask how they feel about product A versus product B. You do want to make sure that you’re asking for specific information here. So, if you want to understand how they feel about product A versus product B, you should be asking for those specific names in the question as opposed to saying how do you feel about my company overall? You can certainly do that and then you can always think about those scores combined if you want to get a sense of where everything stands on a broader sense.
Q: Would it be recommended to include a comment box in the NPS survey to get more feedback?
A: Yes, I recommend adding in a comment box, provided that your survey is set up the right way. Remember it’s all about getting a high response rate so that we have good amount of data. What a lot of NPS surveys do (including ChurnZero’s) is that they don’t show that follow-up question box until a ranking has been picked. So, when someone get the NPS survey, it looks like one question (i.e. I have very little to do here) which will encourage them to respond. Then they see that comment box and it provides an opportunity for them to elaborate. If they choose not to respond to that follow up question, well- we’ve already captured that initial NPS impression.
I do think you should be following up the NPS question in some capacity. I am a fan of going pretty broad with your follow up. For example – “What is the most important reason for your answer?” Again, remember this is about the relationship. Often, we assume people’s problems are only going to be around the product itself. However, it could be much broader than that. For example, their problem could be with your pricing model, or they aren’t happy with your service hours or any number of things. So, don’t bound them in or push them towards certain types of answers. A text box allows them to be freeform here with their feedback.
Q: At what stage of an organization’s business maturity (ex. number of customers) should you start surveying your customers?
A: If you have only a handful of customers, it might feel a little strange to survey. At that point you assume you have a strong enough relationship with your customers that you know how they feel. But notice I used the word – assume. The intention of NPS is that it’s not your assumption or your perception of the customers relationship with you and their satisfaction. It’s their opportunity to tell you. So, I’m going to say that I don’t think there’s a point at which it’s too soon to survey. If you have a smaller customer base you might use the results differently than if you have a larger customer base, but it’s always interesting to have that information.
Q: Do you survey all contacts in an account or just your main point of contact (POC)? And if it’s all contacts within an account – how do you handle different scores from people from the same organization?
A: Great question. So, my recommendation is that you go broad with your surveying. We want to make sure that we’re hitting not only our frequent users of the product, but also our less frequent users of the product and even perhaps people who don’t use it at all, particularly if those people are decision-makers and hold the purchasing power. Then once you have the NPS results, segment after the fact. It is very important to be able to say okay, on my NPS for my power users it’s a 32 but then, when I look at my decision-makers that drops down to 15. Now, they’re both still positive so that’s good. However, there is a difference between those two roles and we can start to isolate why there’s a difference. But that begins by surveying everybody, so I would go to more than just your one POC.
Q: Do you think that NPS should be tied to compensation in any way, or is that putting too much stake in it?
A: That’s an interesting question. I think the right answer is dependent upon the organization. The first thing I’ll say is- if you’re not following NPS best practices then I wouldn’t put confidence in that metric to integrate it into compensation plans. Otherwise, you’re setting your employees up for failure. If you’re running it consistently in the right way and you’re feeling confident about its accuracy – then that’s where you can then talk about it being tied to compensation. Now, where I sometimes am cautious around putting it into compensation is – that typically it only goes into comp plans for just the customer success and/or support teams and what’s important to remember is that NPS can be influenced by every single team within the organization. So, if you’re going to comp, I almost like the idea more of saying- this is a company metric so as a company were going to be compensated on NPS. Whether that’s some sort of bonus if you meet a certain score or if you stay within a certain threshold. But I would encourage you to, however you treat compensation to remember that this isn’t just about customer success and customer support it is broader than that and you should treat it as such.
If you’re interested in more best practices on Net Promoter Score check out this blog post – NPS – Now What?
New Resource – NPS Cheat Sheet
To learn more about Net Promoter Score (NPS), check out our cheat sheet. In this NPS Cheat Sheet you will find a complete description of NPS and key terms to enrich your Customer Success vocabulary. You will also learn how to administer and calculate NPS, recommended follow-up actions for each segment, and other best practices.
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