One of the easiest and most popular ways to see what customers think about your company is to check your Net Promoter Score, or NPS.
Whether you’re feeling overwhelmed by negative feedback and low scores or are simply looking for ideas on further improving the customer experience, there’s plenty you can do to send your NPS scores surging.
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the Net Promoter Score: what it is, what affects it, and how you can form an action plan to boost your NPS, turning more customers into brand ambassadors.
What is a Net Promoter Score?
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely your customers are to recommend your products or services to others. An NPS survey usually asks a single question: How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?
How to calculate your NPS
To calculate your Net Promoter Score, you first create a survey. An NPS survey normally uses a 1—10 scale, with 1 meaning “Very Unlikely” and 10 meaning “Very Likely.” Happy customers that answer 9 or 10 are your brand's promoters, while those that score 1 to 6 are your detractors. Shoppers that give you a 7 or 8 are known as passives.
To generate your NPS score, you subtract your percentage of detractors from your share of promoters.
For example, let’s say 100 people respond to your survey:
- 80 respondents rated 9 or 10
- 10 respondents rated 7 or 8
- 10 respondents rated 1 to 6
In this scenario, 80% of users are promoters:
80 (number of of promoters) / 100 (total respondents) = 80%
Meanwhile, 10% of users are detractors:
10 (number of promoters) / 100 (total respondents) = 10%
When we subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, we get an NPS of 70.
What is a good NPS score?
Most companies fall into the range of 30—50. A good Net Promoter Score is anything above 50, and scores higher than 70 are the gold standard in most industries.
According to Bain & Company, who first developed the NPS metric, any score above 0 can be considered good, as it means you have more loyal customers than disloyal ones. However, as we previously mentioned, your target should be much higher.
So, what do you do if you’re not seeing your desired score? NPS improvement doesn’t have to be grueling guesswork. Here are 5 tips to improve your NPS in no time.
Learn the basics of customer satisfaction scores, an equally important metric, in our All About CSAT blog post.
5 tips to improve your NPS
1. Act on customer feedback
When it comes to customer feedback, collecting it is only half the battle.
Personalized customer service makes all the difference. 77% of shoppers have a more favorable view of a brand if it asks for feedback. However, 53% believe companies aren’t doing anything once they receive customer opinions.
NPS feedback is a valuable source of information that lets you listen to customers and analyze their needs. Remember to reply to every survey response — even an automatic follow-up will do. Ask what your customers like about your product or service and what you can do better moving forward.
Furthermore, don’t just focus on positive feedback. In the case of negative experiences, find the root cause of each customer’s pain points. Make shoppers feel heard and show them they can have a real impact. Listening to your customers and analyzing their needs is the first step in making NPS data actionable.
2. Implement live chat
When detractors explain why they aren’t likely to recommend a company, it’s often because of slow customer service response times. Most customers say waiting for an agent’s response is their top frustration when interacting with customer service. In fact, 90% expect an immediate response to their customer service questions.
What can you do?
Live chat is the only support channel offering instant help customers have come to expect. With it, teams can respond to customer questions in seconds.
And these faster response and resolution times significantly impact how customers view your brand. According to Statista, customer satisfaction metrics, including NPS scores, are better for companies with live chat than those without it.
Adding live chat often leads to several long-term benefits too. As your customer base grows, it enables you to offer 24/7 support across multiple time zones and countries without upending your support infrastructure. Ensuring customers get the service they demand maximizes your chances of generating positive word-of-mouth.
3. Automate frequently asked customer questions
Automation is one of the most powerful tools you can enact to improve your NPS, and with today’s leading solutions, you can fully automate up to 95% of incoming questions.
Doing so allows you to improve the customer experience in two game-changing ways.
First, it enables you to offer online self-service: a feature that 88% of your shoppers are already looking for. Rather than sending customers to an FAQ page or asking them to search your site themselves, you can use intuitive automation – such as a chatbot – to deliver these answers.
Now, whether they want to know something simple such as where is my order (WISMO), or have a more complex question regarding the intricacies of your products or services, your automation solution has you covered.
Second, automation frees your agents to focus on your most important interactions. With an effective solution, they can spend their time and energy on resolving complicated cases, building stronger customer relationships, and offering the white glove service that helps you turn shoppers into loyal brand advocates.
4. Personalize customer interactions
33% of customers who abandon a brand do so because of a lack of personalization. To build brand loyalty, you need to tailor your customer experiences to fit each individual’s unique needs. Nearly three-quarters of shoppers prefer personalized customer service, but only 44% feel they’re being treated like individuals.
Simple things like remembering a buyer’s name or shipping address make them feel respected and will improve their overall experience. But it shouldn’t stop there.
For repeat shoppers, it’s about showing them the products or services they’re most interested in. This can come in many forms, from promotional emails tailored to their purchase history to greeting your most loyal shoppers with a personal welcome back message every time they enter the site.
For new shoppers, it’s all about making this initial experience memorable. One way leading brands are doing this is by leveraging live chat to put customers in touch with a product expert. Better still, advanced solutions let you automate this personalized experience with phenomenal results. Shoppers can instantly get their questions answered, consult customer reviews, and learn about any deals or promotions you’re offering as soon as they visit your site.
5. Offer proactive customer service
Reactively answering customer questions is a vital component of customer support, but rarely will this help convert unhappy customers to promoters.
As opposed to reactive customer service, proactive service can build memorable experiences across the customer journey. Proactive customer service occurs when you’re able to anticipate your customers’ issues and reach out with a solution. Customers don’t start proactive customer service interactions — support teams do.
This proactive support satisfies customers by anticipating their issues and proposing a solution without waiting for them to ask questions first.
That’s why it can have a profound impact on overall NPS. Companies that embrace proactive service see an uptick in customer retention and a drop in churn. With fewer service speed bumps and noted time savings, shoppers enjoy a smoother customer experience and give companies their loyalty in return.
Understand the differences between proactive and reactive support and learn the benefits of each in our Proactive vs. Reactive Customer Service blog post.
5 Tips to Improve Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)
1. Act on customer feedback
2. Implement live chat
3. Automate frequently asked customer questions
4. Personalize customer interactions
5. Offer proactive customer service
Effective ways to gather NPS feedback
1. Make it easy
When asking for feedback, the last thing you want to do is inconvenience customers. Offer a hassle-free experience, and shoppers will be more likely to answer your survey.
One way to do this is by keeping this interaction short and to the point. Ask a single survey question instead of a longer series that might turn customers off. Reach out at the most appropriate touchpoints so customers don’t feel undue frustration.
When doing so, personalize your messaging as much as possible. These frictionless, tailor-made interactions not only help customers feel appreciated but can boost customer loyalty too.
2. Embrace automation
Customer demands are on the rise, and manually meeting customer expectations can challenge the best businesses. Instead of doing things yourself, take advantage of automation solutions that can distribute and analyze NPS surveys on their own.
AI-powered automation tools can reach out to website visitors in real time at critical points in the customer journey that are most likely to generate higher response rates. Chatbots, for instance, can ask pre- and post-purchase NPS questions, even offering incentives like exclusive promos to shoppers who submit their answers.
3. Leverage omnichannel availability
Chat is an effective channel for collecting NPS feedback, but it’s not the only one. Businesses should use omnichannel capabilities to their benefit and let customers fill out surveys wherever they please. Follow-up emails, social media polls, and mobile app notifications can all be useful in gathering more responses.
And integrating your support channels ensures NPS data can be synced and analyzed in one spot, allowing companies to get deeper insights and more valuable feedback.
With omnichannel connectivity, teams can also set more accurate benchmarks when deciding what action points to take after obtaining NPS data.
Mastering the Net Promoter Score
With our NPS tips and tricks and a robust customer-centric approach, an improved NPS score is well within your grasp. Leverage your customer responses to build an action plan that lets you use NPS to your advantage.
The best part? You don’t have to go it alone.
Zowie’s all-in-one customer service automation platform automates your repetitive work starting day one, equipping your team with everything they need to delight customers and improve net promoter scores.
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