NPS Survey Best Practices: Elevate Your Customer Experience

Implementing NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys effectively necessitates adherence to best practices that maximize their impact in gauging customer loyalty. Understanding and incorporating these best practices not only ensure accurate feedback but also drive actionable insights. Delving into the realm of NPS survey best practices is vital for businesses aiming to foster lasting customer relationships and boost advocacy.

Obtain Total Commitment

Making sure that everyone in the company is aware of the objective is the first step towards your NPS survey best practices. Obtain the support of the entire team and make your NPS objective a shared vision. Your bottom line will ultimately increase if you emphasize how important it is to improve NPS in order to enhance the business and get everyone on board!

Tailor Your NPS Evaluation

People are overloaded with emails these days, which makes it more likely that they will delete anything that looks like a typical form letter. Customizing your NPS survey is therefore essential. You can personalize your NPS survey best practices by include the recipient’s name in the email’s introduction, emphasizing the product they bought in the subject line (e.g., “What did you think about your new iPhone purchase?”), or adding your own branding elements (logos, colors, etc.) to the questionnaire.

Read more: Boost Customer Satisfaction with Feedback Management

Craft Captivating Subject Lines for NPS Surveys

If your survey is being sent via email, you should think about what to write in the subject line. You must differentiate yourself from the 120 emails that the typical office worker receives each day. To let them know that you are aware of who they are, add the name of the product or service they purchased in the subject line. “How’s your new purse going?” will undoubtedly garner more interest than “Tell us about your latest purchase.” Not receiving many answers? A/B testing, which frequently includes sending out emails with varied subject lines, content, or in-app color schemes or aspects, is one of the best practices in designing NPS survey best practices. 

Recognize Industry Standards

Your NPS calculation yields a score ranging from -100 (worst) to 100 (highest). Too frequently, businesses panic if they don’t reach 100! Although it’s a great objective to pursue, very few businesses succeed in achieving it, as it would imply that no customer has ever expressed dissatisfaction with your goods or service. 

Therefore, it is beneficial to comprehend market benchmarks and aim to only exceed them (for instance, department stores typically do the best, averaging 58, while internet providers score the lowest, averaging just 2). 

Inform Clients in Advance about Your NPS Survey

This serves only as a warning to customers. It may be something like this: a salesperson might say, “After this call, we’d like you to complete a quick phone survey,” or an automatically produced email after a transaction might state, “We’ll be sending you a satisfaction survey with receipt of your product; your response is appreciated!” Pre-notifying clients can enhance response rates by up to nearly 30%, despite the fact that this may seem ridiculous!

Send NPS questionnaires at the right time

It is important to emphasize that clients get a lot of emails. Sending an NPS survey by email at the appropriate time is essential. Approximately 24% of emails are opened within the first hour of delivery, ~5% in the fourth, and less than 1% in the twenty-fourth, as per Smart Insights. Therefore, it’s critical to contact clients at the hour when they are most likely to respond. That means submitting your NPS survey on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday at 10 a.m. or 2 p.m., according to CoSchedule is one of the NPS survey best practices.

Find out more: How to Collect Customer Feedback Effectively

Survey Each of during the Buyers’ Journey

Consumers interact with your business through a variety of channels, all of which should uphold the same high standards. For instance, a consumer may have had an excellent overall experience, but they may get angry due to a shipping delay. Your NPS score can be significantly lowered by just this one touchpoint. Every step of the buyers’ journey can be made easy by securing internal commitment from everyone.

Distribute NPS Surveys Frequently. But Not Too Often

Regularly tracking NPS through surveys is crucial since otherwise, you won’t be able to determine whether things are getting better or worse. Consider this: if you successfully resolve a customer’s issues, they may give you a promoter-level 9, even though they originally gave you a dismissive 2. You wouldn’t be aware of that without consistent NPS tracking.

On the other hand, sending out NPS surveys too frequently would make you appear bothersome. Sending out surveys as soon as a new customer is among the worst things you can do in our observation of NPS survey best practices. Asking people how they feel before they’ve had much of an encounter with your business is likely to turn them off or skew results because NPS is meant to measure the overall emotion someone has with your brand, whether good or poor.

Employ Responsive Survey Design

Mobile devices come in an endless array of shapes and sizes these days, and their screen resolutions vary as well. This implies that if your survey is not formatted correctly, it may display badly on some displays, with words and images being cut off. Making your survey responsive—that is, mobile-friendly—thus ranks among the simplest strategies to increase the number of respondents to your NPS survey. Because responsive design adjusts to various screen sizes and resolutions, it can resize or expand content as needed. Furthermore, this is more crucial than ever because mobile users account for around 55% of all website traffic.

Send Follow - Up Questions from the NPS Survey

It’s critical to learn the reason behind a customer’s rating. Without asking more questions, you’ll never know. Make sure your questions are meaningful, but keep the survey brief and sweet. 

Promoter: 

• What is the main factor influencing your score?

• Tell us about your experience; what went well?

• What more can we do the next time to wow?

Passive: 

• Did you run into any specific problems? 

• What one thing could we do differently to satisfy your needs?

Detractors: 

• Why wouldn’t you recommend us?

• How might we have enhanced your experience?

• If your recommendations were implemented, would you give us another thought?

Keep A Close Eye on Your NPS

It’s crucial to remember that just because you performed well on your top NPS surveys, it doesn’t guarantee that you will continue to do so. You must always keep an eye on your NPS to make sure you’re not gaining or losing supporters. If you notice a decline, or even worse, a sharp decline, send follow-up inquiries to find out what went wrong and how you can improve going forward.

Promote Positive Feedback

Encourage promoters (high scorers) to share their positive experiences on social media or review platforms. Take advantage of positive feedback to enhance your brand reputation.

In conclusion, embracing NPS survey best practices  is instrumental in leveraging customer feedback for actionable insights. By implementing strategies such as crafting effective survey questions, timely follow-ups, and analyzing feedback, businesses can nurture promoters, address detractor concerns, and ultimately elevate customer loyalty to drive sustainable growth.