SaaS NPS Benchmarks: The Ideal Score
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In the competitive SaaS industry, understanding customer satisfaction and loyalty is crucial for growth and retention. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) serves as a vital metric, offering insights into how likely your customers are to recommend your product to others. But what qualifies as a “good” NPS in the SaaS space? In this article, we’ll explore SaaS NPS benchmarks, provide context on the ideal score, and discuss how you can use NPS to improve customer experiences and drive business success.
What does NPS mean in NPS Benchmarks SaaS?
Fred Reichheld and Bain & Co. came up with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a way to measure customer loyalty. It asks buyers how likely they are to buy from you again or tell their friends about your goods and services.
There aren’t many big differences between the questions on SaaS NPS surveys. The question generally looks like this: “How likely are you to tell a friend or coworker about [product, service, company name]?”
People always rate on a scale from 1 to 10, and then they are asked an open-ended question to find out more about why they gave the number they did. SaaS NPS surveys sometimes just ask people to explain why they chose the score they did. It would be like, “What is the main reason for your score?” Sometimes the language is clearer.
Here are some examples of different types of follow-up questions:
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What do you like or dislike most about [name of product, service, or company]?
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What can we do to make our service better?
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Which parts do you like or use the most?
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Which parts do you not care about or use much?
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What did you like best and least about [good, service, company name]?
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Which of these (x, y, z) factors did you think made the most difference in the score?
Read more: How to Calculate NPS & What does NPS Stand for
Why is NPS important in SaaS?
It’s important for companies to use NPS SaaS questionnaires and NPS SaaS Benchmark to improve the customer experience and keep customers coming back. Harvard Business Review and Bain & Company all did studies that found a strong link between good NPS scores and sales.
Also, the annual B2B NPS & CX Benchmarks Report from CustomerGauge found that NPS is still the most trusted measure in B2B, with 41% of respondents agreeing. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) came in second with 26%, and CES (Customer Effort Score) came in fourth with 11%.
Read more: CSAT vs NPS vs CES Comparison: Choosing the Right Customer Metric
There are a few things that SaaS companies can do to improve their Net Promoter Score among SaaS NPS Benchmark and grow their business faster:
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Finding common problems to look into more closely.
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Asking those who say yes for online reviews or recommendations.
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Getting in touch to fix the issues brought up by negative comments before customers leave bad reviews or unsubscribe.
The most important thing in SaaS isn’t NPS, though. Some critics say that a single question is not a good indicator and that SaaS NPS Benchmarks are only useful when mixed with other metrics, such as in-app behavior, to get a fuller picture.
However, most businesses already use a number of different feedback tools that, when paired with an NPS score, give them a lot of useful information. Examples that are specific to SaaS are:
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Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Tips on how to do a good NPS poll
Here are something you should consider so your NPS survey can work more efficiently:
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Pick the type of NPS poll you want to do. You can have a survey right on your website or make a separate poll that can be sent in-app or by email.
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Write down your NPS questions and questions to follow up on them.
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Make sure the name and description of your survey are catchy and clear so people will want to fill it out and understand what you need.
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Carefully think about the visual aspects. Customers may not want to fill out the poll if it doesn’t look good or if the questions are poorly written.
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Make sure that your template has a way to thank people for their time at the end.
Best Techniques for the NPS survey
It doesn’t have to be hard to make an NPS poll. By following this list of best practices, SaaS businesses can get accurate NPS data when they do it.
Shorten it up
We suggest having no more than four or five questions, but polls with only three questions will give you the best results. If you make it too long, you’ll get few responses and wrong answers. If it’s any shorter, your info won’t be useful for much.
What Should You Ask?
The way you ask a question will help you focus on making customers happy while also making the information you get more specific to their experiences. Take a look at these questions:
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Your friends and family might ask you about [product, service, company name]. How likely will you recommend it?
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Tell us about your experience with [product, service, business name]. How likely are you to tell your friends and family about us?
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How likely are you to tell your friends and family about [business name] now that you’ve used [product, service] for [amount of time]?
Personalization can Help
When you greet a customer by name and show that you know about their past by mentioning features they’ve used or trends they’ve seen over time, they are more likely to react.
Add a Box for Comments
Adding a comment box shows that you care about feedback that isn’t just about the poll. To keep the survey from looking too long, make it clear that adding more notes is optional.
Make a Feedback Loop that never Ends
Add a checkbox that asks customers if you can call them to talk about their experience in more depth. It gives people a chance to say what they think and makes them feel like their opinion is important.
Send a Reminder
The best way to get more people to fill out your survey is to send messages. You don’t want to bother people too soon. You don’t want to wait too long, though, if it’s a transactional poll.
Don’t use Spam filters
If you don’t want to get caught by spam filters when you send emails, don’t do the following:
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Use all capital letters or exclamation points in the subject line
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Having too many fonts, sizes, and colors for the text
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Putting in catchphrases like “do it now” or “last chance.”
Test, Test, Test!
Putting an NPS poll to the test will help you get the most accurate results. Don’t forget to ask your employees what they think about possible problems and how you can make things better. Sending first within the company will ensure:
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Your email engine is functioning well.
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Emails open in the right way and with the right style.
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Links to the polling work
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Different browsers can open the poll, and it works well.
How to do Analysis on NPS scores
If you’re giving surveys to a lot of customers, it can be hard to figure out your NPS score. These are the rules you should follow when you look at your open answer data:
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Sort: Putting feedback into groups based on topics helps you see what needs the most work. Customer service, efficiency, and navigation are some examples.
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Use data about people: Putting answers into groups based on things like location, age, gender, income, and so on helps you learn more about the people who like and dislike your product. With this information, you can make experiences more tailored to different groups by focusing changes and new features on those groups.
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Record Sentences: You can help customers make the right choice by labeling comments as either positive, negative, or neutral. This will help you learn more about how promoters, detractors, and passives might change their minds.
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Compare the results of each poll to see how things have changed. Did making the changes you said you would based on the last NPS SaaS survey pay off? If not, why not?
SaaS NPS Benchmarks
Below is some information for your reference of whether your businesses are performing well or not.
Read more: What is a Good NPS Score by Industry [2024 benchmarks]
What is the Average for the SaaS business?
It was found in CustomerGauge’s most recent NPS Benchmarks Report that the average SaaS NPS Benchmarks is +36.
In SaaS, what does a Good NPS score look like?
Bain & Company, the company that made NPS, says that an NPS number of 0 or more is good. More than 50 is great, and more than 80 is world class.
If your number is greater than zero, it means that there are more Promoters than Detractors. This is a good sign. But it’s good to see how you stack up against others in the same field.
In SaaS NPS Benchmarks, the average score is 25 - 33+, so anything above that is considered good. However, your ultimate goal should be to match the top companies in your field.
A business goal shouldn’t be to get more people to buy from you. It should be to get more people to tell their friends about you.
SaaS NPS Benchmarks
49
73
70
36
89
55
91
54
20
67
90
65
87
73
72
70
66
58
42
51
43
52
48
33
31
37
49
30
21
33
Top Case Studies from SaaS companies about SaaS NPS Benchmarks
In order to get a better idea of how important SaaS NPS Benchmarks are for SaaS businesses, let’s look at a star in the field and see how they use NPS to keep customers coming back and help their businesses grow.
PandaDoc
PandaDoc is an app for making and signing computer documents. Over 600 people work for the company, which has more than 30,000 customers. This is better than the average NPS for the SaaS industry: 41 for PandaDoc. Responders are made up of 62% promoters, 17% passives, and 21% detractors.
What Is Different About PandaDoc? A lot, in fact:
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The PandaDoc CX team puts NPS comments right into the Slack channel for the whole company to make sure that the customer experience is always top of mind.
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The team has come up with “success KPIs” such as the number of times customers fail to close a deal, the number of times a document expires, and the number of times it is rejected. These are kept track of at the customer level in the app to see what needs to be fixed.
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10 to 20 customers are asked to an advisory board meeting every six months to talk about the product roadmap, the customer experience strategy, and share their thoughts.
Slack
12 million people use Slack every day, and 156,000 businesses pay for its services. Slack has a Net Promoter Score of 50, with 65% of people saying they would recommend it and 20% passives and 15% detractors. All in all, a very high NPS for a SaaS company. For years, Slack has been able to keep growing its revenue. Between 2020 and 2021, it jumped by an amazing 43%, making the company famous. What plan did Slack use to make this happen? The company created a philosophy based on referrals by looking at NPS scores to find out the main reasons why people do or do not suggest their services. At Slack, the most important indicators are not new users, sales, customer satisfaction, or customer dissatisfaction. There is a bar that is set at whether other users suggest it or not.
A strong NPS can be a game-changer for SaaS companies, offering a clear indication of customer loyalty and satisfaction. While SaaS NPS Benchmarks provide valuable context, the key to success lies in understanding your specific audience and taking actionable steps to address their feedback. By prioritizing NPS as part of your customer engagement strategy, you can foster stronger relationships, improve retention, and create a loyal base of advocates who propel your business forward.
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