Our best advice and tips for strengthening your NPS surveys

Sending out an Net Promoter Score survey in an e-mail to a customer isn’t difficult. But one thing is to collect answers, quite another is to optimize the way you measure so that NPS creates value for the business, customers, and employees. We have gathered our top tips for getting the most out of your customer surveys.

Keep it simple

NPS works best when it is not mixed with long questionnaires. Instead, ask one question with an optional comment. By conducting a stand-alone survey, you strengthen your response rate and make it easier to customize the channel for your survey according to the individual customer. At the same time, it becomes easier to follow up on the answers and create a closed loop between touchpoint, answer and follow-up.

Pro tip: The strength of the single question is that it is answered in real time. Rather than asking a ton of questions long after the touchpoint, you ask the customer when the experience is completely fresh in the memory.

Relation or transaction

Relation (rNPS) is the customer’s overall view of the company, while the transaction (tNPS) is the relationship with the product or service in a specific touchpoint. If you want to measure the relation, the question should not be asked directly after a touchpoint, as the experience in the touchpoint will affect the answer.

You can easily use NPS for both relation and transaction. Simply angle the question according to the purpose. For example, you can replace questions for CSAT and CES with a transactional NPS:
“How likely is that you would recoomend our company to a friend or a colleague?” is replaced by “To what extent does the newsletter provide relevant content for you?”

Pro tip: Do not measure the relation of all customers once a year. Divide customer surveys and ask regularly. By dividing the surveys, you will get a better overview for handling the responses. Furthermore, continuous measurements give you a general picture that is not influenced by temporary or circumstantial opinions.

Measuring systematically

It is essential for an operational program that measurements are conducted in a systematic way. Decide where it is most important to take action first and create a structure to give you a good overview. All measurements must have an owner, who is responsible for each touchpoint. In this way, you integrate the measurement in your organization.

Choose the right channel for the purpose

The choice of channel for your surveys should be made on the customer’s terms. Choose the channel most relevant to the transaction and the one, which makes it the easiest for the recipient to deliver his or her response.
For example, if the marketing department wants input for the company’s newsletter, the question should be included in the newsletter. If customer service has had an e-mail correspondence, you should incorporate the question by mail. If you have been in contact with the customer by phone, it makes sense to send an SMS.

Pro tip: It significantly increases the response rate if you incorporate the customer’s premise into your choice of channel.

Follow up on your customers' responses

Most people have tried to give feedback to a company only to be met with silence. This does not make the customer inclined to respond again. By following up on the customer’s comments, you show the customer that you take them seriously. In nps.today we find the highest response rates among the companies that follow up on their customer’s feedback.
It facilitates dialogue between customer and company, which the company can use to strengthen the customer relationship and create better products or experiences.

Pro tip: Follow up on the customer’s answers systematically. By combining NPS with for example revenue, you can create a safety net for your company, where you can prioritize follow-ups on your most important customers.

Notify employees of NPS

When NPS is initiated, it is important to notify everyone in the company. Employees need to understand that it is a tool for improving their daily work. In addition, the use of NPS must create an increased customer focus across the organization and, therefore, all employees must be made aware of what NPS is about.

Pro tip: If you use Slack or Teams in your organization, these systems are ideal for making NPS visible to employees as they work in the systems throughout their day. Alternatively, you can create virtual dashboards which can be displayed on screens in each department.