How to use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to make your customer experience better

Net Promoter Score. You might have heard of it and be tempted to think it sounds “a bit nineties”.  Surely in this age of real-time analytics, customer tracking and AI-infused algorithms, this survey-based metric has no place in ecommerce strategy?

Not quite! NPS is a deceitfully simple powerhouse of predictive analytics that can be collected and analysed by teams with zero experience designing surveys and with tools you probably already have. 

If you’re not currently using NPS in your company, read on. Introducing this metric has a ton of uses and benefits. Will you be the one who transforms your organisation with this quietly powerful tool? 

Do you know NPS rather well and are interested in how to get more out of it? Scroll below for some ideas to get actionable insight from this technique 

What is Net Promoter Score? 

Net Promoter Score is a measure of customer satisfaction. 

Scores range from -100 to 100. 

NPS works on the basis of a simple question to your customers:  

(from 1 to 10) How likely are you to recommend our company / product / service to a friend or colleague? 

When customers answer 1 to 6, they are considered to be detractors. People who will actively stop friends and colleagues from purchasing from your company. 

Answers between 7-8 are considered passives, who have either a balanced opinion or don’t really care enough to actively recommend you.  

Finally, you have 9-10, the answers of promoters. Promoters will actively recommend your company, and likely continue to purchase whilst their satisfaction is maintained. 

There is a second follow-up question. It reads: 

Why did you give this score? 

These answers aren’t used to compute the NPS score, but can yield significant and actionable insight. Rather than an afterthought, this is the bit of the instrument that will allow you to start projects destined to make your customer experience better. 

What are the benefits of NPS measurement? 

There are two main benefits of NPS. 

The first one is its predictive power, and how it can be used as a proxy measurement for satisfaction and loyalty.

Bain and Company, who developed this metric found that for most industries Net Promoter Scores explained roughly 20% to 60% of the variation in organic growth rates among competitors. On average, category Net Promoter leaders beat competitors by a factor greater than two times.

It’s worth thinking about this. Companies spend countless hours pouring over analytics reports looking at metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate and average order value whilst NPS can account for a much bigger influence on company profits. 

Of course, ecommerce teams should spend time analysing web analytics and CRM data, but clearly, NPS should also be part of the mix. 

The second benefit of NPS is the absolute simplicity in which companies can collect and calculate these scores. 

It’s a two-survey question that is simple and quick to answer. 

That’s all it takes. No branching logic, no customer segmentation, no questionnaire design. And no tracking instruments, cookies or additionally scripts on your codebase potentially harming your site speed. 

Just two questions. 

In the end, a number that is simple to collate and powerful in predicting customer loyalty and revenue. Neat! 

How to collect NPS

To collect NPS from your customers, you need two things. 

One is the survey itself. You need a survey with those two questions, minimally adapted to suit your case: 

• How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? 
• Why did you give this score? (this is an open question, and the answers are called “verbatims”)

The other is a channel to distribute your survey. If you have a marketing automation platform, this is the ideal way. 

This is because one crucial aspect of collecting NPS is timing. 

For people to give the most precise scores and the most thoughtful answers to the second, open-ended question, the ideal time to distribute this survey is a few weeks after purchase.  This way, the customer has had time to receive the item, try it, and contact customer service if there has been a problem. In other words, they have a recent and thorough experience with your company. 

By using a marketing automation platform you can schedule campaigns that send NPS surveys to customers, say two weeks after their last purchase, and stop sending when they answered the survey (or send again when they purchase again). 

For the survey itself, we recommend a tool like Typeform because this way you can use hidden fields to fetch people’s email addresses and match their NPS score to your customer data. 

This data matching can be useful in two distinct ways:

• You can segment individual NPS by customer attributes and purchase data, therefore zooming in on the types of customers that are most and least satisfied. This exercise is likely to drive some significant insight. 

• You can use NPS buckets (promoters, passives and detractors) to launch personalised engagement campaigns. Promoters might react well to premium services and direct sale messages. Passives can benefit from emails recapping the benefits of purchasing from your company, whilst detractors might love to hear about new initiatives that are making customer experience better for everyone. 

In short, a small survey on a platform like Typeform, delivered to your customers at the right time with your marketing automation / CRM / email platform. 

Or, you can use a tool like Delighted, that will take care of both the survey and its deliverability. Worth looking into if you’re looking for a more plug-and-play solution. 

Now that you have the individual scores, it’s time to calculate your NPS score. 

How to calculate NPS scores

NPS is very easy to calculate. This is the formula 

Percentage of promoters – Percentage of detractors. 

For example, if you survey 1,000 customers and 333 are promoters, 333 are passive and 333 are detractors, your score is 33% – 33% which is 0. 

To know how good (or not good) any NPS is, you need category benchmarks. This is to say, you need to be able to compare with companies selling similar products. You can do that here. 

Roughly speaking, over 20 is considered OK and below that shows clear room for improvement. There’s of course no limit to how much you can improve it, and as per the research from Bain & Company, NPS leaders outgrow competitors over time. 

How to use NPS verbatims to make your customer experience better

We’re now getting to the heart of NPS usefulness. 

The first question on the NPS survey gives you the number, but the second question gives you actionable insight. 

When you run an NPS survey, you will collect hundreds (thousands?) of unstructured verbatim answers, where people will explain what they love, like, dislike and hate about your company. 

This is where it gets interesting. 

The first step in working with this data is classifying each answer into one (or various), themes. Things like “shipping”, “customer service” or “returns” tend to weigh heavily on customer experience, but you will need to figure out what other themes there are. 

Depending on the amount of data and your resources, you could classify these terms via text analytics / sentiment analysis in Python or via a few smart formulas on a spreadsheet. 

Now, you can start slicing the data and quantifying the number of mentions per theme, and where they fall across the NPS range (ie, promoters, passives and detractors)

And now, you can answer these key questions.

What do promoters rave about? 

What do detractors complain about?

The first priority in improving your overall customer satisfaction is to deal with popular negative answers from detractors. This is your “Fix” quadrant. Some of the problems mentioned here might be complex, which is why they haven’t been solved before. This could be a cumbersome return process or dissatisfaction with customer service. Heavy investment in this category can yield the greatest results.

While thinking of detractors, also identify some of the less popular themes, and see if there are any quick wins that can be solved quick and easy. 

Next, you want to understand the promoters’ “reasons to believe”. This is your “Promote”  quadrant. 

What do they like the most about buying from you? 

This could you help you validate your key messages for your acquisition media or for key pages on your site. It might also give you some new ideas on themes that matter for your customers but you weren’t aware of.