What you need to do before measuring Net Promoter Score
NPS or Net Promoter Score is a powerful tool to measure user satisfaction for your company’s product. In fact, tt does more than just measuring how satisfied your users are; it goes one step further and gauges your customer loyalty.
If you need a refresher on NPS, I propose Sachin Rekhi’s post on NPS: A Practitioner’s Guide to Net Promoter Score, which gives a great introduction.
Here’s a quick refresher any way.
Simply put, users score how likely they are to recommend your product to their friend or colleague on a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being most likely. Users with scores of 10 and 9 are Promoters; 7, 8 are Neutral and 0–6 being Detractors. NPS is found through the difference between the % of Promoters and the % of Detractors.
That’s the easy part.
But you need to do some homework before sending an NPS survey to your users.
In this post, I will answer why you need to use NPS, whom you should send it to, when you should send it and give you a few additional tips on using NPS.
Let’s start with why.
Why do you need to measure NPS?
I’ve found that NPS goes a step further to measure user loyalty. Once you’ve measured this, you can use it to increase customer loyalty, and even reduce churn.
On speaking to many startups, I have noticed that there is a prevalent herd mentality when dealing with NPS. A good way to figure this out is to be aware that using NPS, it will take time to get feedback and convert them into product decisions. As Sachin says it in his post, it depends on the size of your user base and the your product development cycle. A quick win could be to check whether your competitors use NPS. If so, ask around or do some research on how they’re using it.
Like every other data-collection method, it has its pitfalls.
Let’s get to the next question: whom you want a score from and when you want to ask.
Whom to ask, when to ask:
Choose a time-based user segment from the time of sign-up or activity. Ensure that the duration is not too short.
Sending an NPS survey a couple days after signup will not enable the user to give a feedback because she is not yet completely familiarised with your product, after a free trial for example. A good time that I’ve found for B2C startups is around 1 month for the first NPS and every 3 months after that (Yes, take the NPS survey multiple times from the same user).
I don’t recommend a user-activity based segment — where NPS is triggered after a user performs a certain action on your product, like listen to 10 songs for example. It is important to survey your entire active user base to ensure that you’re measuring the engagement levels of your entire user base. (I’ve heard that Transferwise does it this way. If you have a counter-argument, let me know in the comments!)
The frequency of NPS also depends on the sample size of your user base, as I mentioned above. If your user base is relatively small, you might need longer time to conduct an NPS because you will be surveying a considerable chunk of your small user base for statistical significance.
Tip #1: Ask more than just the ONE question
A few ideas:
- Where did you hear from us?
- Why did you give us this score?
- How can we improve this score by just one point?
- Can we contact you if we need further information?
- Any other question that you think is relevant for the user to answer.
Tip#2: Make is a frictionless as possible
- If you’re thinking of getting the NPS survey by email, I will either assume that you’ve got such a huge user base that a 1% response rate will result in statistical significance or that you’ve found an email hack. Else, I suggest you use NPS in-app using tools such as Typeform.
- Try sending a plain-text email to follow up if users don’t answer.
- Work on the copy of the message sent. I use a copy along the lines, “Your feedback will help us build a better product for you.”
Tip#3: Reduce churn
Here’s how Mention used NPS to reduce churn considerably.
There you go!
NPS can be great for both startups and large companies, but be aware of its pitfalls and advantages before starting.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Originally published at nikhilsamuel.com on March 10, 2018.
