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If you’re measuring your NPS, you’ll probably want to be improving it too. There’s no real trick to it – to improve customer loyalty, you’ll need to listen and respond to customer feedback. Measuring NPS is useless without the conversation it creates. In this post, we’ll walk through the feedback cycles you’ll need to create in order to improve your NPS and build even more customer loyalty.
Immediate action
As the survey results come in, you’ll invariably receive questions and comments that require a response. Responding to every single customer (regardless of the score they submitted) is the first and most important step to improving your NPS. Detractors may be disappointed because they aren’t aware of the very feature they need. Passives might just need a little company engagement to push them into Promoter land.
We’ve implemented an automated follow up system based on the customer’s score. Promoters were asked to recommend Baremetrics with a simple tweet. Detractors were asked for more information on what went wrong, and Passives were asked what the One Thing we could do to move them to a 9 or 10 was.
But the method of following up isn’t important. The important part is making a concerted effort to create a conversation with customers who are engaged enough to respond to your survey. That’s where the good stuff comes from.
Analyze the Trends
Now, zoom out and look at the overall responses. One person worried about something is worth responding to. Twenty customers mentioning the same issue is worth making company changes for. If you only look at NPS responses individually, you’ll miss valuable information.
When analyzing NPS, you’ll want to segment data by type of customer. You might look at plan type, or age of customer. What trends are you seeing? Are older customers more likely to be detractors? Is your freemium plan creating the most promoters?
Separate scores by the reason for them. Is it feature requests? Or is something else driving your NPS score? You might notice I’m asking a lot of questions – it’s because you need to. Analyzing trends in NPS requires making hypotheses and digging into the WHY.
For example, in our first Net Promoter survey, we found two main reasons for Detractors. We weren’t shipping progress fast enough, and we’d had some recent stability issues. Shipping a big new feature made a huge difference (125%!) in our NPS. But we wouldn’t have known where to start if we hadn’t analyzed the data. You can read more about our experience in our blog post on increasing customer loyalty.
Confirm and Inform your Priorities
Once you’ve analyzed the big picture, it’s time to take a good look at your company’s plans for the next quarter, year, or five years. You likely have a roadmap full of ideas, improvements and priorities. Does it match what customers are asking for?
Instead of starting with a blank wall and filling it up with customer ideas, use the information from your NPS program to** confirm** that you’re existing plans are heading in the right direction. Not every priority needs to be solving a customer complaint – innovation is important too! But if you’re not addressing the biggest issues from Detractors, you should take a moment to decide if you want to keep them around. If you want to convert some of those Detractors into Promoters – it might be time to make room for their concerns.
Follow up with Respondents
Made some changes? Great. Now we need to let customers know about the improvements that come from their feedback. There’s nothing more satisfying as a customer than taking the time to fill out a survey and then actually seeing your feedback make a difference.
It might be in a customer newsletter, or an individual email, but make sure you follow up and complete the feedback loop.
Improving NPS
Survey. Listen. Act.
Not only will the number increase, but your customer loyalty will too – and that’s what it’s all about. We don’t improve NPS because we like high numbers. We improve because we want to keep providing value to our customers and keep them loyal for life.
