Getting Started With NPS® in 4 Easy Steps

Heard great things about Net Promoter Scores®? Not sure how to get started at your company?  Read on for 4 easy steps to kick off your NPS® program.

What Are Your Business Objectives?

NPS is more than a simple score on whether or not your customers like you.  NPS provides you with a lot of great customer feedback that can be applied in a number of different ways.  Before you start surveying your customers, give consideration to how you intend to use the results:

• How will the score be used?
  • As a company-wide business metric?
  • Tied to people’s roles and compensation?
  • Owned by a department?
• How do you plan on leveraging feedback?
  • To build a better product?  
  • To improve customer onboarding?
  • To improve customer support?

• What, exactly, are you looking to measure?
  • Customer Support experiences?  
  • Onboarding Satisfaction?  
  • Product experience?  
  • All of it?

Answering these questions is the critical part of getting started.  Your objectives and intentions will determine how you set up your VoC program and who will execute on it.

What type of NPS Program Will You Choose?

Leaning on your newly defined business objectives, you’ll next want to decide upon what type of NPS program you’ll launch.  There are a few different ways to deploy NPS that will help you to meet your objectives:

• tNPS – post transaction survey process (mostly used after a service or support interaction)
  • This is a survey that will be sent out after a transaction and will give you a leading indicator on loyalty for that given service

• NPS – relationship survey process (mostly used for relational purposes (longer term loyalty)
  • This is a survey that will be sent out on a regular time interval (quarterly, biannually or annually) and will gauge overall loyalty for your customers

Establish Your VoC Team

Once upon a time, early in my career, I moonlighted as a radio DJ.  They had a hard policy that was “Don’t crack the mic unless you have something to say.”  I think that rule especially applies to surveys….Don’t ask for feedback unless you plan to respond to it and you’re going to put that feedback to use.  That said, you’ll need to be mindful of your Voice of the Customer team.  

Of course, this doesn’t need to be a new team in your company.  But you will want to have some named people that will be responsible for reading responses and responding to customer feedback, questions, and requests.

As you’re working to establish your team members consider:

• Who will collect, read, and respond to the survey responses?
• What will you do with each recipient segment (promoter, passive, detractor)
• Name a program manager with authority for escalations or immediate “fixes” for customers in need

Who Will You Survey, and How?

The next step in getting started is defining who you will survey, and how.  The answers to your business objectives and the type of survey you will deploy should give you speedy answers to this one.  But for ease of use, here are a few thoughts:

If you have end users who live in your product, and key stakeholders who rarely access your product, then surveying each of these customer types will lead you into a multi-channel NPS program.  Multi-channel allows you to survey users from inside your product while emailing other customers who are engaged with you but not your product.

In the case that you only want to survey power users or administrators (or any user of a type), then you’ll probably want to use an in-app survey tool.  In-app survey tools enable you to control where the survey shows up as these users interact with your product.  They also  deliver a higher response rate than email.

If you only want to survey executive sponsors, you might consider using email surveys as executives have a tendency to be more mobile and might not be operating in your product consistently.  

Once you’ve been able to define your business objectives, your NPS program, VoC team, and you’ve decided who you’ll be surveying…you’re almost ready to launch!  The next step from here is determine what tool you will use to distribute and collect survey and get started!.

Want more information on getting your program going?  Join me and Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch on Thursday July 21 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern where we dive a little deeper into the topic of setting up and scaling your NPS program.