With the easy to deploy and calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS), more and more companies of all sizes are looking to collect feedback. In this article we will look at 7 things you need to know about the Net Promoter Score – but first a quick reminder of what NPS is and why it’s important.
The Net Promoter Score® is often associated with an indicator of satisfaction, whether it’d be for a company’s customers, employees, staff or users of a product or service.
However, if the NPS were to be defined more clearly, it would be an indicator of the probability of customers, users or employees recommending a service or a product or a brand.
Now that we know more about what exactly the Net Promoter Score® is, here are the 7 things (facts and statistics) to know about this indicator.
- How is the Net Promoter Score calculated?
- The Net Promoter Score is a scalable system
- Detractor ≠ Hater
- Good customer relations = exponential growth
- A simple NPS score without tracking is (almost) useless
- Net Promoter Score is very relative
- You can’t rely on NPS alone
Before diving into the article, you can check the video right below that deals with the Net Promoter Score and why it is very important.
1 – How do you calculate the Net Promoter Score?
In order to define the NPS score, we just ask one simple question:
How likely are you to recommend {{variable}} to a friend or colleague?
To this question, the participant will give a score ranging from 0 to 10 and will therefore be classified in 3 categories:
- Detractors – Score of 0 or 6
- Passive – Score of 7 or 8
- Promoter – Score of 9 or 10
This NPS is then calculated using the following formula:
NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors
This will give you a score between -100 and 100, which will give you your recommendation probability indicator.
If you want to know how to interpret the NPS score, we have written an article about it: just click here.
2 – The Net Promoter Score® is a scalable system
As we have already seen, the NPS measures the probability of recommendation. This indicator is therefore a scalable system, as it can be applied in a precise manner.
Although the Net Promoter Score can be used for an entire brand or company, it can also be applied in a much more targeted way. You can calculate the NPS of a product, a marketing campaign, your company’s customer service, the list goes on.
Furthermore, what makes this system powerful is its simplicity. One question is all it takes and it adapts perfectly to your needs. Since you can deploy the NPS within a company, it is a score that allows you to detect friction points across different teams.
This makes NPS a great way to influence decision making and align the different teams in a company to the same goals.
3 – Detractor ≠ ‘Hater’
As seen above, a detractor is a respondent who gives a very low score ranging from 0 to 6. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that they will never recommend your product, brand or services.
A study conducted by Customer Experience Matters showed that depending on the sector, the percentage of detractors who recommended a brand ranged from 13% to 39%.
This study may therefore mean that a bad experience leads to a low rating from respondents. However, if the company corrects this dissatisfaction quickly, then there is nothing to stop this detractor from becoming a brand advocate.
This is why experience is so important. As we recall, keeping a customer is much cheaper than trying to acquire new ones. Which means, staying away from attrition, from churn.
4 – Good customer relations = exponential growth
Covid has reinforced the idea that relationships between a company and its customers are more so important. Many companies were forced to close their doors due to already having a strained relationship. For other companies, the focus was on improving the customer experience in order to improve their relationship.
Building a good relationship with your customers allows you to make them loyal, to make them promoters of your brand.
Satisfied customers are customers who recommend you. And word-of-mouth customers are 4x more likely to buy your product/service.
This means that the more you optimise your Customer Experience, the more your customers will be satisfied and recommend your brand, and the more your company’s revenues will grow.
5 – A simple NPS score without follow-up is (almost) useless
The Net Promoter Score is an indicator that has many advantages, its simplicity, its adaptation to the need or the type of respondent…
However, detecting a detractor who would not recommend your product is useless if you do not go further in the analysis. Following up on this point of dissatisfaction would be much more productive.
The right solution is therefore to go deeper into this bad rating with one or more questions. For example:
“What is the cause of your dissatisfaction?”
“What feature did you like least? Why?”
“How can we improve your experience?”
“What do you expect from our service?”
The aim here is to find out exactly what the reason is for the poor score. With this additional question, you will know exactly how to react to improve the user experience to convert them into promoters.
Furthermore, you can get in touch with them directly to see if there’s anything you can do to help them. If these unhappy customers notice that you are acting on this feedback, they will feel heard, important and involved in improving your product or service.
6 – The Net Promoter Score is very relative
There is no one right or wrong NPS score. Simply because the score, or the application of the score, is different in different sectors.
To give you an idea of the gap between the different sectors, here is a graph that shows the average NPS score for each industry.
There is a huge difference between the IT sector and the internet services sector. However, even if the average NPS for internet services is low, this does not simply show that these services as a whole are poor.
Here, the score raises an important point, which is assessing your score according to the field of activity. A good NPS score for internet services would therefore be around 10, an excellent score could be for example 30, as we are basing this on the average of the whole sector.
On the other hand, an NPS of 30 for IT would be a really bad score since the average for the sector is 51.
7 – You can’t rely on NPS alone
Once again, measuring the Net Promoter Score for a product, service or brand is good, but you can’t stop there.
This seventh point repeats the idea of the fifth. Measuring a score is not enough, there are other performance indicators (KPIs) that will allow you to know more about your customers.
In addition to the NPS, it is also a good thing to measure satisfaction (CSAT) or the Customer Effort Score (CES). The CES measures the effort required of customers to perform a particular action, such as giving feedback, validating a shopping basket, etc.
This is where micro satisfaction surveys come into play. We call them “micro” surveys at Feedier because they contain no more than 5 to 10 questions, unlike traditional surveys.
The aim here is to collect feedback from the customer at different points in their journey in order to get the most qualitative feedback possible. In this way, you will be able to pinpoint the exact point of improvement in order to reduce dissatisfaction and make detractors a thing of the past!
Feedier is THE intuitive solution for measuring and improving user experience. The platform allows you to measure your NPS at the right moments, create micro-surveys to get more details on these moments of dissatisfaction and be able to correct them by reacting proactively while collaborating with your teams across the company – leading to operational excellence.
You can visit our platform page to learn more or schedule a demo with one of our team members to see how Feedier can improve your user experience.
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