What’s a brand without its customers? Your customers are the wind in your sales, so trust their opinions, ideas, and critiques.
Research shows that 78% of shoppers prefer brands that gather customer feedback.
Fortunately, there are many ways to do this—one of them being net promoter score (NPS) surveys. Read on to learn how and why to create one of your own today.
The basics of NPS surveys
Let’s talk fundamentals.
An NPS survey measures customer loyalty based on a customer’s journey. The scores obtained from surveying can be used as benchmarks in company performance evaluation and comparison yardsticks to competitors.
The NPS survey does this by categorizing responses into three groups:
- Promoters (9-10): Loyal customers who will likely recommend your business.
- Passives (7-8): Satisfied but not enthusiastic customers.
- Detractors (0-6): Unhappy customers who may harm your brand through negative word of mouth.
NPS surveys are versatile tools that can be used post-purchase, after customer support interactions, or periodically to monitor and improve overall customer satisfaction.
What is the value of increasing NPS by one point?
Increasing your NPS by just one point can have a significant impact on your business. Higher NPS scores are often correlated with increased customer retention through improving your customer experience, greater word-of-mouth referrals, and higher revenue growth.
Even a small improvement reflects a positive shift in customer sentiment and loyalty, which further adds to building up your brand.
NPS survey best practices for effective questions
Don’t know what to ask? We’ve got you covered.
Keep it simple: The core NPS question and its importance
Go with the classic:
“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [business/product/service] to a friend or colleague?”
The number one mistake companies make with their post-purchase surveys is making every question open-text versus clear-ended questions with more narrow or straightforward answers.
Why? Because customers often lose interest in answering questions that require significant effort, which reflects lower survey response rates. Also, open-ended questions are harder to analyze and pull quantifiable metrics, which can limit your ability to compare to industry benchmarks or your historical performance.
However, certain open-ended questions can provide detailed and emotional insights from customers that your company may need.
So, mix it up. Use a variety of open-text questions mixed with closed-ended questions, and spread questions out over time.
When you’re asking open-text questions, make sure you place them either as follow-ups or at the end of the survey. This is helpful to customers who might be intimidated by having to write a lengthy response.
Feeling lost or need some inspiration? With KnoCommerce’s NPS survey platform, we have a Simple NPS template ready and available for you to kickstart your survey journey.
Avoid asking any questions that could create bias
Your survey needs quality questions.
When creating your NPS survey, avoid leading or overly complex questions.
A leading question is one that strategically points to a desired response, which will skew the insight data, lead to inaccurate representations, and spark misguided decision-making—not something you want.
A leading question may not always seem so obvious. Here is an NPS survey example:
“How impressed were you with the quality of our [business/product/service]?”
The issue here is that the question presupposes that the customer is impressed with your business and will then steer the customer toward a positive (and maybe inaccurate) response.
With NPS surveys, you also want to avoid double-barrelled questions, questions that ask about multiple topics but only prompt for one answer. These questions are often confusing for the consumer, which leads to response ambiguity that lowers the quality of your data.
Here is an NPS survey example of a double-barrelled question:
“On a scale of 0-10, how satisfied were you with your shopping experience and product pricing?”
This question combines two different subjects (CX and pricing) into one response, where customers realistically may have different answers for these distinct subjects.
Instead of leading or double-barreling, opt for using follow-up questions.
Use direct and specific follow-up questions to gather qualitative feedback for deeper insights. Effective follow-up questions allow customers to discuss their organic opinions without response ambiguity.
What do these follow-up questions look like? Here are a few examples:
- “What’s the main reason for your score?”
- “What could we improve to make your experience better?”
- “Would you consider purchasing again based on the value you received?”
Understand what type of feedback you’re looking for
Gather insights that are specific to a certain aspect of your business. Try breaking your surveys down by purpose, product, and audience with specific survey questions.
Need some question inspiration? Lucky for you, KnoCommerce has gathered a 200+ post-purchase question bank that you can filter by product, purpose, and audience. Find it here.
Need a real-life example? Take BrüMate, a brand that focused each survey on a specific product to improve their current product lines.
BrüMate, a DTC drinkware brand, partnered with KnoCommerce to create an NPS survey for one specific product at a time. They wanted to know the specifics to make their different products stand out.
The brand uses the NPS feedback at the product level to spot product-specific flaws. This insight was a game changer—allowing the brand to double down and create new products catering to the customer’s needs, validating customer loyalty.
And the surveys? BrüMate’s surveys saw an upwards of a 98% response rate and 96% completion rate. Read more about this success story here.
NPS best practices for timing and frequency
Survey timing, frequency, and urgency matter. Especially when aiming for high response and completion rates.
Boost survey engagement
Sometimes, it’s appropriate to offer small incentives like discounts or giveaway entries without damaging the integrity of the results. Make sure the incentives don’t foster any bias towards specific answers.
Survey timing
Timing matters. Send your NPS surveys out at meaningful touchpoints such as:
- Immediately post-purchase
- After customer service interactions
- After product delivery
- At key milestones (first, fifth, or tenth purchase)
Ideal survey frequency
It’s important to strike a balance to avoid survey fatigue.
It’s best to segment surveys for different customer journeys, like new versus repeat customers. Avoid over-surveying the same customer with repetitive questions by diversifying your repeat-customer surveys. On the other hand, strike while the iron is hot and send first-time customers NPS surveys post-purchase to gain first-impression feedback on shopping at your store.
Analyzing and acting on NPS data
After gathering your insights, you have to place meaning in your numbers.
First, you use an NPS calculator to calculate a score based on gathered survey data—where scores will range from -100 to +100.
What is a “good” NPS, and what do the numbers really mean? Here is a breakdown:
- A score above 50 is excellent. A high NPS which shows strong customer loyalty and satisfaction.
- 0-50 indicates room for improvement. This is a neutral or mixed score that either suggests that your customer satisfaction is average or that you have as many detractors as promoters.
- Below 0 signals major issues needing attention. A negative NPS shows that your customer satisfaction is low, with detractors superseding your promoters.
Identifying trends from follow-up question responses
Analyzing your feedback can feel overwhelming. Here are some tips to streamline that process:
- Categorize responses. Sorting feedback into categories. This makes it easier to identify types of responses and focus on specific areas, such as product features, customer experience, or service issues.
- Spot recurring themes. Look for patterns or commonalities in the responses. Are multiple customers highlighting the same problem or praising a particular feature? These recurring themes often point to your most valuable insights.
- Visualize the data. Bring the story to life by transforming qualitative feedback into visual formats like word clouds, bar charts, or graphs. NPS survey tools can make the data more digestible and help your team quickly understand the bigger picture.
With your Knocommerce account, you can visualize your customer responses in various ways.
First, go to reports. From there, you can filter by survey, question, date range, and audience. Data can be shown in bar charts, pie charts, and more.
Turning feedback into actionable insights for teams across your business
Don’t let your valuable survey data go to waste. Use these numbers to invoke actions like:
- Inform product development. Use feedback to prioritize new features or improvements.
- Enhance marketing efforts. Leverage positive feedback and testimonials from promoters in marketing campaigns and spark more word-of-mouth referrals.
- Track customer sentiment. Monitor your NPS score over time to assess the impact of your initiatives.
- Combine NPS with other metrics. Integrate NPS data with metrics like customer lifetime value (CLTV) and churn rate for a holistic view of customer health.
Closing the loop: Responding to feedback to build stronger relationships
Complete the feedback loop by sharing how you implemented your customers’ feedback. Luckily, there is a way to do this without the laborious process of emailing each respondent back individually.
Leverage your communication channels to do things like:
- Run an email campaign. Periodically, use your email channel to announce improvements to a product after receiving feedback about it.
- Update your company website. Vamp up your products page on your company’s website to highlight improvements inspired by customer feedback. Or, go the extra mile to create a customer feedback page designed specifically to showcase how feedback gets implemented.
- Share on social media. Use the real-time benefits of social media to post live updates of product improvements in the works or behind the scenes.
Take Advantage of the Templates in KNO’s Library.
If you’re just getting into post-purchase surveys and don’t know where to start, don’t stress.
KnoCommerce is your go-to NPS survey platform with a library of free templates that you can use, including attribution, NPS, building customer profiles, and more.
Did we mention they’re free? Get started in minutes here.