At the heart of your business’s success lies customer loyalty. Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys are integral in determining just how strong your customers’ loyalty is to your business, which is why they’ve become an important tool to many tech PR founders and leaders. Before we discuss the top 7 NPS survey best practices, we need to define what an effective NPS survey is.
What Is an Effective NPS Survey?
A NPS survey is a questionnaire with the objective of gauging customer loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm for a company and its associated products or services. Any effective NPS survey is one that most accurately gauges the feeling and emotions associated with your business. To have the most effective NPS survey, follow the below steps.
The 7 NPS Survey Best Practices to Follow
How you design your survey plays a significant role in the value of the insights you receive. This entails asking the right questions and phrasing them in such a way that they draw out a customer’s true thoughts and feelings regarding the goods and services offered by your company. The following best practices will help you craft your NPS survey to receive the best results possible, which will be invaluable to your technology marketing team and customer PR program.
1. Know When to Conduct Surveys
As the saying goes, timing is everything. This is certainly true of NPS surveys, which must be distributed thoughtfully to ensure they are well-received by customers. For instance, weekly questionnaires may seem like a good way to stay in step with customer sentiment, but can actually annoy your customer. When sending questionnaires, focus on those times when customers will be least busy and more likely to pay their full attention to your queries.
2. Make Use of Reminders
Along with follow-up, reminders are useful for nudging busy customers to complete a survey. When sending reminders, do so carefully; refrain from sending more than three reminders, and make sure you carefully separate customers who have completed the questionnaire from those who have not.
3. Craft a compelling subject line
Most people have inboxes brimming with unwanted emails. That’s why it’s crucial that you craft a compelling subject line when sending out emails to ensure your customers don’t mistake these messages for spam. Try to make your customers feel like individuals, while also properly identifying your company. DigitalMarketer.com offers some insight into writing effective subject lines for your emails.
4. Create Unique and Exciting NPS Surveys
Once you have a customer’s attention with a carefully crafted subject line, you then need an NPS survey that maintains their attention. You will want no more than 5-6 questions when crafting your survey. Too many questions could use too much of your customer’s time and they may leave the survey unfinished. Keeping the questions capped at 6 keeps the survey concise and to the point. You will also need to ask the right questions to gain valuable insights.
5. Ask the Right Questions
You will need your questions to be unique and bring valuable insights. Most NPS surveys will ask the customer about their feelings towards a company. To gain the most value we will want to be more specific. If you are looking for feedback on specific services or products, replace “company” with one of those. By doing this you can get more granular with your customer’s feedback.
6. Make the Customer Feel Valued
Even negative feedback is useful for your business. After all, you won’t be able to zero in on lapses in quality or service if you don’t know where the true problems lie. Accordingly, you should make all customers who take the time to respond feel valued, whether their responses are good or bad. Use language that shows appreciation and highlights the importance your customers play in the success of your business.
7. Don’t Neglect the Follow-up
Receiving feedback from customers is really just the first step in the process. Next you must take the proper follow-up measures to ensure customers remain engaged and that you continue receiving valuable insights. Responses are key in this case, as they will help you organize customers into meaningful categories. Depending on the NPS, your customers will be classed as promoters, passives, or detractors, and you can use these classifications to tailor follow-up practices.
