As a product manager or product marketing manager, you deal in numbers. Fragmented numbers can sometimes add to the confusion in measuring success, but the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) solves this, offering statistics that tell a powerful story about your product and its users. NPS is the key to building and maintaining a robust product.
Let’s take a closer look at why an NPS tool matters so much and how to use it to its fullest potential.
Understanding NPS
NPS was introduced by Fred Reichheld in 2003, who aimed to create a straightforward way to measure customer loyalty. Today, companies don’t just use an NPS score tool as a single metric. They’ve transformed it into a system for fostering a customer-centric approach throughout their entire organization.
How NPS works
At its core, the NPS survey tool revolves around one simple question: ‘On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?
Customers fall into three categories based on their answers:
- Promoters (9-10) are your biggest advocates! They actively promote your product, driving growth, and are a great source of positive testimonials, case studies, and feedback for shaping your roadmap. Nurture these valuable relationships with exclusive offers or early feature access to keep them engaged.
- Passives (7-8) are content enough with your product but lack enthusiasm, making them vulnerable to competitors’ offers. They’re unlikely to actively recommend your product, which limits potential growth. Engage with Passives through targeted surveys to uncover what might reignite their excitement and turn them into Promoters.
- Detractors (0-6) are unhappy customers who pose a risk to your reputation through negative reviews and churn. While their feedback might be harsh, it helps to identify major product downsides and user pain points that should be addressed. Reach out to Detractors to understand the root of their dissatisfaction, as this insight can help you prevent further customer loss.
Subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and voila! You have your NPS. This can range from -100 (really bad) to +100 (which is awesome!).
Remember, your NPS score is important, but the real value is in understanding the balance between Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. This helps you strategically focus your team’s efforts for maximum impact on product success.
Insightful components of the best NPS survey tools
The core NPS question gives you a starting point, but these additional surveys are where you gain powerful insights to drive product improvements:
- Be sure to add open-ended follow-up questions like “What’s the main reason for your score?” This digs into the motivations behind a customer’s rating, with the qualitative data highlighting areas to celebrate or address, guiding your roadmap.
- Ask follow-up questions to your brand-promoting customers. You can also request them to provide a testimonial or short review—this way, you gain social proof to attract new customers, boosting your product’s credibility.
- Collect additional customer data points alongside the NPS rating (e.g., their role, company size, pricing type, location, etc.). This allows you to analyze NPS trends within specific segments. As such, segmentation helps you tailor your product and messaging for maximum impact across different audiences.
5 reasons why NPS survey software is critical for your business
Alright, now let’s talk about why this matters for your product’s success:
Insights into customer satisfaction and loyalty
First, NPS gives you a clear, real-time understanding of customer satisfaction, which is the bedrock of any successful business. Satisfied customers are less likely to churn, keeping your revenue stable, and are more likely to upgrade and increase their spending over time. Plus, they become powerful advocates, recommending your product to others.
Identification of areas for improvement and growth
Open-ended NPS responses are a goldmine, revealing the specific features users love or the pain points driving them away. This lets you prioritize development strategically, discover hidden opportunities for expansion, and identify areas where streamlining means increased adoption and value for customers.
Benchmarking against competitors and industry standards
Understanding how your NPS stacks up to competitors in your industry is essential. It validates your strengths, highlights areas to outpace the competition, and helps you set realistic goals to boost your team’s performance.
Driving actionable changes and initiatives
This data fuels smart choices and helps you build a truly customer-centric roadmap, justify resource allocation to fix issues impacting satisfaction and create targeted marketing messages that resonate.
Building stronger relationships with customers and increasing retention
Last but not least, asking for feedback through NPS software shows customers you care, opening a dialogue that builds trust. This proactive approach solves problems, creates a more positive overall customer experience, and fosters a customer-focused mindset throughout your entire organization.
Challenges and solutions
Challenges you may face when using NPS
Best NPS software holds great potential, but it requires thoughtful execution to deliver the promised benefits.
One frequent issue is low response rates, which can skew your results and limit the insights you gain. If only a small percentage of customers respond to your NPS score software survey, you’re not getting an accurate picture of overall sentiment. Your results might be overly positive or negative, making it hard to prioritize further actions.
What’s more, low response rates also mean you’re missing out on those valuable “why” comments that explain the reasoning behind the scores, making it difficult to identify actionable areas for improvement. A simple NPS score tells you if customers are generally happy or not, but it won’t reveal why. Only by asking follow-up questions can you make your NPS feedback truly actionable.
Furthermore, one-off NPS surveys have limited value. Tracking NPS over time and ensuring the data is accessible to relevant teams can also present challenges, especially with any manual processes involved.
Strategies for overcoming challenges
Here’s how to get more value from your efforts:
- Fight low response rates with user-friendly surveys
Ditch clunky email surveys and make NPS a seamless part of your product experience. For instance, Beamer lets you customize in-app surveys or use eye-catching widgets that blend perfectly with your design. This integrated approach can significantly boost response rates. - Focus on actionable feedback
Include targeted follow-up questions to understand what motivates those scores. Beamer’s NPS solution lets you segment your audience and ask different follow-ups to specific customer groups for richer insights. - Track trends effortlessly
NPS is most powerful when you see how response trends evolve over time. On a side note, Beamer’s analytics dashboard visualizes your data, saving you from countless spreadsheet tabs and making it easy to identify whether your efforts are moving in the right direction. - Integrate NPS into your workflow
Make sure NPS data drives action, not just sits in a report. As such, Beamer’s integrations with platforms like Zendesk or Intercom mean you can trigger workflows based on scores.
Ready to see how Beamer can transform your customer success and retention? Try the best NPS tool for free today and experience the difference a customer-centric approach makes!