AskNicely - more valuable customers with NPS

Happier, more
valuable customers
With NPS®

We know ﬁrst-hand how valuable
Net Promoter Score® (NPS) data is to
customer facing businesses.
We wanted to do something useful
with that knowledge, so we’ve pooled
it together with our customers’
experiences to come up with this
ultra-comprehensive guide to NPS.
If you want to know how your
customers feel about your business,
then this is the guide for you.
Whether you’re a CEO, ﬁnance leader
or a customer service legend, we’ve
included useful information to help
you make the most of your NPS
program.
Aaron, John and the
AskNicely Team.
Basically, the most complete guide to NPS you’ll find anywhere.
The definitive nps®

contents
It’s all about customer happiness 4
A quick intro to Net Promoter Score 12
NPS: the nitty gritty 20
Making NPS happen in your industry 34
Understanding your NPS insights 44
Using NPS for happier customers! 59
The NPS bonus round 67

It’s all about
customer happiness

Do you have
customers? Do you want
more
customers?
You’re going to need
to know what’s
working for your
current customers
You’re going
to need some
As you grow,
you’ll need to
know what new
customers are liking
and not liking
Then you’ll need
to work really hard
to look after
the ones you’ve got
Chnaged your mind?
Really do want
more customers?
YES!You need to measure
customer satisfaction
STARTHere to figure out if
you need to measure
DO I need to measure
Decision flow-chart
Customer
happiness
Before getting started it’s a good idea to take a step back
and think about what you want to get out of the process
– what business needs are you trying to solve for?
No doubt you’ve got your own ideas, but there may be
other stakeholders who you need to get onboard and
ultimately, the more impact you can make with your
customer happiness program, the stronger it will be.

Whether you’re making your first
move into measuring customer
satisfaction for your business or
supplementing tools you’re already
using it’s important to get everyone
on the same page right from the start.
This isn’t just about winning
everyone’s approval of your idea
at the board meeting and getting
funding. Even if you’re the CEO,
you’re going to need more than just
sign-off on the expense to make your
NPS program successful. That’s why
it’s important to establish some clear
objectives at the start.
Think about your relationship with
your customers across the business
and pay special attention to areas
where it seems that visibility into
the customer relationship is lacking.
Different businesses will have
different challenges and different
areas of the business will have
different needs in terms of data they
want out of your customer happiness
measurement.
Later on in this guide we’ll dive into
specific needs for different industries
and different areas of the business.
To start with though, this section
goes through our top six customer
happiness challenges. These are
general challenges that businesses
have in understanding their
customers to help you look for
additional wins you might be able
to make with your program. These
are general business challenges and
definitely not only measurable using
NPS®, but in section 2 we’ll look more
specifically at the NPS framework and
why it’s the most effective method
for measuring and understanding
customer happiness and satisfaction.
Building your business case

With the explosion of digital
technology - in particular mobile
– peoples’ attention is becoming
increasingly divided and brands need
to work harder to stay front-of-mind.
Forward thinking, tech savvy brands
like Uber, Apple, Google and Amazon
make huge investment in optimizing
every customer interaction to make
dealing with them and using or
purchasing their products as easy as
possible.
The ﬂow-on effect of this that
customers become used to a certain
level of ease of interaction and what
was once considered outstanding
is now simply the expectation. And
regardless of what business you’re
in your customers will measure you
against the quality of experience they
expect from these digital powerhouse
brands.
Whether you need to make tiny
improvements or massive changes,
perfecting your customer experience
starts with understanding what’s
working for them and what’s not.
Furthermore, you want to ensure
you’re regularly collecting feedback,
because in this age of rapidly
changing expectations you can’t rest
on old data – one year’s leading edge
is the next year’s middle of the road.
The changing level of
customer expectations

Nowhere are these heightened customer expectations
more prominent than in the younger generations - in
particular the millennials (Gen-Y) who are now making
up a large part of the customer base and workforce for
many businesses.
For Gen-Y, feeling important is important – they don’t
just want to tell you what they think, they need to know
that their opinion is valued and your brand is going to
listen to what they say.
So gathering feedback from Gen-Y is not only important
to ensure you understand how you’re meeting their
expectations – the act of asking is itself part of the
experience they expect (just make sure you listen!)
There’s no shortage of horror stories that illustrate how
one poor customer experience can end up online, go
viral and tarnish a brand.
Ideally you’ll avoid these types of negative experience
ever happening BUT… If someone does have a bad
experience, it’s important that they feel they can come
directly to you or your customer support team to resolve
their problem before they take to social media.
By regularly collecting customer feedback, you have a
good chance of reaching a customer with your feedback
request before they go global. And by acting before a
problem occurs, you’re creating an understanding that
the feedback loop is there and open to customers. This
helps to increase the likelihood that they’ll contact you
ﬁrst in the case of any issues.
Those pesky
millennials
The social
media effect

Being able to identify which customers are at risk and which are your biggest fans is not only useful for
predicting business growth, it’s also very useful for marketing as well.
As digital channels have evolved over the past few years, marketing has become more and more personalized.
Marketers have the ability to segment and target marketing to individual groups based on a wide range of
data points to make sure their message is seen by the right people.
By understanding how happy each customer is with your business, you give the marketing team the ability
to also group customers based on their level of satisfaction. This can make marketing campaigns much more
effective and less costly.
Forecasting &
modelling
and all that important business stuff

invest in the experience
jeannie walters
Not all leaders
It
customers

If you’re not measuring customer satisfaction regularly, then
you’re likely to be getting skewed feedback from only a small
part of your customer base.
Unfortunately most people won’t take the feedback initiative
unless they have a really bad or really good experience. And
it’s more often people who have a bad experience that feel
the need to talk about it.
This is what creates a bias in your results if you’re only
collecting feedback on an ad-hoc basis as and when
customers send it your way. The impact can be bad
for businesses as a relatively low number of negative
experiences can seem much worse without the context of an
overall rating to keep it in perspective.
Just because you don’t actively seek feedback out, doesn’t
mean customers won’t give it to you – whether that be
publicly via social media and review sites, or via direct
contact.
Not every
customer is
always right

A quick intro to
net promoter score

You certainly don’t have to use the
NPS method to collect customer
feedback, and it may not be the
only measure you use (we’ll get to
that later) but there are a number of
reasons why it’s become one of the
most popular approach around.
A (very) brief history
lesson.
The Net Promoter Score framework
was developed by Fred Reichheld,
Bain & Company and was released in
the Harvard Business review in 2003.
The framework was created following
extensive research into customer
satisfaction and looking at a range
of existing techniques companies
were using to measure levels of
satisfaction.
NPS: what’s the big deal?

An NPS survey always consists of a
single question asking the respondent
how likely they are to recommend
your business/brand to a friend or
colleague. Generally, respondents
are given a scale of 0-10 on which to
respond where 0 = not at all and 10 =
very likely.
It’s common practice to then follow
with an open-ended question asking
for feedback on what they think you
could do to improve their rating in
the future.
We’ll get into some of the nitty gritty
on how to structure those questions
in the collect chapter shortly.
Responses are then categorized into
three groups:
Promoters (9 & 10)
Passives (7 & 8)
Detractors (0-6)
Putting the Net in Net
Promoter:
Once you’ve collected your rating
out of ten from as many customers
as you can, the NPS framework gives
us a way to roll-up that data to get an
overall rating.
This is done by calculating the
percentage of total respondents
that were in each of the groups
(Promoters, Passives and Detractors).
Then taking the Percentage of
detractors and subtracting it from the
percentage of promoters.
This gives an overall ﬁgure which can
then be used to monitor satisfaction
across all customers.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Detractors Passives Promoters

The NPS survey format has been
carefully designed to be as easy as
possible for customers, while also
giving you the most useful data
possible at the other end.
As we’ve already established, there’s
definite value in collecting customer
feedback. The biggest problem most
businesses face when setting out to
do this is simply getting customers to
complete a survey in the first place.
With so many businesses now looking
to measure satisfaction, customers
are becoming bombarded by constant
surveys. Compounding matters,
people are becoming more and more
precious about their time in general.
Even the word “survey” or “questions”
is enough to scare some people off.
And if they make it past the first
hurdle of agreeing to participate,
every question you add beyond the
first two can lose you 30-50% of your
respondents.
When you’re trying to get the best
picture of your overall customer
satisfaction, it’s crucial to collect
feedback from as many customers
as possible. However, you also need
to collect enough useful information
to give you something meaningful
to work with. So you need to walk a
very fine line between maximizing
your response rate and maximising
the value of data you get out of the
survey.
And that’s where NPS strikes a perfect
balance: the simple one-click initial
question makes it easy for customers
to provide you with an answer, while
the rating scale gives enough detail
for you to understand more about
how they’re feeling.
customers, every
question beyond the
Why so simple?

While seemingly simple, the question itself has been
carefully designed to give you the most reliable and
thorough data possible.
Asking customers about whether they are likely to
recommend your business/product/service has a strong
correlation to their overall satisfaction. Yet, asking
them to consider whether they would recommend you
removes some of the emotion from a ﬂat-out “how
happy are you with our brand?”
This ultimately gives more consistent ratings because
customers think more about their overall experience
when recommending a business to a friend rather than
focusing just on a recent outstanding experience (either
good or bad).
The more complexity you add to a survey question,
the higher the likelihood of introducing bias that may
inﬂuence your customers. A simple survey question
leaves less room for misinterpretation or unintentional
bias.
And by adding a second open-ended question as a
follow-up, you give your customers a chance to add
more detail to their responses. This is where you can
gain valuable insight on an individual level.
What’s in a question?
how likely Are you to recommenD
us to a friend or colleague?

When it comes to the answer having
a numeric scale - in particular a
10-point scale is important for a
number of reasons. First of all, using
a plain numbered scale as opposed
to points labelled with words further
helps to reduce ambiguity and bias in
the responses.
Most importantly though, a
consistently numbered scale makes it
easy to measure change and overall
rating. Without the numeric scale, it
would be much harder to roll up into
an overall Net Promoter ﬁgure.
So you’re probably still wondering
why the detractors group includes
ratings all the way up to six? This
is a deliberate feature of how the
framework was designed. Extensive
research was done comparing NPS
ratings to other key indicators of
satisfaction and data from lengthier
surveys. And It’s for people who give
a rating below six that we start to see
other strong indicators of negative
potential value from that customer.
Having the groupings some-what
biased towards the bottom end of the
scale also helps companies look at the
results a little more conservatively.
By the numbers

NPS
checklist
NPS is a great measurement tool
for most businesses, but isn’t
right for everyone – go through
the checklist and make sure you
can tick off at least half of the
boxes:
Does your business rely on word-of-mouth and
referrals for at least some of your customer growth?
Is gaining insights quickly a priority when talking
about customer satisfaction in your business?
Do you want to monitor trends in customer
satisfaction over time?
Do you have contact details for your customers (ie to
send a survey out)

Collecting Data
If you’ve made it to this point you’ve
probably already ﬁgured out NPS is a
good ﬁt for your business. We’ve got
the basic survey format, but there’s
a few other things to consider about
how you’re collecting the data and
these are really important to look
at when selecting the platform that
you’ll use to send and manage your
survey results
Scheduling surveys
Yes, getting results sooner rather than
later is great. It’s part of the reason
you selected NPS after all, because
you know it’ll get lots of responses
quickly.
BUT! First you need to think about
exactly when the surveys are going
out and to whom. There are two main
methods of deciding when to send
which also affect how your survey is
positioned slightly – Relationship and
Transactional surveys.
Making NPS happen

This is the batch n blast, gather a
whole lot of feedback at once method.
Very useful when you’re kicking off
your NPS program and also helpful
to include on an ongoing basis. A
relationship survey goes out to a large
number (or all) of your customers.
Because of the wide focus, you would
ask a broader question focusing on
their whole relationship with the
business or brand.
When thinking about when to
send a relationship survey, think
about how it fits into your overall
communication flow – it’s basically
just a matter of fitting it around
anything else routine that you’ve got
going out to your customers.
It’s important to ensure that any
tool you use will let you segment
customers for the purpose of sending
out relationship surveys so that you
can easily profile a certain group
within your customer base.
Segmenting your customers to select
who you’re sending to is particularly
important when you first start with
your NPS program. If you have a large
customer base that’s built up over a
long time but have many customers
that have not purchased from you or
dealt with your company recently it
may be counterproductive to send
those customers a survey.
You also need to make sure your
system gives you the ability to
schedule send times for batch invites
so that you’re not sending things in
the middle of the night...
Relationship surveys

A transactional survey is triggered
off a particular event. Because the
survey closely follows an event or
customer engagement, you will often
get much better response rates with
this method as the customer has the
experience (and your brand) in the
front of their mind.
When looking at triggering
transactional surveys, consider what
events you can get useful information
from:
Purchases
Renewals
Customer support requests
Major new product updates/
releases
Plan upgrades
Transactional surveys
Depending on what you’re using
as a trigger, you will want to set the
length of time from the event to when
you send the survey – for example,
if you want to measure satisfaction
following a particular product
purchase, make sure that you allow
enough time for the customer to
actually use the product before you
ask them if they’d recommend it.
The really important piece to
transactional surveys is ensuring that
you can actually plug the necessary
systems together to trigger the survey
automatically, because sitting there
hitting the send button every time
someone buys from you isn’t really
anyone’s idea of scalable.
The AskNicely tool integrates natively
with a number of systems and also
plugs into Zapier which has pre-built
integrations with over 500 different
apps and web services.
Think about how you could use your
existing systems to identify those
events you want to trigger a survey
from:
CRM
Accounting Software
POS
ERP
Help Desk Software
Ecommerce Systems

Make sure your NPS system can limit
how often you send a survey to any given
customer so you don’t overload them with
survey requests – something that can
cause more harm than good to the value
of your brand.
This is particularly important when
looking at running transactional surveys
because you are likely to have multiple
events that can trigger a survey. If your
system is not properly equipped to handle
and multiple triggers, then it can become
a disaster to manage.
Don’t
overdo
it...

Email is not only the cheapest and
most environmentally friendly way
of sending out survey requests,
it’s also by far the most effective
way of reaching the customer at a
convenient time where they are likely
to ﬁll out a survey.
People tend to react best to emails
because they check them at times
that are convenient to them. More
intrusive methods like push messages
or SMS that demand more instant
attention and are likely to be ignored
if they don’t arrive at a convenient
time for a customer.
Arguably the most important reason
for using email is to give you the
ability to match the customer
feedback back to your database
automatically. An email address
is a perfect unique identiﬁer for a
customer, giving you a common
reference to be able to save data back
into your CRM or other system if
desired.
Of course, it’s not as simple as just
sending an email – you need to think
carefully about what you’re sending
out. Here’s our top advice for making
sure your email catches a customer’s
attention and convinces them to give
you feedback.
It’s all
about
delivery
It’s not just when you’re sending
your survey that will affect the
quality of the response you get.
How you send it out is also very
important.

Depending on your business you may
want to choose either your company
name or a persona at your company
to send from.
If your customers regularly deal with
a single point of contact and know
that person by name, then that’d be
a good idea to use. However, if your
customers aren’t going to be familiar
with one point of contact, then it’s
best to stick with the company name.
Using your normal company email
domain also makes the message more
trustworthy from the customer’s point
of view rather than receiving an email
from an address like mycompany@
npssurveytoolsoftware.com!
Also, sending from an address that
goes back to a real person is an
important opportunity to collect
additional feedback. Some customers
may feel more comfortable simply
writing a reply message – ideally,
you want to encourage them to give
feedback via the NPS survey so that
it can be tracked and collected for all
the good reasons we’ve just discussed.
BUT, if you don’t give them the
option to reply, it could be a missed
opportunity.
If you’re sending out a
lot of survey requests
(which hopefully you
are!) it may pay to look
at using an alias that
allows you to separate
out email replies from
normal email traffic
rather than going back to
the sender’s main inbox.
You may even want to
have the ability for a
few different people to
receive responses.
Use a real
email address

What a customer sees in the first glance they take at an email can be the
difference between them opening it or sending it straight to junk!
The first two pieces of information the customer sees are the subject line and the
first one or two lines of the email (depending on their email client, they may see
this in the preview).
So make sure your subject line is clear and catchy. You want the customer to open
your email, but there’s no point using a sensational subject line if it doesn’t relate
to your survey (so resist the cute kittens in the subject line).
Using a customer’s first name is also a great way to improve your connection with
them. You should open your email by greeting them by name either in the subject
line or the first line of the email.
First impressions count

{{customer’s first name}}, a quick question
about {{your business name}}
{{customer’s first name}}, would you
recommend {{your business name}}
{{customer’s first name}}, how are we
doing?
{{customer’s first name}}: we’d like to know
what you think.
{{customer’s first name}}: a quick survey
from {{your business name}}
{{customer’s first name}}, can we ask you
some questions about your experience
with {{your company name}}
{{customer’s first name}}, have you got 2
mins to tell us what you think of {{your
company name}}
Do this: Not this:

Make your email look the part when
someone opens it! The customer
has to trust that the survey request
is genuine and is actually coming
from your company. With an ever
increasing number of phishing
attempts and scams around,
customers are likely to be wary of
clicking anything that looks less than
legit. Furthermore, if your brand
isn’t present anywhere, it can create
confusion and you’re missing out
on a chance to strengthen brand
awareness and connection with your
customers.
So make sure your logo is on the
email and make sure the colours
match your brand.
Beyond the branding, there are
a couple of other elements that
are really important in gaining a
customer’s trust.
With security being a concern too, it’s
important to ensure that anywhere
you send your customers from the
email is via a secure connection
because you’ll be asking them to
input information in the next step.
Be professional &
trustworthy
Ensuring your
email meets legal
requirements is
important. You need
to give recipients
the option to opt-
out or unsubscribe
from receiving
further emails.

lego group
broader
that they could use to evaluate its products and that the
rob markey
Bain & Company

A good NPS survey email should give
a brief intro and explanation as to
why you’re conducting the survey
and then get straight to the point.
One of the beauties of email is the
ability to include the initial survey
question input right there in the
email. By giving the customer the
ability to click on their chosen rating
straight from the email, you remove
an extra step and a chance that
they’ll get distracted and move on. It
also ensures you capture that initial
ranking even if they decide not to
provide further feedback in the follow
up question.
Note: it’s important to understand
that this doesn’t mean the whole
survey is conducted from within the
email – once the customer clicks
the ﬁrst link, they’ll be transferred
to a website to submit any further
feedback – this is necessary because
of the way email clients work.
Capture feedback
directly from email

Just because you’re choosing email
to send out survey requests, doesn’t
mean that you won’t be reaching
customers on their mobiles. The
amount of time people spend on their
mobile phones for email and web
browsing is constantly increasing.
Over half of emails are now opened
from a smartphone!
So this means you need to make
sure you’re thinking mobile when
you send out your NPS survey. This
starts with the format of the email
– a well-constructed email should
read equally well whether someone
opens it on their computer, a tablet or
smartphone.
The most important piece of the email
of course is the NPS survey input
itself – the numbers should be visible
in the width of the screen – making
a customer scroll across select the
right rating is not ideal. At the same
time, the numbers should also be
large enough on a mobile screen to be
easily clickable without introducing
error by customers accidentally
clicking the wrong button!
And it’s not just the email that should
be mobile friendly – when a customer
clicks on that ﬁrst number to give
their rating and then goes through
to a web page to enter any further
feedback, they should be easily able to
enter data on any device.
Design for mobile

email
checklist
You should make sure that
whatever platform you select
can let you do the things below
to give your customers the best
experience and give you the most
chance of having your survey
ﬁlled out:
Use customer details - name or company name in
email
Set the sender details - name and address
Brand the email with your company logo and colours
Collect the NPS rating directly from clicking the
email
Send mobile friendly emails
Make click-through links via a secure connection

Making NPS happen
in your industry

The follow up question is an important part of the NPS
survey. So even though we’ve put lots of effort into
capturing that initial input it’s important not to neglect
the follow up question.
The most recommended option is to have a single follow
up question which is open-ended. While it’s a great
opportunity to collect additional feedback, you should
also make sure the customer knows their initial rating
has already been captured and that further feedback is
optional. Simply starting by thanking them is a great
way to do this:
Asking why a customer chose the particular rating
is an ideal way to structure the question because the
question is the same no matter what the ﬁrst rating was.
Compared to something like “What could we have done
better?” which doesn’t really make sense for someone
who just gave you a 10.
A question like “What could we have done better?” also
potentially skews the customer’s response to focus on
the negative aspects – not so great for an 8 or 9 rating
where you’ll probably get just as much value out of
knowing what’s working for them.
The follow up question
Thanks! Can you tell us why you chose 8?

There’s a bunch of stuff to get right
to ensure you get the best possible
response rate for your survey and
if you have a good NPS survey tool,
it should take care of most of the
technical stuff for you. But, assuming
you get all that right, how many
survey responses should you expect?
NPS produces signiﬁcantly higher
response rates than multi-question
surveys so you can expect better than
the 8-15% such tools tend to deliver.
A common benchmark is 20-40% is a
good range. We see an average across
all customers of 37% response rate,
but do see some customers achieve
over 75%.
It’s obviously good to have a high
response rate and the response rate
does have some indication on how
engaged your customers are with
your brand. However, you also need
to consider when you last dealt with
customers when evaluating your
response rate – if you’ve just sent out
a survey to your entire customer base
and have some customers that you
haven’t sold to for over 12 months,
you might expect a lower response
rate from that group.
Meeting
expectations
Multi -
question
survey
(8% - 15%)
NPS®
survey
(Average
20% - 40%)
Commercial
marketing
email click
through rate
(4% - 7%)
(Exceptional
20% - 40%)
Average
Response Rates
This is why you’re far better off
sending a dedicated email for your
NPS survey than just tacking a
survey on to a marketing email!

annette franz
listen, close
and communicate

The simplicity and ﬂexibility of the NPS
framework means it works well across
a wide range of industries. However,
there are a few things you should think
about for different business types –
here’s a few insider tips:
One Size fits all
... mostly

SaaS businesses have some specific
needs because they typically have a
long on-going customer relationship.
They also often have varying levels of
users and customers.
Think about your user levels – you’re
likely to have customer contacts who
were the original decision makers in
the buying process, then you may
have other contacts who are the
owners within the business. Then you
have some who are just simply users
and have no vested interest in the
purchase/renewal process.
It’s important to consider these
different groups when sending
out your surveys – there can be a
difference between the voice of your
customer (the owners and decision
makers) and the voice of your users.
There is definitely value in collecting
feedback from all groups, but it’s
important to make sure you can
separate their feedback. Also think
about when you’re sending surveys
to different groups – it may not make
sense to ask users as often as owners
or decision makers. Or maybe users
Timing of sending out your survey
is an important consideration for
SaaS businesses – think about the
usage cycle and on boarding for your
product – there’s no point asking
customers what they think too early
on in their use of the product if they
haven’t had a chance to really get into
using it.
Some key triggers you might consider
using to send surveys out to give you
key insights into different areas of the
business:
If you have an onboarding or
training period send a survey
to anyone who was involved
in that process to evaluate that
experience specifically.
How often does your support
team interact with different
levels of users? Send an NPS
survey following a support
call to evaluate sentiment
immediately and see how
effective your team is.
If you have customers on
annual contracts or longer, send
surveys to key decision makers
before the renewal date to
identify at-risk customers.
Software as
a service

Product vs company:
It’s important to distinguish between
whether you’re asking if the customer
would recommend a particular
product they purchased, or whether
they’d recommend your company in
general. This will affect how you word
your initial question and you’ll also
need to think about how you trigger
each type of survey.
You may well want to run both
general brand surveys plus product
speciﬁc surveys if you have certain
high value product that you want to
collect data on separately.
In either case, you’re probably going
to use a purchase as a trigger – but
you’ll need to think about timing after
a purchase to actually send a survey
out. If you’re asking people if they’d
recommend a product, think about
how long they need to accurately
gauge whether they’d recommend
the product. If you’re asking them if
they’d recommend your brand/store
in general, you still want them to have
at least had enough time to consider
their purchase.
Some key things to consider are:
How often do customers typically
purchase from you?
What’s the average size of a purchase
(both in terms of $ value and number
of products)
For individual products, what is the
lifecycle of the product and is there a
learning/discovery phase where the
customer starts to use it or do they
just jump straight in?
For either product or company
based NPS surveys - and particularly
if you’re going to mix both – it’s
very important to make sure you
restrict how often customers will
be contacted with a survey. You
don’t want to be sending a general
company survey one day and then
a product speciﬁc one the next, or
sending surveys every time someone
shops with you!
Think about how to collect data:
For online retailers, this is easy –
most will have email addresses of
customers entered as they checkout.
For bricks n mortar retailers, however,
it’s not always the case. That doesn’t
make it impossible though. Think
about how you can use your loyalty
program or maybe offering e-receipts
(a receipt sent to a customer’s email
address rather than printed) to
encourage customers to give you
their email address and linking that to
their purchase.
E-Commerce and retailers

As a service provider, you potentially have a couple of
different measures of satisfaction you’ll want. Asking
the customer if they’d recommend your business as a
whole is the most common but then for some businesses
it may make sense to also ask in reference to a single
appointment whether someone would recommend a
particular member of staff or a particular team.
Eg: A hairdresser may choose to survey customers once
per quarter shortly following their appointment and ask
them specifically if they would recommend the stylist
they had the appointment with. But then they might
send every second survey out asking if the customer
would recommend the Salon to a friend.
It’s important for services business to think about
the timing of sending a survey in relation to how
often a customer uses your business – for a service
where a customer comes to you on a weekly basis, the
timing is not so critical because you’ll be fairly fresh
on the customer’s mind at any time. However, for say
a plumbing firm who would generally only service
customers occasionally sending out a survey closer to
the time of service is important.
Even for a business with regular service, timing more of
a concern if sending a survey in relation to an individual
team member as it relates more specifically to the most
recent appointment rather their experience in general.
Service providers
(B2B and B2C)

NPS is a particularly important
measure for utility companies
because while they have a long
ongoing relationship with their
customers, they tend to have
relatively few actual engagements
with customers. Even the monthly bill
is becoming less of a contact point as
people move to automated billing and
email notiﬁcations.
The most common time that a
utility company engages with their
customers is when they have a
problem. And that’s not ideal for
gauging how happy your whole
customer base is! However, it does
mean that your customer service
team is one of the most important
parts of your business to evaluate.
For utility companies, it’s well
worth running a regular NPS survey
asking how likely customers are to
recommend their business. However,
it’s also worth looking at running
some triggered surveys following
interactions with your customer
support teams.
Surveying customers based on
anniversary date can be a good
idea to establish a regular cadence,
but you might also like to look at
historic data to establish whether
there are particular times of the
year, or particular events that cause
your customer base to be more at
risk of leaving you and time surveys
just before that period to identify
and react to dissatisﬁed customers
proactively.
Utility companies

survey
checklist
The act of collecting data needs
to be smooth and fast from the
customer’s point of view to make
sure you get the most responses
possible and the most usable data
out of the other end. Here’s our
quick list of must-have features
for an NPS survey:
Send out survey requests via email
Make the whole process mobile friendly
Have the ability to send out surveys in batches to
either your whole customer base or a portion ﬁltered
on customer details.
And be able to send out surveys based on individual
triggers
Should be able to integrate with other systems to
trigger surveys (CRM, ERP etc)

Understanding
your nps insights

1. The overall NPS rating – this is the value that
should be output by your NPS survey tool in real-time.
It’s the percentage of total responses that were detractors
(0-6 rating) subtracted from the percentage of total
responses that were promoters (9 or 10 rating). This will
be a number from -100 to 100.
2. Individual NPS survey ratings – these are the
ratings that each customer gave you as a response
to the question “How likely is it that you would you
recommend our company/service/product to a friend/
colleague”. These ratings have a range of 0 to 10.
3. The additional information entered in the
post survey question. Assuming you’re following our
best practice guide and giving just a single open-ended
question, this data will all be different, so is harder to
roll-up into high level analysis in real-time than the NPS
ratings, but can still be very useful in deeper reviews and
understanding your results.
4. The overall response rate. The number of people
who actually respond to your NPS survey is also very
important in helping you measure how engaged your
customer base are. Brands who have more engaged
customers generally see higher response rates.
NPS Results - basics

First of all, there is no universal line in the sand deﬁning good and bad. Your
results will always be relative to your company and others in your industry. That
said, it’s always important to benchmark yourself and it can be particularly hard if
this is your ﬁrst time measuring NPS and have no results to compare against.
Generally speaking, if you’re getting anything positive, you’re doing alright! A
positive score above 40-50 is outstanding and anything negative below -50 is a
cause for concern.
So what’s a good result?
0-100 +100+50-50
Publicly reported NPS values across all industries

Wondering how
average ratings vary
across different
industries?
We scoured the web
for ratings across a
range of different
businesses from
2013-2016 – here’s
the average rating
for each industry.
Entertainment
0
20
40
60
80
Telcos
FMCG
Automotive
SaaS
Retail
Insurance

On the face of it, the standard follow-up question can
seem hard to measure or quantify because of the fact
that it’s open ended. While it’s critical to make this
question open to make the survey as easy as possible for
customers to ﬁll in, it’s also important that you get the
most useful data out of it.
You’ll ﬁnd a lot of responses fall into various categories.
It can be a good idea to routinely collate responses and
have someone go through and tag them. Exactly what
tags you use will depend on your responses and the data
that you want to focus on, but consider using some of
these as attributes to tag:
General tone of the response: constructive,
angry, friendly, upset
Suggestions for improvement: product, service,
customer support, pricing, delivery
Particular problems raised: product, service,
customer support, pricing, delivery
Length of response: Short, Medium, Long
For retail or ecommerce businesses – the
particular department referenced in comments.
Following up on that
follow-up question

CRM
For most companies, this will be
the most important data source to
connect – your CRM will most likely
hold information on demographics,
location, purchase history and/or data
on support queries. By pairing this
data with the results collected from
your NPS surveys, you can start to
look at the ratings given by different
groups or segments of customers.
CRM – B2C
B2B businesses can consider breaking
down results by geographic region –
are any areas letting you down?
Or you could investigate whether
there are any age groups with whom
you perform better. This sort of
demographic analysis is valuable. It
helps marketing teams decide which
groups to focus on in advertising,
and also uncovers the most effective
content. It’s also helpful for customer
service and support planning,
revealing both audience size, and
where queries will most likely come
from.
Purchase history is particularly
useful for retailers or consumer
goods brands. Understanding
whether a product or category has
either a positive or negative affect
on customer satisfaction can help
provide valuable insight.
For businesses with a large numbers
of products, it can be helpful to start
by tagging purchases into certain
categories. Look across categories
for trends and then drill-down to a
product level where needed.
CRM – B2B
In B2B there are two sets of data you
will look at – company level data and
individual level data.
For an individual, Job title and/or
department are important. Where
someone works within a company
can have a major impact on their
interaction and satisfaction with your
business. This helps your sales team
A deeper understanding

understand how to better address
different stakeholders in the sales
process. It also helps your marketing
team create content and documents
for particular areas of the business,
and helps your support team be more
proactive in addressing likely issues
with different users.
At a company level location is also
worth looking at - it’s useful to see
any geographic areas where you
perform better or worse. For global
businesses, particularly in SaaS, this
is valuable in helping plan support
coverage and hours.
Another company level metric that is
useful for most businesses is industry.
Identifying particular industries
where you have a stronger or weaker
NPS rating helps deﬁne strategic
direction. Focusing on easy to please
‘low hanging fruit’industries where
word-of-mouth referral is high can
be a great growth strategy for an
early stage company. At a later stage,
addressing those underperforming
industries may be more of a priority.
And have a think about other useful
data you may have (or that can be
easily obtained) such as number of
staff, number of stores/locations and
revenue.
Beyond CRM:
Depending on your business, there
will be other systems that may give
you valuable data to help analyze NPS
responses. Which ones you decide to
use will likely vary based on which
are easiest to integrate with. Take
a look through the list below and
think about which of these you could
easily integrate. And remember, you
don’t have to start with everything
integrated to get useful data – think
about how you can create a staged
approach by starting with the basics,
then adding systems as you go.
Accounting
Support ticketing
Ecommerce platform
ERP
Booking
Guest management
Point of sale

Introduce a regular
feedback loop
Monitor NPS survey responses and
pull out relevant feedback on a daily
or weekly basis at stand-up meetings.
Raising feedback with the team in
real-time helps address issues quicker
and also reduces negative impact
of hitting your team with a a wall of
feedback which can be overwhelming
if done infrequently.
Guide your roadmap
Help prioritise new features in your
roadmap by looking at feedback
data and evaluating which features
address areas that are causing the
most unrest for customers.
Identify issues
By matching NPS survey ratings to
your customer database, you can
look at which areas of your product
or which feature sets customers have
access to. Being able to look at overall
NPS ratings for users in different
areas can help identify if you have
particular weak points in products.
NPS & your
product team

Predict Churn
By understanding how many
customers are giving you the lowest
NPS rating, your ﬁnance team
can build forecasts on how many
customers you might expect to lose
in a given period. Additionally, by
looking at low scores along with
revenue data from either your
accounting system or CRM, you can
more precisely look at the dollar value
of that group of customers.
Predict word-of-mouth referral
This is the one the accountants will
like – by knowing the number of
people in the top promoters segment,
your ﬁnance team can predict how
many organic referrals you are likely
to get.
Identify potentially costly
inefficient areas of the business
Your customers make a perfect
barometer for the performance
of different areas of the business.
Increased negative feedback
around particular areas can indicate
inefficiencies or particular points of
the business that could be costing you
customers.
NPS & your
finance team

Build a customer centric culture
This is probably THE most important
output you can get from your NPS
– because the top-level metric is so
simple, easy to measure in real-time
and easy to make visible to the whole
company, it makes a great tool to help
you focus company culture around
customer advocacy and satisfaction.
Dashboard high level metrics
The total Net Promoter value is an
ideal metric for creating a high level
overview of customer health.
Quickly drill into individual
areas of the business
By surveying at key touch points,
tagging individual feedback and
linking data sets it’s possible to create
individual metrics for key areas of the
business, meaning that problem areas
can quickly be identiﬁed from a high
level.
NPS & your
CEO & Exec Team

Sales, Support, Customer Success,
jason lemkin

Measure individual support
team member performance
By triggering surveys after a support
request, you can gauge how satisﬁed
customers are immediately after. This
can help identify strong and weak
performers and drive a continuous
improvement culture within the
team. It can be helpful to talk about
the really positive experiences from
recent surveys at team meetings.
Identify potential problem areas
By using the data collected across
other areas of the survey, you can
proactively prepare your team to be
ready for certain issues based on what
you know is causing difficulties for
customers.
Identify at-risk customers
By referencing individual NPS
ratings as customer support requests
are received, you can identify at-
risk customers with low scores and
instantly escalate or give priority
service.
NPS & your
customer support Teams

NPS & your
hr team
Identify potential training issues
By using data collected that ties back
to individual areas of the business,
you can identify particular teams that
need additional training or upskilling.
Help drive company culture
Similar to the CEO and executive, the
HR team can use NPS as a tool for
driving a continuous improvement
and customer focused culture.
Consider using NPS feedback as a
way of pulling out speciﬁc pitfalls
teams should be aware of, or to
highlight exceptional performance.
Improve onboarding services
If you have onboarding period,
sending surveys at strategic points
can provide valuable insights
into how new recruits are serving
customers.

Understand brand strength
A lot goes into valuing a brand, but
the NPS ﬁgure on its own can provide
a good high level measure. When
combined with other historic data
such as share of voice, the score can
help you keep a constant measure of
brand value, predict and counteract
potential falls.
Measure different campaigns
and audiences
By linking NPS ratings with the
original marketing campaign or
acquisition channel, you can discover
which campaigns are delivering
the most value. If one campaign is
driving fewer customers, but a high
proportion of promoters, you could
boost that campaign in the future.
Build customer referral and
retention campaigns
Customer referral programs drive
additional revenue from your existing
customer base, but they can also be
costly to kick off. Targeting promoters
makes building your program (and
cheaper)! A customer’s NPS rating
can also be used to effectively target
marketing campaigns. Deliver
surprise and delight rewards to top
promoters, or send high value offers
to detractors to win them back before
they churn.
NPS & your
marketing Team

useful data
checklist
This is our quick list of must-have
features for getting useful data out
of your NPS surveys:
Link survey results to individual customers using
email address or another unique identiﬁer
Automatically roll individual results up into the
overall Net Promoter Score
See overall score over time to identify trends
Easily plug-in data from other systems to help
segment and analyse results
Show overall NPS rating to the whole business
(eg. Put it up on a nice big dashboard or the
company intranet)
Create multiple surveys at different customer
touch points with different triggers.

Using NPS for
Happier customers!

So you’re collecting great data from all your
customers and it’s clearly visible across the
business. Now it’s time to take that data and
turn it into action!
The best way to turn around any negative
customers and get that rating up is to show
your customers that you’ve heard and and
understood their feedback. If they see changes,
you’ve got a good chance of winning them back
to your side.
So time is often of the essence here. Think
about the quickest changes you can make and
look at tends coming out of the survey data to
give you an idea about which will make the
biggest impact.
action!

Nominate an owner
Make sure someone (or a team of
someones) in the business owns the
overall NPS rating and the output of
the survey process. Without a clear
owner, you risk NPS becoming ‘just
another metric’.
The NPS owner doesn’t need to be
responsible for every area of the
process, but should make sure any
feedback filters through the right
channels of the business and is
followed up on.
Beyond the main owner, you should
also define contacts within each
department. While they may not
be responsible for any day-to-day
tasks, they are defined escalation
points or regular reporting points
for information that relates to each
department.
Establish guidelines for
follow up
It’s also important to have clear
guidelines around actions to be taken
with different types of followup.
You should also define timelines –
consider creating an internal SLA
around how quickly feedback will be
responded to, and measure yourselves
against that.
You might want to look at creating
automated alerts for certain types of
feedback so that visibility is elevated
within the organization.
Spend time on the
positive
Measuring NPS is not all about
addressing problems, so it’s important
to also focus on the positive stuff that
comes out of surveys. This should be
done both internally and externally.
Look at comments from promoters
to see if there are any quotes you can
share (with permission!) Attributing
quotes using just first name and
location can be a good idea. For B2B
business, remember that if you want
to put a company name against a
quote, it can prolong the process
as other approvals are likely to be
needed.
Seeking permission to share quotes
gives you a great opportunity to
engage and reward top promoters.

telstra australia
rob markey & chris harrop
Bain & Company
of cost over the past four years, even as it delivered dramatic

An unexpected reward can really help to bolster that
relationship and encourage referrals.
Don’t just restrict rewards to people who you want to
quote – it’s a good practice to get the most out of all your
promoters - rewards don’t have to be high value.
Customer referral programs
A customer referral program is a fantastic way of
formalizing the process of following up and rewarding
promoters. It can also be a great way of engaging those
with less than stellar results – giving some sort of reward
or incentive for referral will often get people moving.
Be personal
Following up feedback isn’t all about internal processes
and automation; giving your company a personal face is
also important. Engaging personally with respondents is
not only good for strengthening your relationship with
them, but also gives you a good chance to understand
more about what’s working (or not working) for them.
While your NPS owner will typically follow up on
the majority of the feedback, you can also take the
opportunity to engage the CEO or senior management
in the process. They don’t have to be involved with every
piece of feedback – don’t make it an unmanageable
process for already busy people. But do make sure you
pass on both positive and negative comments for follow-
up!

Keep your eye on the big picture
While the individual ratings and feedback
are important for selecting customers to
follow up with personally, it’s important to
keep focused on the overall Net Promoter
Score.
Make sure you’re tracking and reporting
on the ﬁgure regularly across the whole
company. If it starts to dive or climb
noticeably, use this as a trigger to start an
audit to look at the results in more detail to
ﬁnd out what you’re doing right or wrong.

While it’s a great health check and ongoing measure,
NPS certainly shouldn’t be the only measure of customer
satisfaction you ever rely on. If you have identified a
problem, NPS ratings can be a useful tool for selecting
customers to send more detailed survey requests to.
This isn’t about choosing the people who will give you
the best ratings, it’s about choosing those who are most
likely to give you a response. By targeting people who
have given feedback as well as an NPS rating, you’re
engaging with an audience that is already more likely
to give you further feedback. You may also want to talk
to a more tailored audience if you’ve identified a very
specific issue – you may consider targeting based on
keywords in the survey responses.
If you are sending out more detailed surveys to target
groups, make sure you take that into account when
reviewing the results; you’ll introduce some bias in
selecting who you send surveys to.
NPS isn’t the only measure

action
checklist
Think about using these
techniques for making survey
follow up quick and effective:
Assign owners for follow up
Make results visible to the whole company
Follow up personally with respondents
Share follow up responsibility all the way up to
the CEO
Strengthen referrals with a customer referral
program

Optimizing responses
There are a range of factors which
can affect the response rate of your
survey. While just distributing surveys
and getting some initial feedback is
important, once you’ve got that data
it can be worth taking a look at some
of the ﬁner details. This is particularly
relevant for larger organizations with
lots of customers, as they’ll have a
larger number of surveys going out
and therefore will be able to make
a bigger impact with incremental
improvements.
Language of the survey question
Try varying the text you use in the
survey question. Try things like
adding a little bit of pre-text about
why this information is important
to you or how you plan on using
the data collected. Even little details
like whether you use “would you
recommend to a …” friend, colleague,
co-worker etc… can affect response
rate.
Email subject
This is a big one – the best practice
given in this guide is a good starting
place, but you may ﬁnd something
that works better for your particular
business and industry. Consider
the formality of language – do you
want to be casual or serious? Or
maybe somewhere in between?
Are emoticons a step too far or
are they an important part of your
communications?
Taking NPS to
the next level

That follow up question
This is another big one – changing
this question can give you much
better responses. While we’d
recommend sticking with an open
ended question, you might like to
try changing the language or adding
another one-click question or rating
to help you quantify results better.
In any case, it’s important to
randomize recipients of your
modiﬁed survey, and always keep
sending the same format to a control
group – that way you have something
to measure against. Higher responses
to a new survey can be misleading,
because response rates can also vary
on different days, at different times,
or in response to other conditions
outside your control.
Recruiting
Some companies use an NPS survey
to keep an eye on how their recruiting
process is working. Send a follow up
survey to unsuccessful candidates
after an application or interview
process along the lines of “Sorry
it didn’t work out this time. Please
tell us, if another role came up with
[company name], would you consider
applying again?”
Staff
While it’s certainly not a replacement
for regular performance
conversations, NPS surveys sent to
staff can give you a good overview of
satisfaction levels. When it comes to
staff feedback, you should consider
making responses anonymous to
encourage honest feedback. Knowing
what they really think is often more
useful than knowing who said what.
Suppliers
Measuring supplier and partner
satisfaction can be helpful for
identifying potential issues. External
tension with a given supplier or
partner can indicate a problem in the
department they work most closely
with.
Beyond the customer
It’s nice knowing customers will recommend you, but what about
your own staff? How about suppliers, partners or even job applicants?
Because NPS scores can be measured on an ongoing basis, it’s a great
way to continually provide feedback for other areas of the business.

When it comes to making your NPS rating a company-
wide focus, take a look at how social media and video
games create buzz around achievements and updates.
Consider creative ways of sharing your NPS rating
within the company to generate some incentive for
improvement.
A thermometer with incentives at different levels can
be a great way of getting the whole company behind
the NPS rating. Consider using a measure of the last X
months NPS, rather than all-time, which will help make
improvements more visible. The time period will depend
on how many surveys you are sending out and how
frequently – just make sure there’s enough responses in
the given period to make the net value relevant.
Another great idea is for boosting awareness within
the company if you have different teams interacting
with or looking after different parts of your customer
base: Split your NPS survey results up by area of the
business and calculate the overall NPS value for each
area independently. You can then create a leader board
so teams can see whose customers are loving them the
most. Then consider having monthly or quarterly awards
for the biggest improvement, the highest overall NPS or
special awards for individual feedback.
By being innovative, you can really boost the awareness
of the NPS program and create a customer centric,
success focus culture.
Have fun with it!

References
http://wordofmouthindex.com/womi-scores/top-100-brands/
http://www.thestreet.com/story/13095775/1/blackberry--who-knew--wins-most-improved-from-us-consumers.html
http://wordofmouthindex.com/womi-scores/top-100-brands/
http://insideevs.com/automakers-take-notice-data-points-love-affair-electric-cars/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-lego-came-back-from-brink-refocusing-consumers-rob-markey?trk=mp-
reader-card
http://www.netpromotersystemblog.com/2015/10/08/brick-by-brick-rebuilding-lego-by-rediscovering-customer-
centricity/
http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/transforming-a-company-by-learning-to-love-customers.aspx
http://netpromotersystem.com/videos/trailblazer-video/zappos-trailblazer.aspx
http://www.cx-journey.com/2012/01/key-components-of-voc-initiative-links.html
http://www.cx-journey.com/2012/03/using-nps-to-segment-customers.html
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-customer-experience-strategy-killers-you-need-get-walters-ccxp?trk=prof-post
https://www.saastr.com/i-was-wrong-nps-is-a-great-core-metric/
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-open-click-rate-benchmark#sm.0091ngbj10h2egs111n1o3zmsqh0b

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