What is NPS®?
A "Net Promoter Score (NPS)*" is used to measure the loyalty of a customer base. It is based on the principle that customers can be categorised as "Promoters", "Detractors" or "Passives".
The NPS for a company is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers that are Detractors from the percentage of customers who are Promoters.
The resulting NPS can be as low as −100 (everybody is a detractor) or as high as +100 (everybody is a promoter). An NPS that is positive (i.e., higher than zero) is felt to be good, and an NPS of +50 is excellent.
The Net Promoter is based on asking a single, standardised question of all of your existing customers: "How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends and colleagues?"
The answer is recorded using a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is Not at all Likely, and 10 is Extremely Likely.
The results are categorised in the following manner:
A score of 9 or 10 = Promoters
A score of 7 or 8 = Passives
A score of 0 – 6 = Detractors.
NPS = the % of respondents who are Promoters minus the % of respondents who are Detractors. The Passives don't contribute to the score but do add to the number of respondents.
Automating the NPS® Process
The objective for building an automated Net Promoter Score® machine is to make NPS a repeatable process, without the need for manual intervention or a third party survey tool.
You can build an automated system using your existing Marketing Automation System and CRM. Your newly built system will be able to automatically survey all customers on a regular schedule, and store the results in your CRM system.
A common approach to NPS is to use a tool like SurveyMonkey to run a simple survey. However, taking a different approach can get you a higher response rate and have the system integrated with your existing CRM system. You can achieve this by using an email campaign, a landing page and a couple of workflow rules.
Creating New Fields
To implement the survey, start by creating two new fields in your Marketing Automation System and your CRM on the customer contact record:
An NPS Result field to store the customers selection from 0-10.
An NPS Comments field to store any comments the customer made that contributed to their score.
Setting up an Email Campaign
Use your existing email system to create an email which asks a question like "How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends and colleagues?" and give the customer the option to respond with a single click.
Each answer link in the email should be a separately tracked Custom Redirect. Each of the Custom Redirects (11, if you're rating 0-10 - one each for the options 0,1,2, … 10) has a completion action to set the NPS Score field to the appropriate score. All of the links direct customers to a thank-you landing page that thanks them for their feedback and gives them to the option to add comments.
Creating a Thank-you Landing Page
Using your Marketing Automation System you can create the 'thank-you landing page' with a simple form that contains fields for first name, last name, email address (already pre-filled) as well as a single comment box that gives customers the option to leave comments if desired. If the customer adds comments to the landing page these are saved to the NPS Comments field in Marketing Automation System contact record and synced to your CRM's system.
Reporting NPS Results
The reporting of the results of the survey is easy using a simple contacts report in your CRM, which shows all contacts where the NPS score was not blank.
Design Considerations
The email and landing pages don't necessarily have to have an amazing design. Deliberately using a low-tech, minimalistic design can help to get a maximum response rate. If you choose a simplistic design, the email will operate even if the recipient blocked the display of images. By recording the response to the survey at the moment the customer clicks on a score link in the email, you make sure getting the result even if they did not subsequently add a comment.
Results
Here are some results for a recent client of ours:
The email response rate was 17%.
100% of responses were received within 4 days of the email being sent.
The NPS result for the client was +23.
This approach to creating a NPS program should work in most marketing automation systems. Questions? Get in touch!
*Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.