Net Promoter Score: How to engage with your users
Using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to engage with our customers proved to be very useful for Easygenerator. In this post, I want to share my experience and tell you why and how we used it, and how we used the outcome to engage with our users.
Wat is a Net Promoter Score?
The Net Promoter Score is the outcome of a simple question: How likely is it that you will recommend to a friend or a colleague?". The users can respond by giving a mark between 0 and 10.
Based on the responses given, the users are divided into three groups:
- Promoters; with a score of a 9 or a 10.
- Passives; with a score of a 7 or a 8.
- Distractors; with a score between 0 and 6.
Obviously, promoters are your most loyal users. They are called promoters because they like your product or service so much that they will spread the word for you. They are your ambassadors. The passives are still quite content, but the chance that they will promote your solution is not that great. And there is a bigger chance with this group that they will switch to another solution. Distractors are not satisfied and can even spread negative feedback and obviously, there is a real chance that they will cancel their subscription.
How do you calculate an NPS?
How do you calculate a Net Promoter Score? You start with determining the percentages of users in each group. For Easygenerator that is:
You ignore the passive (31.5%). But you deduct the detractors (7.4) from the Promoters (61.1%) and you have your NPS, in our case 61.1 -/- 7.4 = +53.7. An NPS score can range from -100 (only detractors) to + 100 (only promoters).
So what does it mean?
Easygenerator has an NPS of 54 (the average score was 8.8).What does it mean? How will it help the company and the customers?
Compare to the rest
You can use your NPS to compare your company with others. Unfortunately, I was not able to find any NPS of one of our competitors, but I did find this benchmark study:
From this report I get that NPS vary from -5 to plus 68 across these industries and that software has an average NPS of 41 and that the highest NPS in the software industry is +55. From this, I get that in comparison we are doing really well. But the real value is not in the score or in this comparison but in a chance to engage with your customers.
Interact with your customers
We contacted all the users that responded. When someone fills in the NPS question we will ask them a follow-up question. When they score a 9 or a 10 we will just thank them, but when the score is a 7 or an 8 we will ask them what we need to change in order to make it a 9 or a 10. When the score is between 0 and 6 we will also ask them why there are not happy and what we need to do to change this. Based on these answers we decided to interact on a personal level with everybody that scores between 0 and 8.
Research your neutral
With the neutral group, there is room for improvement. We send out individual emails to all of them, responding to their feedback and asking them for more details.There feedback is processed by our product owner and we will take this into account when setting our priorities.
Call your distractors
The distractors also need attention. When you base your business on subscriptions (like we do) your greatest enemy is churn (cancellations). We will email and call all these users and hopefully find out why they are unhappy.
Reward your promoters
Some promoters will give you some feedback at well, but usually, it is just positive feedback. We decided that we want to reward these loyal customers. We started a special community (invitation only) for this group. The can interact with each other, sharing tips and tricks. But we also offer them extra information on our product roadmap, giving them a chance to give their opinion and vote on plans we have. They can submit suggestions for new features or improvements. We will also invite them for a roadmap session with our product owner every quarter.
Work hard and keep repeating
In our case, the Net Promoter score is really good. But it is no reason to take it easy. On the contrary. We have tons of remarks from our users that we need to process and solve. If you update your product on a regular basis (we do that every week) the advice is that you repeat the NPS survey each quarter. If you do not update regularly one or two times per year is sufficient. By repeating the NPS survey you can see how your NPS develops. Before we started with the survey, we set a goal of an NPS of 50. We are already above that which is incredible. We are only doing this for a couple of weeks and maybe our biggest promoters are more motivated to fill in the survey. Therefore it is possible that our NPS will drop a bit. But if it stays like it is we have to set a new goal. Which is great.
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