How to Improve NPS
Measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) is relatively easy. Improving your NPS, however, is more difficult. Here are 7 practical tips to improve your NPS.
Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a gold standard in the customer service industry.
What’s better than having a high percentage of your customer base loving your product or service enough that they’d gladly recommend it to their friends?
Net Promoter Score, a market research metric based around the survey question, “On a scale from 0-10, how likely would you be to recommend our [company/product/service] to a friend or colleague?”, is now a staple for businesses everywhere.
However, knowing your NPS is just the beginning. In order to improve customer service, you need to understand how to improve your NPS.
How to Improve Your NPS Score: 7 Tips
Your NPS isn’t static. In fact, there are steps you can take to improve NPS scores and potentially amplify your reach through organic word-of-mouth.
Here's how to improve NPS score.
1. Ask your customers for a follow-up explanation
So, you’re asking your customers the NPS survey question.
But are you asking them why?
If they would recommend you, do you know what makes them a fan of your company? And if their score is low (i.e. it’s a no), do you know what is keeping them from feeling comfortable with recommending you?
If you’re only asking the NPS survey question along with a simple “tell us more”, you’re likely missing out on crucial information that could offer clues as to what you need to do to improve your score.
Instead, you should be crafting more complete surveys based around the NPS survey question that allows you to pull as many insights out as possible.
2. Close the loop
Let’s take this a step further.
Besides simply asking why, go a step further and implement some way for you to gather additional context around their answer to the NPS survey question.
Two examples could be:
- A questionnaire, or
- Follow-up email conversation
This will allow you to glean additional information around their answer that could help you uncover both what’s working and what isn’t– and why.
3. Follow up on all negative feedback
Following up on negative feedback gives you the chance to win back customers who have had a bad experience with your brand.
It also allows you to find out what went wrong so that it doesn’t happen again.
You may be tempted when closing the loop to only reach out to those customers who offered a high NPS rating while ignoring those who gave a low score.
However, if you do that you’ll pass up on the opportunity to win those customers back.
Even if you can’t immediately fix the issue the customer is having, communicating with them and letting them know you’re working on a fix can often be all that’s needed to win them over.
4. Implement NPS feedback into your team training
Another quick but potent tip: once you’ve begun to gather all this incredibly valuable data, why not use it to inform how you train your team?
As you gain more information about what your customers do and don’t love, use that data to make your team more conscious.
Let them know what your customers like and what bothers them so that they can be cognizant of those things as they’re serving your customers.
By disseminating the insights you’re uncovering in this way, you’ll empower your entire team to help craft a customer experience that’s more in line with what your customers want.
5. Choose the best delivery channel for your customers
The channel you collect NPS survey responses from is an often overlooked but important detail.
You can collect survey data from several channels, such as:
- Text or SMS
- Live chat on your website
- Chatbots
- Slack support
- Discord support
- Pop-ups
- Forms
- Messenger apps such as WhatsApp
- Social media channels
- etc.
Why does this matter? Isn’t all data of equal value in this case, no matter where it comes from?
That’s true, but there’s a very good chance that one or more of those channels is better than the rest for your customers. Specifically, it will lead to a greater number of respondents– and more data.
6. Take steps to maximize response rates
While not a direct improvement to your NPS score, increasing the number of responses you receive to your surveys will give you more data to work with.
This has numerous benefits, the most notable being that you have a more accurate (i.e. larger) data set and that you can draw more insights from that data.
Here are a few ideas for increasing your response rate:
- Purge your email list: If you’re emailing the survey, you need to keep that list clean to maximize deliverability rates. If you get flagged for spam too many times you’ll notice deliverability plummet– and with it, your data.
- Send surveys on Fridays: B2C-related surveys tend to have a higher completion rate when sent out toward the end of the week.
- Clearly outline what your customers can expect from the survey: If the survey is a bit longer than you originally had planned and should take them 10 minutes, tell them. Don’t hesitate to be transparent as that will turn off and turn away survey takers.
7. Track your NPS score progress
It’s not enough to collect all this data and then never come back to it. Or, worse yet, assume that these insights will remain the same year-to-year.
You need to track your NPS survey data on an ongoing basis and store that data somewhere that allows you to view it easily in real-time.
By establishing an ongoing flow of NPS data, you’ll have one central place where you can view and gauge how customers are feeling about your company, its products and/or services, and how you are improving customer service.
You can track the number of detractors (negative scores) and promoters (positive scores), their comments, and notice any changes in sentiment over time.
This will not only tell you if your efforts to improve your score are working but also allow you to detect any new issues as they arise.
Bring a New Level of Convenience to Your Customer Experience with Gleen AI
Every factor imaginable goes into what eventually makes up the customer opinions that become your NPS.
One of the most notable, however, is how easy it is for your customers to get answers to their questions.
When a customer has a question, where do they look?
With a generative AI chatbot like Gleen AI, you can delight your customers with a seamless experience from beginning to end:
- On every platform: Slack, Discord, help desks? Check, check, and check.
- In nearly 100 foreign languages
- 24/7/365 availability and in real-time
- Highly relevant answers based on your own proprietary knowledge base
- No hallucination
- And fully integrating with your help desk solution
Plus, Gleen AI can automatically collect customer feedback on its responses, allowing it to learn and improve how effectively it communicates over time.
Start by creating your free generative AI chatbot with Gleen AI or schedule a demo today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you fix bad NPS?
To fix a bad NPS, you’ll need to take a holistic approach to customer satisfaction and feedback:
- Make sure you’re collecting feedback from the channel that works best for your customers
- Close the loop by following up on all feedback, especially the negative
- Take steps to maximize response rates
- Take benchmarks of your progress
- Dig deeper on your surveys by asking customers why they’re satisfied (or not)
- And implement NPS feedback into your team training
What factors influence NPS?
Several factors can influence your NPS, including:
- Expectations: What do your customers expect from you?
- Competition: What is the typical customer experience in your industry?
- Market size: What is your market’s size and how much of it do you have?
- Customer service: What is the quality of your customer service?
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Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.
