Net Promoter Score Template

What you’ll find in this article:

What is Net Promoter Score?
How does NPS work?

Score Calculation
What your score means

When to Use NPS

Use-cases for NPS

How to get the most out of NPS data
Pros and Cons of NPS
Using NPS with Qualaroo

Set-up
Additional Tips

Conclusion

What is Net Promoter Score?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that can be used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. It was originally created by (and is a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix.

How does NPS work?

The Net Promoter Score is based on customer responses to the following question:

Respondents are grouped into 3 different categories.

Detractors - Those who answer between 0 to 6

Detractors are unlikely to refer your business or will actively go out of their way to not recommend or dissuade a friend or associate from using the product.

Passives - Those who answer 7 or 8

Passives are not likely to refer you to a friend when the opportunity arises.

Promoters - Those who answer 9 or 10.

Promoters are brand loyalists and ambassadors who will go out of their way to refer a friend or associate to a product or service.

Score Calculation

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by taking the percentage of promoters (the 9s and 10s) and subtracting it from the percentage of detractors (6 and below). The final score can range from -100 to 100.

Source: Satmetrix

What Your Score Means

Net Promoter Scores range from -100 to 100 since you could potentially have detractors only (-100) or promoters only (100).

For that reason, your most basic goal with NPS should at the very least be to have a positive score. A negative score would indicate that more of your customers are actively trying to dissuade people from using your product or service than satisfied customers looking to recommend it, which is a huge warning flag!

However, benchmark scores or target scores vary by industry. For example, the Internet Service and Cable/Satellite TV industries often average negative scores. Review the graph below to see what your industry’s NPS benchmark was in 2019.

Although hitting your industry’s target benchmark is a good indication of how you are doing compared to others within your space, don’t just be satisfied with only meeting or slightly surpassing this average score.

In fact, the team who developed the Net Promoter System also identified how companies with twice the industry average experience twice as high a Compound Annual Growth Rate.

When to use NPS

Now that you have a clear overview of how NPS works and what the scores mean, you’re probably wondering when it would make most sense for your business to try this out!

Here are a few use cases we’ve written about:

How often should you collect NPS data?

Although NPS is best understood when you are persistent about improving your score over time, you don’t have to collect this data constantly. We recommend running an NPS campaign once per quarter since your customer’s opinion of your product or service probably isn’t changing too much on a monthly basis.

If you do need to collect NPS data every month though for reporting purposes, segment your audience so that you don’t ask the same customers as last month. This way, you are getting different user input and avoiding the possibility of causing your customers survey fatigue.

How to get the most out of NPS data

The real power of NPS lies in closing the feedback loop and following up with your customers who have provided a rating, especially those who are detractors. Doing so will take your insights to the next level and create actionable game plans for what to do next.

Here are a few examples of how you can follow up with different types of respondents.

Promoters

Thank your promoters and ask if they would be interested in providing a testimonial.
Send follow-up information on your referral program or create one if it doesn’t yet exist!
Have your sales or marketing team reach out for a possible upsell or about a case study opportunity.
Ask the customer to submit a review on 3rd party sites like G2 for SaaS companies or Google/Amazon reviews for B2C products.

Passives

Usually passive respondents don’t dislike your product, but may feel like they are lacking a service or feature. Funnel this data to your product team for feature discovery.
Offer a free extended upgrade so they can get a taste of features they might be missing out on.

Detractors

Have a customer success rep follow-up to see if the detractor is experiencing a specific issue that can be resolved.
Prevent churn by proactively reaching out to discover what would improve their experience.
Use additional feedback about the user experience to fix usability issues
Build your roadmap with features that users think are missing

If your team uses a tool like Zapier, you can automate this process even further to ensure the right info is getting passed onto the right team!

Pros and Cons of NPS

Pros

It’s very simple to set-up and easy for customers to answer!

Most NPS programs consist of 2 simple questions. The hallmark NPS question, “How likely are you to recommend…?” and a simple follow-up question asking why they’ve selected that answer.

Your score can be quickly understood and compared to benchmark data.

Benchmark data is published annually and easy to find for multiple industries so that you have a sense for how your company is doing relative to competitors.

It helps you stay on the ‘pulse’ of customers.

By asking this one simple question, you can keep a steady understanding of how customers are feeling about your organization as a whole. The three different respondent groups map onto customer sentiment in a way that is straightforward and allows you to quickly understand user attitude towards your product.

Cons

It doesn’t give you the whole picture.

Although you will be able to group respondents into 3 different categories very quickly, if respondents don’t share why they’ve chosen a given number, you won’t be able to understand what you need to start, stop or keep doing. However, identifying which employees are responsible for NPS follow-up can easily resolve this issue.

You won’t see improvements without a follow-up plan.

Your customers are providing you with valuable information here. Creating a strategic NPS follow-up plan not only prevents your data from becoming irrelevant, it also allows teams to take collective ownership in improving this metric together.

Industry benchmarks might be too broad for your company.

Benchmark data may not tell you everything. “Software and apps” for example has an average NPS of 30, but this average doesn’t necessarily distinguish between different types of software and applications, of which there are hundreds. Just remember, in the end, it’s more about improving and maintaining the quality of your customer’s experience than it is about increasing a key performance indicator.

NPS is declarative

In other words, because users are responding to a hypothetical statement, their responses are declarations of what they might do, rather than what they have done. Because it doesn’t indicate actual behavior, you can’t know for sure what people would actually do.

Using NPS with Qualaroo

With Qualaroo’s latest feature, Templates, Qualaroo customers can get an NPS survey up and running faster than ever.

Set-up

Start Running NPS Surveys with Qualaroo in 3 simple steps!

Select the right channel.

Decide where you want to run your survey (desktop, mobile web, prototype, mobile app or link) and select “Choose Template.”
Don’t worry–you can run this survey on as many channels as your organization needs by creating additional surveys.

Find your template.

Select “NPS - Net Promoter Score” from our list of pre-vetted templates.
You can even type “nps” into the search bar to find it.

Create, edit and publish your survey!

Be sure to replace [Company or product] with your company’s name or product.
On the drop down menu that reads “None” select the Question option to route respondents to a follow-up question we’ve already written for you.

Additional Tips

Getting the most out of your NPS Nudge

To get the most out of your NPS nudge, we recommend taking advantage of Qualaroo’s targeting options. Depending on your company’s industry, you may need more targeted options that don’t distract from the customer journey experience. For example, we recommend different settings for SaaS products and eCommerce websites. Below we’ve recommended some general targeting options for websites seeking to run a Net Promoter Score survey.

Recommended targeting options

Where should this survey appear?:

Your entire site – type in your domain, followed by a slash and asterisk.
Although you can target specific pages or sections of your website, if this is your first NPS campaign, you should aim to collect as many responses as possible by placing it on your entire site.

Who should be prompted to take this survey?:
- "Came directly to your site (typed in your URL, or bookmark)" + "Only returning visitors".

Select 100% of all visitors who meet the conditions specified below

When should this survey be displayed?:

Generally a 3-5 second page level delay works well, but use Google Analytics as your guide to see what the average length of time people spend on a page is.

How often should this survey be displayed?:

Only show once per visitor to prevent repeat responses.

If you need help understanding all the options available within the Targeting Section, please visit this section of our Help Center.

Before and After you begin collecting responses

Before

Integrate Qualaroo with Zapier or Slack to ensure the right teams are notified.
Determine how long you want to run this campaign. Collecting NPS continuously allows you to track improvements over time while setting an end-date can allow you to analyze data over fixed intervals.

After

Expect a steep drop-off at the write-in portion. This is the part of the survey you'll want to pay attention to by creating a comprehensive follow-up plan.

Remember that the follow-up work is where improvements are actually made!

Use Qualaroo’s beta reporting dashboard to quickly visualize results.

Conclusion

Net Promoter Score is a well-known metric that can offer effective and actionable insights into your company’s user or customer experience. Although we’ve provided a lot of information here on NPS best practices here, the NPS survey really is quite simple to administer!

If you have any additional questions or would like to get in touch with a customer success manager about setting up your company’s NPS program, please submit a request here. We are always excited about ensuring you achieve the desired success from your experience with Qualaroo.

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What is Net Promoter Score?