NPS Tutorial: How to Implement NPS Score

Are you wondering whether customers are happy with your product? Looking for information on how to set up and run an NPS survey to find out?

FACT: Net promoter score is a fantastic way to discover customers’ satisfaction with a brand or a product and customer loyalty. 

But it’s also quite a tricky survey to set up if you want to get meaningful insights from it. 

Well, hence this tutorial. I wrote this guide specifically to show you how to implement an NPS score and evaluate your customer’s satisfaction based on your findings. 

Before we begin discussing the NPS process, I believe we should cover some basics and explain the core NPS concepts.

What is NPS?

Let’s start by explaining the two core concepts of NPS:

• The net promoter score, and
• The NPS survey.

In simplest terms, the net promoter score (NPS – a registered trademark of Bain company) is a percentage-based metric that measures the overall customer perception of a brand or product. NPS helps brands determine how many of their existing customers are likely to recommend their products to their peers, be it family, friends, or colleagues from work. 

The data net promoter score delivers; we often refer to it as an NPS score, reveals the percentage breakdown of your audience into three categories – promoters, detractors, and passives. 

• Promoters are people who are on fire about your brand, product, or service. These people score 9-10 on the NPS scale, confirming that they’d be extremely likely to recommend you to others. Think of them as your product enthusiasts, who, most likely, would never abandon you. 
• Passives do find your product valuable and certainly have achieved success with it. But, as the name suggests, they are on the passive end of the scale. They might recommend you, but it’s not guaranteed. Also, a competitive offering could sway these customers easily.  Passives, typically, fall within the 7-8 range on the NPS score. 
• Detractors, on the other hand, are unhappy customers. Not only these people aren’t satisfied with your product, but they can negatively impact your brand and growth through negative word-of-mouth. As a result, the higher the percentage of detractors you have, the greater the risk to your growth.

Here’s the full breakdown of the three categories on the NPS scale. 

To calculate your company’s NPS score, you need to subtract the percentage of detractors from the promoters’ percentage. 

So, if your net promoter score survey identified 80% of your customers as promoters and 10% of detractors, your NPS score is 70%.

NPS survey is a method of collecting customer feedback to evaluate their perception of a brand – the NPS score. 

The survey focuses on asking two questions. The first question asks customers to rate, using a scale of 0-10, their likelihood of referring a company or its product or service to others. 

We refer to it as the rating NPS question. 

The other question aims to go deeper to uncover why a person has given the score they did. Contrary to the rating question, the follow-up is an open-ended question allowing a person to explain the reasoning behind their score. 

Also, unlike the first question, what you ask about in the follow-up will largely depend on the type of information you’d like to collect. 

I’ve written a complete guide to writing NPS questions, where I’ve shared different examples. But let me show you a couple of suggestions for a follow-up question here too:

• You could ask a person about the primary reason for their score. 
• Ask them to tell you openly why they wouldn’t recommend your product. 
• Or you could inquire about what you could have done differently to satisfy their needs.

How to deliver the NPS survey?

To get any NPS results, you must deliver the survey to customers. Ideally, you should also reach out using channels where they’re the most likely to respond. These could be different for your SaaS, so let me share the most common places to include the NPS survey.

An in-app widget. It will allow you to get customer feedback right when they’re using the product. 

Email. Send customers a link to the survey or, even better, embed it right in the email. This way, you can increase response rates since customers will not have to leave their inbox to score your company. 

Website. This is another place to embed the survey. In the case of this survey, keep in mind that the widget might also show up to visitors who haven’t bought from you yet. As a result, your NPS data might not fully represent your customer base’s sentiment. 

How to Implement NPS Score

With the above of the way, let’s go through the complete process of setting up and implementing NPS.

The process involves three steps. The first two relate to planning the survey. In the final one, you set and launch it up. 

Step 1. Identify the best way to engage your audience

We’ve covered above the three ways to deliver the survey – as an in-app widget, a website widget, or as part of an email. 

Now, you could implement NPS using all three strategies. However, there is always a risk that you’ll collect responses from some people a couple of times. Plus, with the website widget, the data might include non-customers. 

Having said that, you could combine two strategies, for instance. For example, you could launch an in-app widget and send the NPS survey via email. 

However, I prefer to focus on a single strategy and ensure high response rates over the long term. 

2. Define what insights you want to uncover with NPS

In general, NPS asks about the customer’s experience and their likelihood to recommend a product to others. However, there are other insights the survey could help you collect. 

For one, you can structure the rating question to uncover additional insights beyond the person’s loyalty to your brand. 

You could also find out about their satisfaction based on the customer’s experiences with you. 

Or ask about their overall experience as a customer. 

When implementing NPS, consider what you want to uncover, and formulate your questions from that perspective. 

3. Set up the survey in NPS software

To implement the survey, you will need to use dedicated NPS software. The app will allow you to set up both questions and deliver them using your choice channel. 

The set up will, more or less, work the same across most dedicated NPS platforms. For this guide, I’m going to illustrate it using our product – Refiner. 

If you haven’t heard of us before, Refiner is an advanced NPS survey tool for SaaS. It allows you to collect and turn NPS feedback into meaningful and actionable insights. 

Here’s how to use it to implement the NPS score.

1. Select the NPS delivery method. 

Refiner comes equipped with various templates that you can start using out of the box. You can launch an in-app NPS widget, an email survey, and more with a click of a mouse. 

(Don’t worry, you can also edit each template to match whatever goals you’ve set up for the survey.)

2. Customize the survey

Once you’ve selected the delivery method, you can customize the survey to match your goals as well as your brand. 

First, fine-tune both NPS questions – the rating question and the open-ended follow-up. 

3. Style the survey, if needed

Refiner comes with beautiful widgets out of the box. But you might need to change their colors or other elements to match your brand, of course. And you have all the options required to do so. 

• Amend colors, 
• Position the survey wherever you want (in the case of an in-app widget.)
• Style the widget box, and customize a couple of other elements. 

4. Specify who’s going to see your survey

The last element of the setup relates to targeting. You can display the survey to every customer, of course. However, there are situations where you might want to target only a specific group. 

For example, you can re-run the survey after a while to evaluate whether your promoters still hold the product in the highest regard. Or consider asking your power users only. 

Refiner gives you all those opportunities and more. 

Plus, you can specify when the survey will appear with various triggers and decide whether you will run it once or have it run continuously. 

Once done, you’re ready to publish the survey.

BONUS: How to Use NPS Scores

This is one of the most common questions I am being asked about NPS – “I’ve launched the NPS survey, now what?”

Well, the first thing is to wait for the data. It might take a while before you get enough responses to make the research statistically valid. 

Then, the key to NPS is to put your scores into action. 

I’ve written a complete rundown of different ways to use NPS scores, but here are a couple of suggestions:

• Identify recurring customer issues with the product. You’ll find many of them mentioned in answers to the follow-up question. 
• Leverage promoters to boost your social proof. You can do this by asking those people for reviews, testimonials, or use cases. 
• Track customer satisfaction over time to see how well you’re doing. 

We’ve also produced a video series on NPS for SaaS and the second video covers how to use NPS feedback to grow your SaaS.

Conclusion

NPS is a fantastic way for a company to discover their customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. But it can also be a tricky survey to set up and get meaningful data. 

Hopefully, after reading this guide, you know what to do to implement the NPS score. 

Good luck.