How to increase your NPS score

As a way to assess customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Scores (NPS) have been a benchmark for businesses since 2003. Essentially, these scores measure how likely a customer is to recommend a brand to someone else based on their first-hand experience.

A higher NPS score indicates a happier customer base, so you’ll want to pay attention and do what you can to raise your rating. Fortunately, we have 8 practical tips to help you keep word-of-mouth promotion flowing. 

Calculate your NPS score

First of all, you need to know what your current NPS score is as a reference point. 

Once customers have ranked their answers on a scale of 1 to 10, they will fall into one of three categories. They’ll either be a Detractor (0-6), Passive (7-8), or Promoter (9-10). To calculate your NPS, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. 

When your percentage is high, you can be confident that your brand is meeting customer expectations while for lower scores, there are likely to be issues that need to be addressed. 

How to improve your NPS score

No matter what your NPS score is, you can always be taking steps to improve the Customer Experience (CX). To help you get started, here are our top 8 tips for raising the NPS of any organisation:

Make surveys user-friendly 

No matter what changes you make to your Customer Experience, none of it will raise your NPS score if nobody responds to the survey. Unfortunately, NPS surveys have very low response rates so they must be straightforward, short, and intuitive. This way, it will be more convenient for people to respond and your overall score will gradually increase. 

Don't waste your customer’s time

On top of making surveys short and sweet, you should always respond to their feedback quickly and positively. This shows customers that you appreciate their input and are proactively seeking ways to improve their experience. And don’t reserve this positive treatment for Promoters – remember to engage with Passive and Detractor customers too. These moments are great opportunities to find out what they need and bring their scores up on the NPS scale.   

Go beyond NPS

While it does help to have an overall measure of the Customer Experience, NPS doesn’t help brands to know exactly what needs to be changed. To get more actionable insights, you will need to go beyond the standard NPS question and ask customers why they gave that score. 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

For this reason, we recommend using a metric like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) to supplement or instead of NPS. Instead of a generalised score, CSAT surveys can target specific aspects of the buyer’s journey, helping to dig into the nitty gritty details and extract more useful data. 

Close the loop with your customers

When a customer shares some feedback, they expect the company to proactively make relevant improvements. That’s where the customer feedback loop comes into play. In a nutshell, the customer feedback loop is a continuous cycle of asking for feedback, acting on it, and assessing the results. The more consistent the cycle is, the happier customers will be. 

Improve your products

When it all boils down, customers are engaging with your brand for a reason – they want the product you sell. To ensure buyers' are enjoying their experience, we recommend asking current customers about the products using a Customer Effort Score (CES). These surveys will help to identify any issues with the products so that you can make necessary improvements.   

Enhance the Customer Experience

The Customer Experience refers to everything about the buyer’s journey, from products and transactions to communication and customer service. For your NPS rating to be higher, you need to work on improving the Customer Experience. For identifying the key areas of concern, use CSAT and CES surveys. 

Share regular insights across your organization

When you do collect customer feedback, be careful not to keep it all a secret. Even if your NPS is high, the insights customers share can and should be shared all across the company so that everyone can adapt and improve their processes accordingly. To make this easy, a good Customer Feedback Management (CFM) platform will collate the data and present it in a meaningful way. 

Measure and analyse your customer feedback regularly

While NPS has been used for over 20 years, it does leave some room for other tools to pick up the slack. Whether you pair CSAT and CES with your existing NPS feedback or drop NPS altogether, the main thing is that you keep tracking and assessing customer feedback regularly. Over time, your customer feedback data will help to shed light on the things your company does well and those that need a more proactive strategy. 

How to get referrals without NPS

While the basis of NPS is a hypothetical referral rate, it doesn’t correlate with tangible reviews. For this reason, we believe NPS is an irrelevant metric. Rather than hoping for referrals based on an irrelevant score, it’s time to turn those positive sentiments into online reviews that make a real difference. 

To achieve this, we recommend using a customer feedback strategy that targets customers at the right points in the buyer’s journey and asks them to live a review. These could include when they have bought a product, received help from your team, or responded to a customer feedback survey with a high rating. 

Ultimately, your goal should be to always listen to what your users have to say, whether it be positive, negative, or somewhere in between. At Review Tui, we prefer to use Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Scores because they are specific, relevant, and meaningful. With this data, you can easily develop an action plan to achieve the ultimate Customer Experience. 

For everything you need to get started, the Review Tui platform has it all, including: 

• Convenient real-time reporting.
• Personalisation with the Hubspot CRM integration. 
• Multichannel surveys with trackable campaign links. 
• Intuitive and effective surveys that are easy to build.
• Analytics to generate helpful insights.  

Get started with our guide to implementing customer feedback strategies for more suggestions and tips.