If you’re in the business of working with people (and honestly, we all are, even in the B2B world), you probably care about your client’s opinion of your organization and their experience working with you. You probably also want to quantify these opinions in an actionable way to share and identify customers who might be open to becoming your brand’s champions (or to put it in NPS terms - your promoters). Leveraging Net Promoter Scores, or NPS, in your organization can help you measure how your customers feel about your business. The right tools can help you not only measure that feedback, but also turn it into powerful marketing material from your best advocates - happy customers.
We recently sat down for a Webinar with AskNicely, a HubSpot integrated tool for conducting NPS Surveys, to break down five of the best practices for executing NPS.
You should collect feedback consistently to avoid an avalanche of information where a lot of feedback falls on your shoulders at once. Taking time each day to understand what your customers are saying gives a holistic, high-level perspective of what can be improved or what is being done well. Additionally, keep your surveys simple to answer, send them at a steady cadence (We recommend quarterly. AskNicely recommends looking at the customer journey), and ensure that you use the right channel for your customers. It’s key to strike the balance between how often you survey and how you survey.
Helpful hint: Include free-text space in your survey so people can give as much feedback as they like without character or word count limits to further qualify the continuous feedback loop you’re looking to establish.
Whether you use HubSpot, Salesforce or a related CRM, integrating your survey tool enables you to collect feedback at the right time and increase survey response rates. This integration allows you to instrument the customer experience and examine how customer happiness differs at different points in the life cycle of your relationship. Additionally, a CRM integration lets you ensure sure scores and feedback go to the right people so they can forecast and adjust business predictions accordingly.
Helpful hint: Use profile and event data to enrich feedback from customers by examining, on a granular level, their segment, location and other related metrics.
Historically, surveys have been sent out widely with little personalization. With all the information now available in our systems, you should focus on collecting personalized data that integrates into your CRM for association with different teams and roles. You can then track it at a granular level and set targets for what your goal score and audience are.
Build rituals for review and improvement and employ these through team huddles, role-relevant measurement, rewards and recognition as well as storytelling. By celebrating this good work and feedback, you’re in turn reinforcing an environment equipped to handle both positive and negative feedback.
Helpful hint: Your NPS score should not be a secret. Keep lines of communication open and sit down with leadership regularly to discuss the scores and how they can improve, allowing you to serve customers better.
Don’t be afraid to toot your own NPS horn. Integrate NPS into the tools people already use such as your CRM, team collaboration tools and data warehouses, and encourage organization-wide adoption of this effort. Additionally, TV dashboards in the office are a good choice for promoting feedback in high traffic areas, and mobile app considerations fare better for people on the go or busy company leaders.
For internal NPS promotion, create a Slack channel (or on your collaboration software of choice) to field good feedback from customers and share with other employees. This is great for people like developers, as they do not always receive direct feedback on their efforts and work more on the backend.
Helpful hint: Live stream your customer feedback as its received and share it on your TV dashboards to drive conversations with people visiting your business.
After getting customer feedback or reviews, turn them into advocacy to spread word about your business and accelerate growth both internally and externally. Easy ways to be customer advocates include focusing on immediate issue remediation when a customer runs into a problem and addressing systemic issues in your underlying product or service offering when they crop up.
Leverage workflow automation to act on individuals comments at scale and text analytics to prioritize company improvements and share these with your customers. By making them feel included and delineating their value, customers are more likely to return to your business again and again.
Helpful hint: Ask happy customers for reviews and referrals. The more satisfied they are with their experience, the more likely you can expect a glowing review.
Whether you're just getting started with NPS or want to improve your existing customer advocacy programs - following these best practices will help ensure you're not just conducting a survey for the sake of surveying.