What is NPS? A Guide

Net Promotor Score.

Often shortened to NPS, NPS is a measure developed by and trademarked Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix.

It's popularity in the business world has increased significantly, as it's seen as a single number to track customer loyalty and your brand reputation.

NPS achieves this, by getting customers to customers rate their likelihood to recommend a company, a product, or a service to a friend or colleague. This is ranked on a 0 to 10 scale.

The Score is made up of three types of responses:

  • Promotors are customers who respond with a nine or ten. These are the customers that are seen to your advocates. These customers are your brand champions.
  • Neutrals are customers who respond with a seven or eight. These are satisfied customers, but may be less willing to recommend your business or at least, not singing your praises.
  • Detractors are customers who respond with a six or less. These are likely unhappy customers who have had a bad experience with your brand. They're more likely to churn, or not make a repeat purchase.

Why is NPS important for business?

NPS itself is a measure of brand loyalty. Brand loyalty is important for brands as research has found that

Brand loyalty is also linked to retention of customers. For businesses, a 5% increase in customer retention boosts profits by 25% - 95%. This is because:

  • Loyal customers spend more with brands they trust
  • Loyal customers generate word of mouth referrals, decreasing the cost of acquisition of new customers.

NPS itself doesn't deliver this, but it is a valuable tool for measuring Brand Loyalty.

How can you track NPS?

So now that you know what NPS is, and how it's helpful to your business, how do you start tracking NPS?

Well, your NPS campaigns can begin relatively simply and get more advanced as your business needs grow.

At its core, NPS campaigns rely on getting customers to answer a survey.

The most common method of delivery of a survey is through email, and more recently SMS text. Other methods include on webpages, on EFTPOS terminals, etc.

Best Practice NPS Questions

To be true to NPS there only needs to be at least one question. This generally follows this theme:

On a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to recommend our business?

This will give you the NPS score.

Most businesses, will offer an optional follow up question trying to illicit free-text feedback from the customer. These questions can be a bit more specific such as:

  • Why did you give us that score?
  • What could we do better?

Software

To help get your NPS campaign off to the best start, we strongly recommend the use of NPS Software. NPS software helps save you time, but also maximise the insights you get from your NPS campaign.

Software solutions such as our own Inqyr AI and others such as Qualtrics, AskNicely etc., are fantastic ways to get started with your NPS Journey. When choosing a tool, you need to ensure that it's fit for your business goals.

Things to consider are:

  • What customer relationship management tool are you using currently, if any
  • What integrations does the NPS software have
  • What reporting capability do I need, and does this match the NPS software
  • What is my budget and how can I maximise it.

We at Inqyr Consulting will be happy to help you out with these decisions and more. We'll help you find the right software solution for your business, give you guidance on setting up your surveys and best practice so you and your business can really maximise your return on investment.

You can get in touch here, or read more about our Voice of the Customer/NPS offering here.