10 Effective Strategies To Improve NPS and Boost Customer Loyalty in SaaS
What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of customer loyalty that assesses the likelihood of a customer recommending your product or service to others.
An NPS survey simply asks users how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale from 1 to 10. Here, 0 means “Not Likely” and 10 means “Extremely Likely”.
The survey can also include a qualitative follow-up question to know why a user gave a particular score.
Why is NPS crucial for SaaS companies?
It’s no surprise that the NPS metric is widely used by all solid SaaS companies.
Here’s why.
It helps you track customer satisfaction and loyalty
NPS feedback gives you an overview of customer loyalty as well as how satisfied customers are with your brand. This is why 55% of businesses across the world use NPS scores to measure user sentiment.
It helps you uncover customer pain points and areas of improvement
Analyzing NPS feedback from dissatisfied users can help you identify customer pain points such as areas of friction. Then you can build improved in-app experiences accordingly and take steps to reduce friction as much as possible.
It helps you gain valuable insights and optimize the customer journey
NPS insights enable you to make data-driven decisions to optimize the customer journey. You can understand what drives customer value and make customers engage more with your features.
This helps you develop strategies to increase customer retention and reduce churn. Higher retention translates to improved customer lifetime value and business revenue.
How to calculate Net Promoter Score?
The Net Promoter Score measures the difference between the percentage of detractors and promoters. Now let’s dig deeper into the three NPS user segments.
Detractors
Detractors are customers who give you a score of 6 or below because they don’t find enough value in your product.
They are disengaged from your product. Detractors typically find multiple flaws in your product and may even convince their friends and colleagues not to sign up for your product.
Negative reviews from detractors can be very damaging to your product and brand image. In fact, 94% of online consumers said that a negative online review persuaded them to avoid a business.
Passives
Passives give you a score of 7 or 8 because they are indifferent about your product. They are not dissatisfied but are not very happy with your product either.
Passives are likely to make repeat purchases but maybe have only one use case. This makes them look for alternative sources of value, and they can switch as soon as they find a better competitor.
Promoters
Promoters are users who give you a score of 9 or 10. They are your power users who actively use your product.
Promoters are the most valuable asset of your company but you should try to convert them to brand advocates. These are customers who spread positive word-of-mouth and actively recommend your product to others.
NPS benchmarks
Any score between 0 and 30 is considered quite good across all industries. And any score of more than 50 is excellent.
Although an NPS score above 0 means you have more happy customers than not, it’s recommended to check industry benchmarks to set targets for what score you want to achieve and which competitors to beat.
If you notice your competitors constantly outperforming you, more and more customers will start considering them as better options.
The image below shows the NPS benchmarks for several industries. Here you can see that the SaaS industry average is 31.
The SaaS industry has a relatively much lower average NPS score. Moreover, several surveys from Quora have revealed that many SaaS businesses don’t cross the 60% mark and consumers are usually a bit stingier with positive feedback.
This may be because many customers use SaaS products as a background tool. There are also limited platforms to share reviews with online peers compared to industries like online entertainment.
The average SaaS NPS has been increasing over time suggesting that customer experiences need to be outstanding to improve retention.
10 Strategies to improve your NPS score and drive customer satisfaction
Now let’s go through 10 strategies to improve NPS that will help you boost user satisfaction and drive growth effectively.
Send NPS surveys on a regular basis to measure customer loyalty
It’s not enough to use NPS surveys just once or twice. You should send NPS surveys regularly throughout the entire customer journey. This lets you gather feedback and measure customer loyalty in different stages.
Some examples of situations that you can trigger NPS surveys for include:
- After a customer completes primary onboarding
- When a customer adopts your entire product, ie. activates all the key features
- After a customer upgrades their subscription plan
- As soon as a customer is done contacting support
- Once a customer has engaged with an in-app experience
- After a customer has engaged with a specific feature for ‘X’ a number of times.
Add a follow-up qualitative question to identify the root cause of the score
The NPS scores won’t tell you much unless you learn the reasons behind each of them. That’s why you should add a follow-up question to each survey to know why a user gave a particular score.
This strategy is very useful in understanding what your users want and how much value they are getting from your product.
Knowing the precise cause of dissatisfaction helps you identify friction points or realize which existing features you should get rid of. This gives you opportunities to convert not only passives but also detractors into promoters.
Moreover, promoters’ responses can reveal the most engaging aspects of your product so that you can maintain them to retain more promoters.
Proactively reach out to detractors and offer personalized help to avoid negative feedback
How can you help your detractors and convert them to promoters?
Analyzing NPS data helps you proactively approach detractors with solutions to their existing problems. You can combine the NPS feedback with insights from other user analytics to gain a deeper understanding of their problems. This reduces the risk of churn before it’s too late.
Send a customized email to customers who give low scores to personally check what’s wrong and offer help, as shown in the image below.
Your detractors might be missing out on an existing feature you can make aware of and drive enough value to even turn them into strong brand advocates.
Engage with passives and try to convert them into promoters
Passives are a great target for gaining more promoters. They mostly have good customer experience with your product but need more attention and personalization on your part.
Reach out to passives directly to learn more about their experience and find solutions that exceed their expectations.
Use follow-up questions and tag the responses to understand where they find you lacking. Once again, you can also combine the NPS analytics with other user analytics to get more in-depth insights.
Combine the NPS survey with other microsurveys to get the big picture
Now we come to how you can combine the insights from NPS with other types of surveys.
One way of doing that is to send other microsurveys such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, customer effort score (CES) surveys, product-market fit (PMF) surveys, and more.
A CES survey measures how much effort users need to give to complete an interaction with your business. On the other hand, PMF surveys tell you whether you’re targeting the right market.
Here’s an example of HubSpot’s CSAT survey. While NPS surveys help you understand the overall user sentiment about your product, CSAT surveys provide insights into how users feel about a particular feature, experience, or user interaction.
Incentivize customers to encourage the feedback process and acknowledge them
Customers are not always inclined toward giving feedback. They may be in a hurry or may find the survey questions confusing. Therefore, it’s important to create a user feedback survey that motivates users to provide answers.
Keep the survey short and focus the question on a particular topic. This saves time and helps users understand what you’re asking.
Moreover, you can offer small rewards, like the one shown below, to encourage users to spare some time and give honest feedback.
Make sure that you trigger these surveys to appear contextually, preferably right after a particular experience. This reduces the risk of frustrating customers by sending surveys at their odd hours and keeps the experience fresh in their memory before answering.
Interview your loyal customers and understand the main drivers of their satisfaction so you can replicate
Your loyal customers are one of your biggest assets, making them the perfect source for knowing what drives user satisfaction.
Incentivize users to attend one-on-one interviews. They add a human element to their interaction with your brand and help you better empathize with their pain points.
Launch a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program to constantly stay connected to customer needs and react promptly. A VoC program lets you collect, analyze, and act on individual customer feedback.
By knowing what makes loyal users happy, you can replicate their journey with other users and increase NPS.
Build an in-app help center to provide self-service support
One bad experience with customer support can make even promoters change their opinion about your business and significantly lower your NPS score.
Customers can get irritated when they have to wait a long time to solve a problem or are confused about how to use a feature. This is where in-app self-service support comes in.
An in-app help center allows customers to solve simpler problems on their own and make them feel accomplished. It also helps your support team to focus on customers with more complex issues and offer quick solutions.
Here’s Userpilot’s resource center that comes with a live chat option, FAQs, an idea submission option, and a link to the knowledge base, among others.
Create interactive walkthroughs to guide new customers and avoid confusion
Product tours are lengthy and provide too much information in one go so it’s better to avoid them. Instead, interactive walkthroughs address these problems by offering concise, step-by-step guides to customers.
You can trigger walkthroughs to appear contextually just when a customer needs help. The easy guides help new users reach the activation points faster without getting stuck anywhere.
Thus, walkthroughs increase the chances of a customer completing the free trial and gaining value from your product. And the smooth user experience leads to higher NPS scores.
Provide top-notch customer support and go beyond customer expectations
A HubSpot research showed that 93% of customers tend to stick with businesses that offer excellent customer service. Your customer support team is the backbone of your organization since they are the first to be contacted by customers.
Therefore, you should always strive to offer top-notch support in a timely manner. Great customer support helps to improve NPS and drive word-of-mouth marketing.
Make sure that your brand sets the right expectations to avoid disappointing customers. The most effective way of offering proactive support and exceeding expectations is by building an in-app help center.
Furthermore, you should interact with them through in-app messages using UI elements like checklists, tooltips, and microsurveys and provide contextual help. Congratulate and reward them for achieving key milestones to motivate them to advance in their customer journey.
How can you create NPS surveys and improve NPS with Userpilot?
If you’re looking for a great NPS sentiment analysis tool, Userpilot is the right one for you. With Userpilot, you can build NPS surveys and improve your score without having to code! So let’s see how Userpilot can help you achieve your goals.
Build various types of microsurveys to collect customer feedback without coding
Userpilot allows you to create NPS surveys and build other microsurveys such as CSAT surveys, CES surveys, PMF surveys, and more.
You can adjust the survey design so that it looks like it’s a part of your own interface. For instance, you can remove the Userpilot branding and personalize them to match your brand’s identity.
Moreover, there is no limit to the number of responses you can gather from these microsurveys. You can trigger the surveys to be displayed in-app instead of by email to ensure all customers notice them.
For NPS surveys, you can add a follow-up question to collect qualitative feedback. You can even tag these open-ended responses to get NPS data on the patterns among user scores.
A tag is essentially a label that can be created and assigned optionally to each response. You can then filter the answers, share them, and carry out trend analysis. This helps you understand what makes customers loyal and what disengages them.
You will get a detailed dashboard with an overview of the NPS responses. The visuals are easily distinguishable by color.
Segment customer based on their responses and feedback
Userpilot lets you segment customers according to the nature of their responses and combine it with other types of user analysis. This helps you add more context to the NPS feedback.
For example, you can group customers and find that 90% of your detractors face problems with customer support, so you know where to start making improvements. You can make data-driven changes to your in-app marketing campaigns and optimize customer experiences.
Furthermore, you can perform advanced segmentation based on NPS tags and several data points including NPS score, user identification, custom events, responses, etc.
Create in-app personalized experiences for specific segments
After you’re done with segmentation, you can create in-app experience flows to provide customized solutions to each user segment.
Suppose a particular customer segment gave you an NPS score of 5-6. You can send them a microsurvey such as a CSAT survey to know what things you can improve.
Wrapping it up
NPS feedback analysis helps you get valuable insights into user sentiment over time. Improve NPS to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.
You can do so by using multiple strategies such as collecting qualitative feedback, providing in-app guidance and self-service support, and providing personalized help to passives and detractors.
Want to create microsurveys to collect customer feedback code-free? Get a Userpilot demo and see how you can do it to analyze customer sentiment and improve NPS.
