What Is an NPS Program and How To Build One Code-Free?

What is an NPS program?

The NPS program is software that can be installed on your product’s website or application to collect NPS feedback from your customers at defined intervals.

NPS survey asks your customers how likely they are to recommend your product to a family, friend, or colleague on a scale from 1 to 10.

What are the goals of an NPS program?

Net Promoter Score is one of the most commonly used and important customer success indicators. When used at regular intervals, it helps you understand how satisfaction and loyalty change throughout their customer journey.

While the primary goal of an NPS program is to collect customer feedback periodically and use that information to significantly enhance your product’s customer satisfaction capabilities, it can help you accomplish other objectives. Here are some examples.

Calculate your Net Promoter Score and measure customer loyalty

To calculate your NPS score, you must conduct an NPS survey first. This helps you understand your customers, measure their loyalty, and classify them into three categories:

• Detractors are customers who score between 0 and 6. They are very harmful to your brand as they spread negative word of mouth.
• Passives are those who score 7 or 8. They are neutral and do not pose a risk to your brand.
• Promoters are your most loyal customers, scoring 9 or 10. They are your brand evangelists. They are extremely satisfied and will likely refer your products to others, helping you achieve high business growth.

After the survey, you need to use the NPS responses to find out the score: it is the difference between the percentage of promoters and that of detractors. It can range from -100% to +100%.

For example, you surveyed 100 customers last year. 50 of them turned out to be promoters, 20 turned out to be passives, and 30 turned out to be detractors.

So, your NPS score is (50-30)% = (+) 20%.

Identify your power users and turn them into brand advocates

Power users are one of the most valuable assets for your SaaS. They are users who have adopted your product to the maximum and are using the core features very frequently.

They are highly likely to be your promoters and a great source of positive word-of-mouth for your brand. Using Net Promoter Score software, you can easily:

• identify them
• engage with them in a more personalized way
• increase your chances of retaining them over longer periods.

Convert passives into promoters

Passives are those customers who are neutral about recommending your product. While they won’t be promoting your product, they won’t be damaging your reputation through negative comments either.

They likely had a positive experience with your product but might need a little nudge to become your promoters. With NPS surveys, you can identify these users and create smarter conversion strategies to turn them into loyal promoters.

Find out detractors and learn what needs to be improved

Detractors are dangerous for your SaaS product. They are unenthusiastic customers who might abandon your product soon. They won’t promote your product but damage your product’s reputation on various review sites through negative comments.

You must identify them first, find their problems, and proactively fix those issues as fast as possible to avoid losing them as customers.

When you have data regarding detractors, you design win-back strategies that reduce churn and improve customer retention.

Do you need NPS software to create a successful NPS program?

If you’re looking to create a successful NPS program that will keep working over the long run, you must use NPS software to automate the whole process. This helps you collect feedback and generate NPS results faster and more accurately among numerous other benefits.

Here are some key NPS software features shared by most tools in the market. Your software should be able to:

• Create NPS surveys in different mediums (pop-ups or interactive emails)
• Publish surveys automatically within a given schedule
• Customized survey settings. For example, you should be able to send all surveys at once, send to a specific customer segment only, or send individual surveys a certain number of days after a purchase has been made
• Collect individualized data on your users
• Automatically calculate your NPS scores
• Analyze the product’s NPS trends score in real-time
• Integrate with other software tools for easy data management

How to build an NPS program for your SaaS?

Here are a few important points to remember that will help you build a successful NPS program for your SaaS product.

Segment customers and decide who to survey

The first step towards building an effective NPS program is understanding who you want to survey.

You don’t want to spam all of your users at once or run the danger of repeatedly sending the survey to the same users. You have to create different customer segments and then send out surveys to them.

The best strategy is to send surveys at different points throughout the user journey. For example, you can send out an NPS survey to new users a few weeks after onboarding.

Surveying new users of the product isn’t a good idea because they can’t provide accurate feedback with the little time they’ve spent with your product.

One way to identify your target group would be to track customers using in-app features. This will allow you to survey users who have real experience with your product and provide an accurate response to the NPS question.

For example, if you’ve launched a new feature, you can gauge customer satisfaction with it by surveying them once every two weeks.

Set the timing and frequency to send NPS surveys

The next step is to decide on the timing of your surveys. This involves:

• At which time should you send the survey
• How frequently should you survey your users

One common mistake most companies make is sending too many surveys thinking that this will help them collect more feedback. As a result, users feel bombarded and often end up ignoring your surveys completely.

To counter this and improve your response rates, you should automate your surveys and select triggers based on customized settings. For example, if one user submits the NPS survey, they will be surveyed again after 60 days.

On the other hand, if a user declines the survey and selects “Ask Me Later”, they can be surveyed again after 7 days.

Add a follow-up question to enable qualitative feedback

One drawback of the NPS rating is that they focus on quantitative data, i.e. how likely are you to recommend the product. This doesn’t tell you why they chose that score.

To overcome this, you can include a follow-up qualitative question after the NPS questions. This helps you get specific and detailed feedback on customers’ experiences.

As shown in the image above, it’s best to use an empty text field so that users can feel free to give their honest input. Users might have different issues with your products, or give you insight into your strongest features.

Once again, using an NPS tool helps you categorize these responses, making it easier to spot repetitive and unique problems.

Tag responses to understand the context behind the NPS score

When you tag responses, you’re able to track the NPS score of different aspects of your product.

For example, it helps you understand the customer experience with your product’s usability, features, or customer support. In the image below, customer support for a certain product has a score of 60 while its usability score is -10.

This helps you zero in on problems that impede growth, understand key drivers of your product and detect patterns.

Customize the design and integrate it with your brand

Lastly, you have to focus on the design of your survey.

To make it visually appealing, you can use colors, themes, and fonts that match the theme of your product. This makes it integrate easily and increases the response rates of your NPS survey.