What Is tNPS, Why & When Should You Use It [+ Examples]

You’ve probably heard of the Net Promoter Score or NPS, but what about tNPS?

In a nutshell, there are two types of NPS surveys: transactional and relational. Though there are slight differences, the goal is the same. It’s aimed to understand how likely customers are to recommend your product to a friend/colleague on a scale of 1-10. The greater the score, the more satisfied your customers are and the more loyalty they feel towards your brand.

This article will break down tNPS and NPS into exactly what they are and introduce you to the power of tNPS in gauging user sentiment.

What is tNPS (transactional Net Promoter Score)?

Transactional NPS (tNPS) is the process of sending microsurveys to customers immediately after an interaction, or transaction, with your business. It takes a granular approach to survey customers to understand them on a deeper level.

Just like the NPS survey, the transactional NPS survey asks two simple questions: how likely customers are to recommend your product to others, and the main reason behind your score.

This identifies three groups of customers:

• Promoters: who provide a score of 9 or 10.
• Passives: who provide a score of 7 or 8.
• Detractors: who provide a score of 6 or below.

What is the difference between NPS and tNPS?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) often refers to the relationship NPS survey which measures how customers perceive your company as a whole. It gives you a bird’s eye view of overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This metric lets you assess business health and compare the internal NPS data against industry benchmarks.

On the other hand, tNPS measures user sentiment after specific interactions. You get direct feedback about a particular user experience, making it easier to take action.

Thus, every department can get a metric to organize their work around, and you’re able to optimize different touchpoints across the customer journey.

Why should you implement tNPS in your SaaS?

Here’s how this survey helps your SaaS business.

• Get immediate feedback and identify friction points: You can measure a business interaction at a minute level and observe its effect on customer satisfaction and their likelihood of advocating for your brand. Instant customer feedback allows you to identify friction points and remove them promptly. Prompt action based on customer feedback can improve engagement and drive more value.
• Optimize the touchpoints in the customer journey: Every touchpoint in the user journey offers an opportunity to strengthen the customer relationship with your business. The tNPS lets you quickly identify and address customers’ issues to meet their needs. This way, you can optimize the touchpoints and increase customer retention.
• Understand what drives customer satisfaction: NPS is about measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. And tNPS goes one step further by tracking these two metrics right after specific customer interactions. That way, you can figure out the sources of customer satisfaction so that you can recreate them in other areas as well as enhance product marketing.

How to calculate the tNPS?

There’s no difference between the calculations of transactional NPS and general NPS. All you have to do is subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, and you’ll get your tNPS score.

What is a good tNPS score?

There’s no fixed good tNPS score since the criteria can differ widely across different geographic regions and industries. Therefore, you need to do some research to find a good tNPS score for your business.

Generally speaking, a tNPS of less than 0 is a clear indication of serious underlying problems in the company. On the other hand, the score range of 0 to 30 is typically considered a good one, albeit with areas for improvement.

You probably have ‘happier than unhappy’ users if your score is above 30. The score can even get as high as 70. A score greater than 70 suggests that you have loyal customers who are actively referring your product to others.

Remember that these scores are highly generalized. Again, you need to conduct some market research to find the median for your region in the SaaS industry and analyze your score accordingly.

Types of transactional NPS surveys

Transactional NPS surveys can be categorized into different types based on the timing and context of the interaction. Here are the 4 common types you can use:

Post-purchase surveys

You can send these surveys after your customer has completed a purchase of your product or service. The goal is to gauge their satisfaction with the buying process and initial impressions of the product.

By capturing feedback at this stage, you can gain insights into the customer’s expectations. Understanding what attracted them to the product and their anticipated outcomes helps you tailor future communications and support.

Post-service surveys

Post-service surveys are an integral part of customer experience management. These surveys are strategically sent after a customer has interacted with the customer service or support team (i.e. resolved support ticket or customer service call).

You can use feedback data from these surveys to identify any systemic issues in customer support. Patterns in feedback can highlight areas that may require process improvements, additional training, or adjustments in support strategies.

Event-specific surveys

These surveys are strategically triggered by events such as feature updates, onboarding, or participating in beta programs. The primary goal is to understand the customer’s experience and satisfaction related to that particular event.

Questions may explore whether the content addressed their concerns, provided solutions, or enhanced their understanding of your product.

Follow-up surveys

These surveys are systematically sent at regular intervals after the initial purchase or sign-up, aiming to track customer satisfaction over time and identify areas for improvement.

The primary purpose is to foster an ongoing relationship with customers and gather insights into their evolving needs and experiences.

Transactional NPS survey examples

Let’s see some of the most common touchpoints, after which you can send tNPS surveys.

• Free trial activation
• Onboarding process completion
• Free trial run
• Customer service interaction.

tNPS survey after free trial activation

Send this tNPS survey to check how the sign-up process was for your new users. A friction-based sign-up flow makes it more difficult for a user to finish the sign-up process. Of course, it comes with the promise of getting higher value later on in the journey.

However, you should make the sign-up process as frictionless as possible to make it easier for users to get started. This is possible when the UI is so good that it can highlight the value of your site/app by itself.

The tNPS survey ratings will help you know where customers are facing unwanted friction.

tNPS survey after completing the onboarding process

The onboarding phase is critical since it is the stage at which new users decide whether they want to invest in your product or not.

Primary onboarding starts with the sign-up flow. A great initial onboarding experience leads users to the Aha! moment when they realize the value of your product. This makes users more likely to activate and subscribe to a paid plan.

Once users have onboarded successfully, send them a tNPS survey to measure the effectiveness of your primary onboarding process.

For example, you may use an onboarding element like an interactive walkthrough or checklist to give a step-by-step guide to users and lead them to the activation point. The tNPS survey will capture what users feel about the effectiveness of the onboarding element.

tNPS survey after the free trial is over

Once the free trial is over, users will either choose to stay or leave. This is a key turning point in the user journey where the customer’s decision hinges on whether they received the expected value from your product or not.

This tNPS survey will help measure customer sentiment about their free trial experience. If they choose to stick around, you can learn some of the strong points about your product. You can also know what they found lacking in your product and the areas in which you can improve.

tNPS survey after a customer service interaction

The customer service experience can make a huge difference in a customer’s decision on whether to do business with you.

You can send this tNPS survey right after a chat session is over or a ticket is solved to evaluate the effectiveness of your customer service team. Learning about their pain points can help you train the service team better and increase customer satisfaction.

An important part of customer service is in-app self-service support, which allows users to solve certain repetitive, simpler issues on their own. This makes users feel less frustrated and more accomplished upon solving the issue.

tNPS survey after a new feature release or product update

This tNPS survey prevents you from wasting lots of money on a new feature or product update that has failed to create a good impression among your users.

You can make it easier for customers to discover new features by using in-app guidance, such as modals to make announcements.

Moreover, you should use in-app messages like tooltips to highlight the functionality of a specific feature and drive feature adoption.

You should also create and distribute proper documentation, such as release notes, to consistently show customers how they can make the best use of your product.

How to create tNPS surveys with Userpilot code-free?

Userpilot allows you to create tNPS and rNPS surveys, without any code! You can even add a follow-up question to get qualitative NPS feedback and understand the reason behind each score.

Furthermore, the NPS tagging feature lets you tag and analyze open-ended customer feedback from follow-up questions. You can group the survey responses into different themes to know what triggers customer loyalty and what discourages it.

You can go one step further and use NPS tagging to quantify the open-ended answers. This is done by segmenting the responses to quantify the survey results. For instance, you may find that 80% of your promoters love your product’s user interface.

Segmentation is not only limited to quantifying tNPS responses. You can also segment customers based on their answers to get actionable transactional NPS data and optimize the user experience.

Apart from NPS feedback data, Userpilot enables you to track user behavior and other core product metrics using advanced analytics dashboards. You can easily get an estimation of feature usage, user activity trends, user retention rate, etc.

Userpilot offers a 14-day free trial, after which the paid plans start at $249 per month for the annual subscription and $299 per month for the monthly one.

Conclusion

If you want to optimize specific touchpoints across the customer journey, tNPS is the best option for you to track and analyze customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Whether it’s after free trial activation or the release of a new feature, tNPS will help you improve the customer experience and provide more value to customers.

Want to create tNPS and rNPS surveys code-free? Get a Userpilot demo and see how you can analyze customer sentiment on a granular level.

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