Like many, we are fans of the Net Promoter Score survey. In just one question, you can learn so much about your overall business success.
You can gauge customer loyalty and get a big picture glance of how people feel about your business.
Your Net Promoter Score is one of your most valuable marketing tools, and once you’ve gotten your results and analyzed them, you have a great opportunity to maximize the data. (tweet this)
In fact, you can use your NPS to jump start your business and use it as a pivotal piece of your marketing strategy.
Yet, it isn’t always straightforward to decide what to do with the information. To help, we look at NPS best practices and the next steps after analyzing your score.
Nurture Your Promoters
After your NPS survey, you’ll have a good idea of your promoters. These are the 9s and 10s on your NPS.
While it may seem easy to set these folks on the backburner, you want to improve your 9s and keep your 10s. To do this, you want to nurture these customers to keep them in the positive column.
The last thing you want to do with your promoters is take them for granted and turn them into passives or detractors.
Continue to strengthen your relationships with these customers. Consider sending them a thank you note with a special promotion or company swag.
It’s helpful to plan a strategy for nurturing these customers. It’s always easier to keep a customer than get a new one, but don’t become complacent. Create a strategy that nurtures them, and they’ll return the favor in kind.
Reach Out to Your Passives
Your passives are completely neutral when it comes to your business.
They are stuck in the middle and feeling neither negatively nor positively about your business.
When reaching out to them, you show them that you really are interested in what they have to say.
You want to let them know that you’d like to know more about their feelings toward your business.
Consider sending a letter thanking them for their response and asking them what you could do to improve your experience.
Your passives may feel negatively but didn’t want to say so in the survey, but they may open up with more personal interaction.
Or, you might find out that you can fix something simple to turn them into promoters.
The final goal for this group is moving them from the passive column to the promoter column for your next NPS survey.
Handle the Detractors
Your detractors aren’t likely to return and spend money at your business. They are also likely to leave you negative online reviews and speak negatively about you.
The good news is that you can encourage just the opposite by reaching out to them.
Consider their low NPS scores as a warning that you have a shot at doing something about changing their minds.
In fact, did you know that up to 95% of customers will give you a second chance if you handle their complaint successfully and in a timely manner?
Doing this also helps eliminate the chance that they’ll spread negativity by word of mouth.
Just like with your promoters and your passives, reaching out says you care. And, with this group of people, it will mean a lot.
You want to have your most experienced customer-facing staff deal with your detractors. If these customers didn’t leave you any feedback, the goal here is to get it and try to turn it around.
The team member who responds should first apologize that your company didn’t meet their needs and acknowledge their negative experience that led to them not recommending you. Offer them the chance to share about what you could do to improve.
Not only does this show good will, but it lets them know you are truly interested in improving.
Finally, come up with a solution to help. This may not be immediate, but it should be timely after the first conversation.
Share Feedback with Your Employees
It’s vital that you share your results with your employees, especially the ones on the frontline.
If you aren’t getting a good NPR score, it could as a direct result of your employees and their customer service abilities.
By sharing your score with your team members, you can all work together to improve your score. Ultimately improving your score improves your company’s overall bottom line.
Use Your Score to Improve Customer Interactions
In addition to reaching out to your current customers, you can use your NPS score to improve interactions with future customers.
Today’s culture is customer-driven, and if you aren’t meeting their needs, they’re going to find someone who is.
Commit your company to improving your score, and that starts with your staff and your company culture.
You want to install a culture of customer service to improve your NPS score. This is the only way to increase your growth potential.
Know why someone would recommend your company and why they wouldn’t. Do what you can to improve upon why they wouldn’t.
To Conclude
When creating your Net Promoter Score survey, you want to ensure your responses aren’t anonymous.
While this may seem counterintuitive to getting results, it’s imperative if you want to be able to follow up with your customers.
Your best way to use your NPS after analyzing your results is to reach out to all three groups: your promoters, your passives, and your detractors.
With each group your strategy might be a bit different, but your goal is the same: to increase your score and retain the high scoring customers you do have.
You can follow up through your survey email system, a personal phone call, or even a handwritten note.
When doing this, follow up in a timely manner and don’t let too much time lapse between when the survey went out and when you respond. Your customers aren’t going to remember what they said if their thoughts aren’t fresh in their mind.
What’s more, when you respond to a poor rating quickly, you’ll have a better shot at resolving the issue.
Finally, make sure that the people responding to your customers are well-versed in the art of customer service and conflict management. They should be highly skilled in relationship building because they are the face of your business.
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Images: Battlecreek Coffee Roasters on Unsplash
