How to Increase Your NPS Score and Close the Loop After You Get Responses

We often hear portfolio companies asking about how to increase their NPS score. The typical response rates that we see are 10-30%. You can read more about how to get higher response rates here.

While increasing response rates is important, it’s first helpful to understand what a good NPS score is, and how you build a system that continually improves your NPS score which starts with closing the loop on responses. Because if you never close the loop and address customer feedback, they are unlikely to continue to respond to your surveys going forward.

It’s not enough to collect NPS scores. You have to close the loop otherwise you’ll never improve your scores.

Collecting feedback from your customers is only one part of the process. But what’s more important is actually DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Having a full NPS program involves collecting feedback but then also responding to your customers to thank them for their feedback, and then subsequently implementing short and long term changes to improve your score over time.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about NPS Program

Who should be the NPS champion? Which function owns it?

NPS is typically owned by Customer Success, Product Management or Marketing depending on your organization’s structure. But regardless of who owns it, the other functions should definitely be recipients of the feedback from the scores. For example, NPS may help Product better prioritize features for the product roadmap, NPS may help Marketing collect customer testimonials and case studies, and NPS may help Customer Success better understand at-risk accounts.

How widely should NPS be shared with the rest of the company?

The whole company should be aware of the NPS score - and understand what it means to be a promoter, passive or detractor because every function has an impact either directly or indirectly on a client’s NPS score. Oftentimes, there is also an opportunity to give credit to specific employees who are mentioned by name by promoters to help boost your employee morale.

How do we increase the response rates from our NPS surveys?

This is one of the hardest challenges that our portfolio companies have and while there’s no perfect answer, there are techniques that you can try to increase your response rates. For example, you can tweak the subject line of your email to increase open rates. Other ideas also include sending a pre-email from your CEO letting your customers know that you value their opinions and take feedback seriously and give them a heads up that they’ll be receiving an NPS email soon. See additional ideas on how to improve response rates here.

Should we send NPS surveys via email or do in-app surveying?

It depends, but we generally guide our portfolio companies to start with email NPS surveys and then over time add the in-app surveying capability if your software allows for it. The reason being is that with email surveys, you will reach both decision makers as well as users of your software, where as in-app surveying only allows users of your software to respond and you might be missing some key feedback from other stakeholders who are not using your product on a regular basis. Read more on how to choose the best channel to gather feedback here.

What’s the right number of follow ups to send if someone has not responded to an NPS survey?

We typically recommend 2 follows ups after your initial survey send, a week apart before waiting until the next cycle. So for example, you might send an email May 1. If you do not get any responses, send a second email on May 8, and another one on May 15, and if still no responses, then wait at least 6 months until you send another survey so that your customers don’t feel inundated.

How often should we be sending out an NPS survey to an individual client?

ParkerGale recommends sending the general NPS survey to each client once per year, and at most, twice per year or every 6 months. There is a risk of over-surveying your customers and realistically, you are not going to make long term meaningful changes that will improve your NPS score in a short period of time. So if a customer responded to an NPS survey in April 2021, they should not receive another NPS survey until at the earliest, October 2021, or more likely, April 2022. If you sent a customer a survey in April 2021 and they didn’t respond, then you can send it again in October 2021.

How often should we be sending out NPS surveys as an organization?

How often a client RECEIVES a survey is very different than how often an organization should SEND a survey. In an ideal world, a PG portfolio company would be having a drip of NPS surveys going out every month to their customer base so that you’re continually collecting feedback, and also so that you can better manage closing the loop with customers. So if you have 1200 customers, you would send out 100 NPS surveys a month to a different cohort on a rolling basis. Otherwise, some portfolio companies also send NPS surveys quarterly, or if you have very few customers (i.e. less than 150 clients), the longest period could be sending a survey every 6 months which would be the maximum length of time we’d recommend between sending NPS surveys. You can read more about the frequency of sends here.

Do we send NPS scores to multiple people within our client? What if they provide different scores?

Yes! NPS surveys should be sent to all relevant stakeholders at your client. In some cases, this could be up to 10 or more people at a single company and that’s okay. You may receive wildly different feedback from a decision maker from a user, but regardless, that information is helpful to identify where you should improve. In fact, if you receive disparate scores from within the same client, then that will help you identify where to focus your efforts, and also give you a general measure of customer health overall.

Can we ask add more questions to the NPS survey to gather feedback on other areas?

We don’t recommend adding additional questions as part of the NPS survey. For NPS, you want to stick with the 2 questions of “how likely to recommend” and “why did you assign this score” only. The reason being that your survey response rate drops significantly the more questions you add. However, after a customer fills out the NPS survey, there are options through Wootric to add a link to take them to another page - that could be Capterra or G2, or an additional SurveyMonkey link to ask more feedback in other areas. Depending on what type of additional survey questions you want to ask, whether it’s product related or something else, it’s better to have a separate survey entirely instead of trying to co-mingle it with your NPS feedback and ParkerGale can help you think through those additional options.

Should we communicate to customers changes that we’ve made based on NPS feedback when we send out new surveys?

Absolutely! If you have an NPS program that is ongoing and you’ve actually made changes based on prior NPS feedback, it’s always helpful to communicate to your clients that you have listened to them and highlight what actions your company has taken. The goal is to let customers know that when you ask them for feedback, you take it seriously and make improvements based on it.

When do we use NPS vs. CSAT vs. CES or some other measure?

When ParkerGale companies deploy NPS surveys, it is generally to gauge the overall relationship and health. Think of NPS as the big picture view of customer loyalty over the long term with your entire company. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and CES (Customer Effort Score) are more transactional metrics that help you analyze key touchpoints along a customer journey. For example, CSAT may be used anytime a customer contacts your Support function to solve a problem and CES may be used after a company has completed implementing and onboarding your solution. NPS is the foundational metric to build upon and as you mature that metric, you can think about tracking CSAT and/or CES. Read more about the differences between the 3 metrics here.

Do you send NPS surveys to churned customers?

No - NPS surveys are only meant to be sent to current customers. If you send it to customers that have left you, it is likely to bring down the score. The goal of NPS is to get a snapshot of your current customer loyalty and prevent churn by identifying detractors and passives before they get to the point of ending their contract.

How soon after you sign on a new customer do you send them an NPS survey?

A good rule of thumb is to send out an NPS survey 6 months after a new customer has onboarded. This gives them enough time to have experience with your product and company before giving feedback. However, if you want to measure a new customer’s onboarding and implementation experience, you may ask a CES or CSAT question after that particular transactional touchpoint.

Do we have to respond individually to every single NPS response?

No and that’s not feasible for most of our companies based on the # of customers they have. You should prioritize responding individually to your detractors first since they are most at risk. For promoters, you can automate a response thanking them for their feedback and potentially ask them to go to a G2 or Capterra link if you have one, or reach out to them for a case study or testimonial. For passives, tailor your response based on their verbatim feedback and the size or importance of customer, but you can also generally automate a response for them as well.