NPS Survey

NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey is a survey used to assess how likely customers are to recommend a brand or a product. This metric helps evaluate customer satisfaction and loyalty toward a specific company. NPS survey is the most effective way of collecting data about the likelihood of clients sharing a brand with their friends and colleagues.

Watch the video to create an NPS form with SendPulse for free!

In this article, we’ll uncover the purpose and benefits of the NPS survey. We’ll also show you how to create an NPS survey and provide some effective survey tips.

What is the purpose of the NPS survey?

Net Promoter Score is a single question asking clients how likely they are to recommend a specific brand or product to their friends and colleagues. Customers can assess their satisfaction with a company on a scale of 0-10. After conducting a survey and getting the results, business owners group customers based on their rate and loyalty towards a brand: promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (6-0). Net promoter score allows company owners to assess satisfaction with their products and services and determine the issues that make customers unhappy.

The main purpose of the net promoter score survey is to assess customer loyalty and satisfaction. With a two-minute survey, you’ll be able to receive insights into customer experience with your brand. Obtained data gives you space for improvement, future business opportunities, and company growth.

Depending on the survey results, you can figure out how loyal your customers are. When you have 9 and higher, people are happy with your company and don’t plan to go to your competitor. When you have 7 or lower in your NPS survey result, you’ll need to consider some measures to improve customer satisfaction and experience.

Now that you know the main purpose, it’s time to explore the benefits of the NPS survey. They will encourage you to consider this metric for your business.

The main advantage of the NPS survey is its ability to evaluate customer loyalty and clients’ satisfaction with your brand. Its simplicity encourages customers to provide answers and helps brands attain actionable insights. There are even more pros that NPS surveys can bring to businesses. Let’s check them out.

• Customer retention. High scores in the NPS survey indicate high customer loyalty and satisfaction with your brand. Happy clients stick around and make repeat purchases, staying loyal to your company. It results in lower customer churn and higher customer retention. If buyers remain with your brand, you don’t need to allocate additional costs to acquire new customers.
• Better customer experience. With the help of the survey, your company focuses on overall customer experience. The scores help you evaluate the likelihood of recommending your brand and measure the possibility of customers promoting your company. Word-of-mouth promotion is much more valuable for business owners than paid ads since people trust the experience and recommendations of real buyers. By assessing the likelihood of becoming a brand advocate, you can identify and eliminate the gaps in customer experience. Clients who are happy with your product and services will tell you about your company to their friends and family.
• Company growth prediction. The results of the NPS survey allow you to predict whether a company will succeed and bring higher revenue shortly. If your business has many promoters, it can experience more sustainable growth. Loyal customers bring constant revenue to your company compared to newcomers who usually perform only one purchase and leave. Moreover, they can become free advocates of your brand. As a result, your customer base will expand, and the number of deals will increase.
• Qualitative feedback gathering. You can present an NPS survey as one question, giving customers space for open-ended answers. By asking your clients why they give you such a rating, you can gain some qualitative responses. This way, you'll identify the problems your brand and customers face when dealing with your business. This information is precious to improving the overall experience with your company and ensuring seamless interactions with clients.
• Benchmarking. The results of the survey help identify the performance of your business compared to competitors. This way, you can find out whether your company outperforms or underperforms. Compared with others, this metric provides valuable insights into customer satisfaction.
• Customer loyalty identification. The metric enables you to assess the level of customer loyalty towards your brand. The information you gain after the survey provides insights into the overall experience with your brand, which results in business growth if clients are satisfied.
• Continuous improvements. By assessing NPS regularly, you can incorporate a series of improvements regarding customer experience, customer service, or product. Since customer needs and preferences change fast, you can identify them and make adjustments. This will help you retain customers and prevent them from leaving once they have slightly different needs.

To reap the benefits of an NPS survey and determine whether customers appreciate your brand, you should know how to calculate it and what those indicators mean. That’s why, in the next section, you’ll find a short and easy-to-understand guide on estimating your net promoter score fast.

How to calculate net promoter score?

After conducting an NPS survey, it’s a must to calculate your net promoter score to determine how many of your customers are happy with your brand and ready to promote it to family and friends. We’ll provide you with a short, detailed guide on doing it easily, so let’s dive in.

Calculating the net promoter score for your company requires you to send your customers a short survey containing one simple question. It asks clients to evaluate how likely they are to recommend your product or brand to friends and colleagues. The question often looks like this: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?” Customers can choose any rating on a scale of 0-10. Then, you should divide respondents into groups based on their ratings.

There are three main groups of customers according to the net promoter score scale: promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (6-0). After grouping customers based on their rate, it’s time to check out a formula for calculating the net promoter score.

NPS = (Promoters/Total Number of Respondents)*100 - (Detractors/Total Number of Respondents)*100

It’s time to see how to estimate the measure with an example. Let’s say you have 100 respondents, 70 of which are promoters, 5 passives, and 10 detractors. Your calculations will look the following way:

NPS = (70/100)*100 - (10/100)*100 = 60%

Your net promoter score would be 60%.

However, before calculating your NPS, you need to conduct an NPS survey. The process is simple when you know the steps you should take. That’s why we’ve provided the most essential instructions on conducting an NPS survey for your business.

An NPS survey is a simple way to collect customer feedback on your products and company in general, but it should be implemented wisely. That’s why we’ve prepared a short, detailed guide on how to do it for your business.

1. Identify your goals. Before creating and sending your NPS survey, you should have a clear understanding of the goals. Usually, company owners need an NPS survey to evaluate customer loyalty and satisfaction and find space for improvement. Consider defining the audience segments you want to send your survey to. You can assess different areas and stages of your business when sending NPS surveys to recent buyers, existing customers, or long-term clients.
2. Outline your NPS question. Writing a net promoter score question isn’t hard at all because it’s universal for any business. You can send the following statement: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?” or its variation. However, depending on your primary goals, you can also have open-ended questions, allowing you to gather qualitative feedback and identify issues with your business if you have any. As an option, you can add more questions if you need information to optimize your website, user experience, or customer support.
3. Find the best survey channel. You should choose channels for sending your survey based on customers’ preferences. There is a wide range of options available, including email campaigns, chatbot messages, pop-ups, SMS, phone calls, and in-app notifications.
4. Identify the perfect time for sending your survey. When sending an NPS survey, consider several factors: time, personalization, and frequency. You should send your survey when customers are more likely to respond. Usually, the perfect timing is shortly after a purchase or interaction with your brand. If you want to get more responses and engage customers, it’s worth personalizing your NPS survey. However, you shouldn’t send personalized surveys too often because it might overwhelm and annoy your customers.
5. Collect responses. You can gather responses automatically using a special service or do it manually. With the help of a service like SendPulse, you can instantly collect all the data and gather valuable insights, enabling your business improvement.
6. Calculate net promoter score. Divide customers into groups based on their rating and estimate NPS using the formula above. If you have open-ended questions, pay attention to the responses. They might unveil specific issues with your company that influence customer satisfaction.
7. Take action based on the results. When your customers provide qualitative feedback, you can have a clear understanding of the problems customers face and suggestions they have for improvement. Ensure prioritizing issues clients pay attention to when optimizing some areas of your business. This will help you improve customer satisfaction and shopping experience.
8. Share results with the team. After analyzing and making conclusions on the received feedback, it’s essential to share the results with team members responsible for future improvement. You should also update customers about the upcoming optimization.

Although conducting an NPS survey seems to be a simple task, indeed, it’s not if you perform it manually. This is because you can receive many responses, and it will take days for your team to review them individually. Fortunately, many tools will help you with this task. We’ve listed 5 best platforms for you to consider when conducting your NPS survey.

Managing data from NPS surveys can be overwhelming when performed manually. That’s why we recommend looking for a useful platform that suits your business size and target audience. We’ve listed 5 best tools for you to consider.

SendPulse

SendPulse is a useful marketing tool for creating pop-ups containing NPS surveys. The platform’s drag-and-drop builder enables you to select the NPS survey pop-up type and design it from scratch or edit a pre-built template based on your requirements.

With the service, you can select a variable to store user feedback values in the mailing list and select rating options (stars, emoji, hearts, like/dislike, or numbers). You can also add a comment field to collect and save qualitative user feedback.

SendPulse also offers customization options. You can change the appearance of your survey by inserting text, uploading images, adding buttons, social media links, an entry field, radio buttons, multi-select elements, and dropdown menus.

Below, you can see how easy it is to create an NPS survey using SendPulse’s ready-to-use template.

Pricing: If you have a small audience of customers, you can enjoy the benefits of a free plan that covers 5,000 views monthly, an unlimited number of subscribers, 1 project, and 5 pop-ups per account. In case you want to build more pop-ups with NPS surveys, you should consider a paid plan starting at $ 6.40. It includes 10,000 views monthly, an unlimited number of subscribers, 3 projects, 10 pop-ups per account, video pop-ups, and A/B testing.

Survey Kiwi

Survey Kiwi is a service empowering you to create forms and surveys in minutes and deliver them to customers through emails, WhatsApp messages, QR codes, websites, SMS, or social media platforms. With the service, you can choose from various templates and customize your survey to align with your brand, target audience, and key objectives. The platform allows you to enhance your surveys with images and logos and adjust colors and fonts to match your branding, ensuring they resonate with your customers.

Survey Kiwi has a powerful data analysis tool that enables you to filter responses, download reports in multiple formats, and share the results. With its help, you can easily collect all the customer insights and analyze them without much effort.

Below, you can see the process of building an NPS survey with Survey Kiwi.

Pricing: You can try the service for free, but continued use requires purchasing a paid plan. If you opt for annual billing, the most affordable plan costs $7 monthly. This plan includes 100 responses, unlimited campaigns, questions, and workspaces.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a well-known survey tool that can be effectively used for implementing NPS surveys. The platform offers a library of 250+ templates and hundreds of expert-written questions for various survey types. You can build beautiful personalized surveys with the platform’s easy-to-use theme designer. When using the tool, you can choose fonts, colors, logos, custom URLs, and styles that resonate with your audience.

With custom variables, you can personalize questions by embedding names and tailoring them to each respondent or customer group. The platform also lets you choose the right format for your NPS survey. You can ask only one question at a specific time and turn your survey into a conversation by asking several related questions.

Below, you will find an example of creating an NPS survey in SurveyMonkey.

Pricing: The service has a free plan, but it doesn’t cover templates for NPS surveys. If you need ready-to-go templates, you’ll need to buy a paid plan starting at €30 per user monthly if billed annually. It covers 50,000 responses per year, a shared asset library for on-brand surveys, custom logos, colors, survey URLs, and many others.

Jotform

Jotform is a versatile online form builder that helps create and distribute various forms, including net promoter score surveys. You can design good-looking surveys with no coding skills needed in minutes. The platform allows you to customize your forms by changing fonts and colors and adding your brand logo.

The service offers a library of 10,000+ pre-built, fully customizable templates, enabling you to build NPS surveys in seconds by adjusting the templates and personalizing them based on your company’s needs and requirements.

Below is an example of Jotform’s NPS template that allows you to build your survey fast.

Pricing: Jotform has a free plan covering 5 forms, 100 monthly submissions, 1 user, and 1,000 monthly form views. If you need to create more forms, purchase a paid plan starting at $34 monthly if paid annually. This plan allows you to create 50 forms with 2,500 monthly submissions, 1 user, and 100,000 monthly form views.

SurveyLegend

SurveyLegend is a tool for creating visually appealing and effective surveys. Surveys built with the platform are highly customizable, meaning you can add various elements to collect all the necessary information from customers. The service allows you to duplicate survey questions, set acceptable, maximum, and minimum input formats, scale rating ranges, add required answers, use pictures in surveys, and more.

You can further personalize your survey design by customizing themes, adjusting font sizes, and creating color schemes. You can also upload custom backgrounds to make your surveys stand out. With the service’s mobile-friendly designs, you can easily survey customers on various devices, including laptops, PCs, smartphones, and tablets.

Below, you can see how to create an NPS survey from scratch using SurveyLegend.

Pricing: You can start using the service with a free plan, allowing you to create 3 surveys, upload 6 images, and collect up to 1,000 responses per survey. If you have a larger customer base, consider upgrading to a paid subscription starting at $15 per month when billed annually. This plan includes 20 surveys, 10 conditional logic rules, and 5,000 responses per survey.

When sending NPS surveys using specialized platforms, it’s important to know how to phrase net promoter score questions to encourage more responses. While the core question remains similar across businesses, there are variations you can use at different times. Let’s review them next.

7 NPS Survey Questions to Get Better Insights

If you want to get more actionable insights that provide accurate information about how things work and don’t with your business, you should ask the right questions. Below, you’ll find NPS survey questions to get more value.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?

This is the first and basic NPS question customers often see in their inboxes, apps, chatbot messages, websites, etc. The question is designed to collect quantitative data, focusing only on numbers. You can slightly change and adjust this question based on your target audience and the information you want to obtain.

Considering your shopping experience with us, how likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague? (0-10)

You can customize NPS questions by altering the words and phrases to fit your needs better. These surveys will help you gather customer feedback about their shopping experience with your company, providing valuable insights into this aspect of your business.

How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends and family after receiving and using our product?

You can always reword the question to sound more relevant to specific customer behavior. The survey is easily adjustable, meaning you can resonate with the customer's life cycle, purchasing history, or behavior.

What do you like most about our product/service?

After asking the basic question, you can follow up with your promoters by asking them to provide open-ended responses. This question helps you find out what makes them happy with your product. These answers allow you to identify what you do right for customer satisfaction and loyalty. As an option, you can provide customers with ready answers so they can answer quickly without spending too much time writing.

What motivated you to provide our company with a high score?

This open-ended qualitative question helps your company gain deeper insights into what you are doing well and what satisfies your customers. By receiving this feedback, you can effectively focus on the right strategies and approaches that work.

What could we do to improve your experience with our product?

This qualitative question allows you to highlight areas of improvement. Your clients can feel free to share their thoughts and recommendations regarding specific aspects of your product you should improve and ways you can do it effectively. This kind of question is usually used as a follow-up question for passives.

What should we do to impress you?

This qualitative question is customer-centric, showing clients that you care about them and appreciate their loyalty. By sending such a survey, you’ll still be able to get some valuable insights into your company's improvements.

Knowing NPS survey questions is just one step toward NPS survey analysis. To find out how it works, you should know each step, which we’ll show you in the section below.

NPS survey analysis isn’t just about sending one simple question to your customers. It's about reviewing the data provided to identify problems, find solutions, and make robust improvements. It’s time to find out how to do it effectively.

1. Calculate your net promoter score. After receiving customer feedback, divide their answers into groups based on their scores. Clients with 9-10 will go to the promoters group, those with 7-8 belong to the passives group, and those with 0-6 should be in the detractors group. Then, estimate your NPS with the formula provided earlier.
2. Segment responses. Divide feedback based on demographics, behavior, and customer lifecycle. Consider analyzing scores based on customers’ gender, location, and age. You should also pay attention to clients’ usage patterns and purchase history when segmenting the obtained data. Customer lifecycle also matters when analyzing responses.
3. Review open-ended answers. Once you proceed to analyze open-ended responses, you should determine the often mentioned themes and topics, overall emotions and feelings about your company and products, and how often specific words and phrases occur. All these elements will help you discover what customers like about your brand and identify common problems.
4. Determine main drivers. The next step involves determining the key factors that influence customers’ experiences. Use both qualitative and quantitative data to find correlations.
5. Compare the current NPS survey’s results with previous ones. You should compare your current NPS results with previous ones to identify changes over time. Additionally, consider benchmarking your NPS against competitors to determine if your score is strong within your industry.
6. Turn responses into visual elements. Visualize data about promoters, passives, and detractors using graphs, trend lines, and charts. It will help your team identify the main points fast and take action. You should also turn qualitative data into word clouds to feature frequently mentioned words and phrases.
7. Outline actionable insights. Consider analyzing each of the groups to find out more information about your business. You should review promoters’ responses to find out what works well in your company and support these areas. When analyzing passives' feedback, you can understand what prevents these customers from becoming promoters. With their help, you’ll be able to identify issues that hold them back from giving you the highest score. Detractors’ data will allow you to solve problems resulting from negative experiences.
8. Develop a plan of improvement. After conducting an NPS survey, follow up with customers to thank them for their answers and inform them once improvements are made. You should work on the plan with short-term and long-term improvements. There might be quick fixes and serious changes that require a detailed analysis. They should be implemented carefully to increase customer satisfaction and your future NPS.

When conducting an NPS analysis, there are best practices you should keep in mind. We’ll provide them in the next section so that you can effectively send a net promoter score survey and obtain actionable insights.

The effectiveness of your NPS survey depends on the way you create it. If you want your survey to provide valuable insights, you need to follow specific steps. In this section, we’ll unveil the best NPS survey tips.

1. Make a straightforward question. Your NPS survey question should be as simple as possible. Ask customers how likely they are to recommend your company or product. There’s no need to write long, complex questions. Your clients should be ready to understand and answer your NPS survey instantly.
2. Use a 0-10 scale. Consider incorporating a 0-10 scale to receive responses to your survey. When you stick to this classic scale, this consistency will help you ensure benchmarking or comparison across various periods or units.
3. Choose the right timing. Conduct research on customer communication to determine the ideal timing for sending your NPS survey. Consider sending it shortly after customer interactions, product usage, or purchases. This timing ensures customers provide feedback based on their recent experience with your company or product.
4. Use open-ended questions for more details. If you want to get not only a score but also qualitative feedback, it’s crucial to add open-ended questions. After customers answer these questions, you’ll have valuable insights into customers’ reasons to recommend your brand or not. Clients’ ratings and open-ended responses will guide you into implementing actionable improvements.
5. Segment respondents and their answers. By dividing customers based on their demographics or regions, you can tailor improvements according to their groups and specific preferences related to their age, gender, needs, location, etc. You’ll be able to develop strategies that meet the requirements of each of your segments.
6. Develop a schedule for NPS surveys. Since customers’ tastes and needs often change, you need to conduct surveys regularly. Consider implementing a schedule of consistent NPS surveys. It will help you identify trends, evaluate the impact of changes, and measure the effectiveness of the latest improvements.
7. Take action after receiving customer feedback. The most valuable point of obtaining customer feedback is using it correctly. Once you get information from the NPS survey, you need to act on this feedback. That’s why you should establish a clear process of analyzing feedback, resolving problems, and making changes to improve the customer experience.
8. Combine NPS with other metrics. Although the NPS survey is crucial for businesses, it would be more useful to implement it with other metrics like customer satisfaction, customer effort score, and revenue metrics. It will give you a clear picture of the customer experience.
9. Personalize communication based on customer groups. Think of your follow-up questions according to customer groups. After you identify your clients as promoters, passives, and detractors, you’ll need a different approach for each segment. You’ll need to interact with promoters and detractors differently. It is essential to show that you value each customer's feedback.
10. Consider implementing incentives to encourage responses. Think of using incentives for survey participants. However, you should be careful with incentives so that clients give you objective responses. Your main goal is encouraging more responses without influencing customers’ opinions, accuracy, and honesty.

Before implementing the provided best practices, you should know how it works in real life. We’ll provide you with examples from different brands for inspiration.

NPS Survey Examples

There are different examples of NPS surveys that managed to attract customers and encourage them to provide actionable insights. We’ll uncover several of them so you know how to do it for your company.

TomTom

TomTom, a location technology company, added an NPS survey to its website to assess the quality of its landing page. Users can provide their feedback on this specific page and give a score from 0 to 10 to evaluate the likeliness of them recommending this company to their friends and family.

This NPS survey is visible and encouraging to leave feedback. Site visitors can simply choose emojis and score and provide the company with valuable insights. Moreover, if users have something more to share, there’s also space for open-ended responses and screenshots. This way, TomTom strives to get more information on issues that appear on its website and eliminate them as soon as possible.

Booking.com

Booking.com customers can access the company’s NPS survey through its app. After staying at hotels booked through the platform, clients can easily assess their satisfaction with the service by selecting a numerical score. The question is straightforward and prominently displayed, requiring customers only to choose a number without the need for further explanation.

Comparably

Upon landing on the website and scrolling through, users encounter a pop-up NPS survey from Comparably. It prompts site visitors to take a few minutes to answer questions, enabling the company to gather valuable information. In addition to providing a 0-10 scale to rate satisfaction, Comparably invites users to respond to six additional questions that vary and focus on user experience.

Congrats! Now you know what an NPS survey is and why it’s essential. Hope that our detailed guide and tips will help you create an effective NPS survey. Register now to enjoy the benefits of using SendPulse for your NPS surveys.

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Last Updated: 03.07.2024