The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an indicator used to estimate:
- Your customers' loyalty;
- Their satisfaction with your products;
- Their propensity to do word-of-mouth about your brand.
All by asking them a single simple question…
Calculating the NPS therefore involves conducting a survey of your customers – for this, you might need a tool to create an online questionnaire.
But what exactly is the Net Promoter Score? How do you calculate it in practice? How should you interpret it? How can you improve it? Here are all the answers.
What is the Net Promoter Score?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) indicates whether customers are satisfied with your products and customer service. The higher this score, the more likely your customers are to actively promote your e-commerce and become brand advocates.
Conversely, a low NPS warns you that you need to change some of your business practices or review your after-sales service.
The NPS is based, as mentioned earlier, on a simple question: “Would you recommend company X to a friend or colleague?”
Respondents must answer using a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning “Extremely unlikely” and 10 meaning “Extremely likely.”
Source: Net Promoter Network
Depending on the answers, three types of customers are distinguished:
- Promoters, who give a score of 9 or 10;
- Detractors, who respond from 0 to 6;
- Neutral customers, who choose 7 or 8.
The core idea of the Net Promoter Score is to compare the two “extremes” (promoters and detractors) to derive a customer satisfaction score.
6 tools to calculate your NPS
To obtain this valuable indicator, it is recommended to use software capable of conducting surveys and analyzing the results. Let’s go! Here are 6 NPS tools to measure your customers’ satisfaction.
1. Promoter.io
Very comprehensive, Promoter.io helps you understand customer engagement. Designed to drive growth and loyalty, the tool combines hundreds of sources to analyze customer satisfaction.
Promoter.io automatically sends NPS surveys on a daily schedule. The goal is to survey your list at different times for more accurate results.
Additionally, this tool can identify trends regarding your customers' behavior. Handy for sharpening your marketing strategy!
As a bonus, it integrates with BigCommerce and Shopify e-commerce platforms, as well as the Salesforce CRM and the Slack collaboration app.
2. Hotjar
With Hotjar, you can set up an NPS survey directly on your store to collect customer feedback in real time, or send your survey by email after an order.
The software also stores survey results, tracks score changes and fluctuations, and gathers relevant customer feedback on what needs to be improved. You can also ask follow-up questions based on customers' initial responses to obtain more in-depth answers.
3. Zonka
Zonka collects feedback from customers and employees using CSAT, CES, and NPS surveys. It captures experiences and comments at every touchpoint: offline via QR codes, on your e-commerce site, by email, by SMS, etc.
This software lets you customize your NPS surveys. You can add a background, colors, and brand elements without needing to code.
You receive real-time alerts by email and SMS for all negative feedback, allowing you to take immediate action to resolve issues and speak with unhappy customers.
Zonka also lets you turn each customer comment into a task to collaborate with your team and resolve customer service issues more easily.
4. Delighted
Delighted prides itself on being the fastest and easiest way to gather concrete insights from your customers. It uses the Net Promoter System to capture honest feedback from your buyers in minutes.
Quick and intuitive, Delighted lets you send a single question to your customers by email, SMS, or via a link (to share after a social media conversation, for example).
You can also survey visitors directly on your online store. They can rate your product/service and leave a review. Feedback appears instantly in your dashboard, allowing you to analyze your NPS in real time.
5. Wootric
You can use Wootric to collect feedback at the best moments! Focus on the critical touchpoints in the journey that make or break customer loyalty.
Wootric offers NPS email templates that let you send surveys directly from your email service (Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor…), your marketing automation solution (HubSpot, Marketo…) or your CRM (Salesforce, Zoho…). Results appear directly in the synced tool’s dashboard.
Another interesting option from Wootric is embedding NPS surveys directly in your mobile app.
In-app surveys generally achieve much higher response rates than those sent by email. However, respondents are more likely to leave qualitative comments in an email survey. The ideal is to use Wootric on both channels!
6. Net Promoter Score by LoyaltyLion
LoyaltyLion is a free app for shops Shopify. You can use it to calculate NPS and measure the likelihood that customers will recommend you to their friends and family.
As its name suggests, LoyaltyLion helps you implement a loyalty program to increase customer satisfaction.
How to calculate the Net Promoter Score?
Calculating NPS is fairly simple.
Once your survey has been carried out with a number of customers – for example, we'll imagine that 500 were surveyed – you need to calculate the percentages of detractors and promoters.
Out of 500 customers surveyed:
- 320 answered 9 or 10, i.e. 64% promoters;
- 150 answered from 0 to 6, i.e. 30% detractors;
- 30 answered 7 or 8, i.e. 6% neutral.
Then simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to obtain the Net Promoter Score – note that it's preferable to round the percentages to whole numbers to get a “round” score.
With 64% promoters and 30% detractors, the NPS is:
- 64 – 30 = 34
How to interpret the NPS?
As is often the case with this type of indicator, it is easier to calculate the NPS than to understand its true meaning.
Let's start with a few general points:
- A positive score (i.e., greater than zero) can be considered "good", insofar as it means your company has more promoters than detractors;
- An NPS score above 50 is, however, far more significant, since it shows that a majority of your customers are "fans" of your brand;
- An even higher Net Promoter Score (approaching 100) indicates exceptional satisfaction (though such a rating is extremely rare).
However, the evaluation of a score depends largely on the company's context.
The NPS Benchmarks site, which compiles the NPSs of thousands of companies, highlights the variation in average Net Promoter Score from one industry to another:
While the healthcare sector proudly posts an NPS of 75, telecommunications, media and leisure cannot say the same, with scores around 30–40.
Thus, it is important to interpret your Net Promoter Score by placing it in the context of your industry.
The data above tells us, for example, that a score of 40 is passable in financial services, but more worrying in logistics or education.
So don't exhaust yourself chasing a very high NPS: scores approaching 100 (like Tesla's) are exceptions anyway.
Source: NPS Benchmarks
How to improve your Net Promoter Score?
NPS alone is not always enough to drive you toward growth. It needs other elements to fully measure the factors behind your commercial success.
Here are 5 tips to improve your Net Promoter Score and better gauge your company's success.
1. Prefer a limited sample
Reliable statistics are essential for spotting changes in your business.
When launching satisfaction surveys, prefer a small sample of 100 people to thousands of prospects. Also, conduct several studies at regular intervals rather than one large survey once a year.
Also consider including an estimate of the margin of error, regardless of your sample size. This will allow you to effectively measure the accuracy of the data.
2. Use your teams to improve response rates
Too often, companies offer gifts to those who participate in surveys (vouchers, entry into a prize draw, discounts…). These incentives skew the results and, over time, lead customers to reject your future requests.
What you should do to address this problem is involve your front-line teams such as customer service, salespeople, the community manager… and all your employees who regularly interact with consumers.
That way, they can inform them in advance about the survey and explain its importance. You will get more sincere and reliable responses.
3. Create regular reports
A single NPS report is not enough. You need several to ensure an objective comparison of your data. So, do one at least every two months. Otherwise, your decisions will be skewed!
Moreover, it is essential to know whether the score is rising, falling, or stagnating.
A coherent data collection process that relies on automation will help you fight inertia and meet deadlines.
4. Highlight your score drivers
On what criteria do customers judge your products or services? By investigating the consumer satisfaction, you will observe that certain elements are responsible for your excellent score. They are called score drivers.
These are the key factors to rely on to keep your Net Promoter Score moving in the right direction. They can be one or two features specific to your product, an ancillary service, a distinctive quality, a color, a material…
To make the process successful, analyze and list these key elements. You can still collect additional feedback and ask post-sale questions to uncover drivers you hadn't thought of initially.
5. Account for seasonality
The Net Promoter Score generally mirrors market trends depending on the seasonsA normal fluctuation that you can hardly counter.
For example, if you sell winter sports equipment, it's normal to have a better score between October and February than during the summer months!
On the other hand, you can identify these trends to compare them year over year. Perhaps some measures can be taken to increase this score, even if the season isn't conducive to selling your products/services?
Conclusion
Essential to the survival of your e-commerce business, customer satisfaction must be at the heart of your concerns. The Net Promoter Score is a useful indicator for measuring your customers' satisfaction, their loyalty and their ability to generate word-of-mouth around your brand.
However, this is a figure to be taken with a grain of salt and to be contextualized in order to exploit it fully – like any metric, by the way.
To know what your customers think of your products and services in general, it is important to calculate the NPS regularly. With the tools listed above, you will benefit from feedback and reviews essential to improving customer service (and therefore to optimizing your revenue!).
Also incorporate our advice into your Net Promoter Score and it will become an even more valuable decision-making tool.
Not only will you move forward with continuous process improvement, but you will be able to do so with full confidence, interpreting and applying your data with complete precision.
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