Customers are the building blocks of any business. That being said, customer feedback plays a major role in expanding the business. Online surveys help us here in receiving timely feedback from our customers to know what they feel about our product. There are different types of online surveys readily available and one such is the NPS survey. The NPS survey questions are the best means of knowing customer satisfaction.
What is NPS?
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. NPS is calculated by asking the ONE simple and important NPS question How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?. The answer option provided usually is a scale of 0 to 10 and this range is used to measure customer loyalty. The most satisfied customers who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called Promoters. The dissatisfied customers with a responding score between 0 to 6 are called Detractors and those in between are the Passives. To know more in detail about NPS survey questions check out What is Net Promoter Score?
What is the NPS Follow-Up Question?
However the respondents are for our NPS survey questions, be it Promoters, Detractors or Passives, we have to follow up with them to get more details. To explore the rating that we received, follow up with an email with questions to know further about their answer. These follow-ups should make sure that you connect with your customers but still make sure to be subtle and make them interested to provide the answers. The NPS follow up can be of standard format or customized based on the respondents. So, it’s important to know how to form some of the best NPS questions to get timely responses.
How to follow up with NPS questions?
The first thing about following up on NPS questions would be to know your customer. If the responses are anonymous it would be difficult to follow up. You can use any software tool to get the customer’s information when they log into your site to take the NPS survey. The best way to follow up with your NPS would be via email. They should not be too late from the time of response may be within a week. The customer has to remember their rating to respond to your email. A good support team can work on this.
Strategies and Tips
Open-Ended Questions
You have received a quantitative answer through your NPS survey question and now it's time to get a qualitative response with some open-ended questions. This will provide an opportunity for the customers to provide detailed feedback. This customer feedback can be used for analyzing and improving on the product or service. For more on how to write open ended questions check out Open-Ended Questions - What, when, why and where?.
Customize the question based on respondents
The best NPS questions can be framed based on the score received. The promoters, detractors, and passives may each have different types of opinion that need to be brought out. Hence, customize the questions specific to the respondents. You can work on enthusiastic questions with promoters like “We’re thrilled/excited that you like us. Would you like to refer us to your friends?”. With passives and detractors, phrase the question in a way to understand why they are unhappy like “Thanks for taking the time to give us your feedback. What should we do better to improve our service?”. Once you receive a response, acknowledge it and apologize for negative experiences.
Brand stand out
Make your brand stand out and voice out in the language suited appropriately. Use a casual, informal tone for a fun and youthful brand. With a more serious business like a financial institution or a healthcare organization, go with a formal language in your NPS questions.
Customer Engagement
It is always good to have a proper customer engagement. The NPS follow up questions are mostly open-ended and hence provides more opportunity for further discussions. When you know a customer is happy, share the excitement and know more about the positive experience they’ve had. Encourage those customers to endorse your business. The neutral customers are neither here nor there so engage with them to bring out more about your product or service and educate them. In this way, these passives can turn into promoters. With unhappy customers, it is always necessary to have good communication as negative word-of-mouth can be avoided. Empathize with them and get to know their concerns. Apologize for any negative experiences and reassure to work on a solution. Reach out to them in the future to let them know what changes were made based on their feedback.
It does look like a big work following up with the customers for their NPS survey responses, but this little extra effort goes long. This will help in developing your business with the best customer feedback.