Here’s one of the simplest questions you can ask your customers: Would you recommend us to your friends?
Word-of-mouth referrals are still one of the top ways people find out about new products and services.
In fact, 88% of consumers say they trust recommendations from people they know above all other forms of marketing.
If your customers wouldn’t recommend you, it’s a sign your team could benefit from implementing strategies to engage, support, and satisfy your customers throughout their customer journey. This will help you boost your Net Promoter Score (also known as NPS), and win more customer loyalty.
Here’s how to improve your NPS score in 7 steps – plus top tips to help you get started.
Follow along or skip ahead:
- What is Net Promoter Score (NPS) and why is it important?
- How to calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- What makes a good Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
- What to do if your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is low?
- How to improve your Net Promoter Score (NPS) in 7 steps
- NPS and customer onboarding example: Later
- Ready to improve your NPS score?
Use our comprehensive NPS Score Strategy Template to assess, track, and boost your Net Promoter Score for sustained business growth long term.
What is Net Promoter Score (NPS) and why is it important?
Net Promoter Score or NPS is one of the top metrics used to measure customer satisfaction. It tells you about customers’ likeliness to refer products and services to other people and gives an indication of customer loyalty and brand advocacy.
If you’re not convinced by the power of word-of-mouth referrals, here are some key stats you need to know:
- 92% of consumers report that they trust referrals or recommendations from people they know personally.
- Referral leads have a 30% higher conversion rate on average compared to leads generated from other marketing channels.
- On average, referral customers have a 37% higher retention rate than customers gained from other channels.
- Word-of-mouth marketing is reported to be between 2-10x more effective than paid ads.
- 82% of Gen Z trust their friends and family for advice on products over any other source.
You can’t afford to ignore word-of-mouth referrals in your marketing strategy. If you want to win more customers and grow your business, you need to make sure your existing customers are satisfied with your products and services.
How to calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is calculated using one simple survey question:
How likely is it that you would recommend [organization] to a friend or colleague?
Responses are measured on a sliding scale. Survey respondents rate their response on a scale of 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely).
According to their answers, respondents are divided into 3 categories to calculate the final NPS score.
| 0 to 6 | Detractors |
| 7 or 8 | Passives |
| 9 or 10 | Promoters |
To calculate your NPS you use the number of Promoters minus the number of Detractors to determine your score.
| NPS = % of Promoters ( — ) % of Detractors |
Your organization’s NPS score will be a number between -100 to +100.
What makes a good Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
If you have a Net Promoter Score that’s close to -100 then it shows your organization has more Detractors than Promoters. If you have a score that’s closer to 100 then you have more Promoters than Detractors.
A Net Promoter Score that’s higher than 30 indicates that your organization is doing well and has a higher number of happy, satisfied customers than dissatisfied ones.
If you manage to hit a score of 50 or more then it’s a great sign of the health of your business, showing that your customers are really happy with your products and services. If it’s 70 or higher then you’re truly exceptional and your customers love your organization. That means you’re going to have more brand advocates and be getting more word-of-mouth referrals.
For organizations with an NPS somewhere between -100 to 0 then you’re in bad territory with more dissatisfied customers than satisfied ones. That’s a strong indicator that you need to be doing more to listen to your customers to find out what you can do to improve to get your NPS higher.
The good news is, your NPS can always be improved with the right strategy.
What to do if your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is low?
Your NPS or Net Promoter Score is key for understanding customer satisfaction. More satisfied customers mean more loyal customers who are more likely to buy from you in the future and recommend you to their friends.
But NPS is about more than just measuring customer satisfaction. In fact, NPS can shape cultural change in your organization and build stronger, longer-lasting relationships with your customers.
If your NPS is low, you need to work on strategies to improve customer satisfaction – including gathering and implementing customer feedback, as well as improving customer support, employee training, and more.
Here are 7 steps to improve NPS score – plus top tips to help you build your own NPS improvement strategy.
How to improve your Net Promoter Score (NPS) in 7 steps
The first step to know how to improve your NPS score is to know what your baseline NPS is.
Conduct an initial NPS survey across your customer base to calculate your current NPS score, so you know where you’re starting from.
Here’s the Net Promoter Score (NPS) formula again:
NPS = % of Promoters ( — ) % of Detractors
Try to integrate the survey into the customer experience by making the timing and delivery of the survey feel seamless, such as at the end of a trial period.
This baseline Net Promoter Score (NPS) will allow you to measure and understand the impact of your NPS improvement strategy going forward.
To improve your Net Promoter Score you need to be regularly conducting NPS surveys and tracking results across your customer base to help you identify long-term NPS trends.
To help you get more thorough results from your surveys, try these 3 tips:
- Use open feedback: Utilize open-ended survey questions to gather more detailed insights from your customers, including from both Detractors and Promoters to find out what’s going well and what needs to be improved.
- Follow up with customers: Develop an automated email flow to follow up with Detractors after their initial survey to find out more about their views and identify the root causes of their negative scores.
- Give them a call: To get even more in-depth feedback from your customers, call Detractors to conduct one-to-one customer interviews and learn more about their experiences with your organization and why they’re dissatisfied.
It’s important to understand the reasoning behind both positive and negative scores from your customers, so you can better understand what you’re doing right and what you need to work on.
When you’ve had a chance to collate customer feedback and get more in-depth insights from your customers, you can use this data to create an NPS improvement strategy.
Here are 3 things to remember when creating your strategy:
- Engage with Detractors: Design an action plan for how to actively engage with Detractors to solve their issues and improve their satisfaction with your products and services to convert them into Promoters down the line.
- Leverage Promoters’ feedback: Use feedback from Promoters to inform your marketing and sales strategies, including gathering testimonials to use as social proof. You can also identify opportunities for reconversion and upselling to Promoters in your customer base.
- Convert Passives: While Passives aren’t your priority, they can be converted into Promoters with the right engagement strategy. Use Promoters’ survey responses to help you actively engage with Passive respondents and impress them with key product features to improve their product utilization and overall satisfaction with your brand.
To increase your NPS you need to make sure you’re engaging with Detractors in your customer base, while also maintaining the loyalty of your existing Promoters – and ideally winning over Passives too..
Work on making your Net Promoter Score surveys as user-friendly and intuitive as possible to increase engagement rates and help you gather meaningful data from your customers.
Here are 3 tips to help improve survey engagement:
- Send NPS surveys at optimal points: Only sending out surveys when a customer unsubscribes or stops using your products isn’t enough. To improve your NPS, you need to conduct customer surveys at regular intervals throughout the customer journey and timing those surveys so they feel natural for your customers to increase survey engagement. Customer satisfaction is likely to change at different points – you need to know when it does and why.
- Personalize survey invitations: Your customers like to feel valued, even when it comes to answering surveys. Personalize your survey invites and questions to make sure they’re relevant to your customers, especially when it comes to specific products and services. Segment your customer base to provide a more personalized survey experience.
- Develop user-friendly surveys: If you want customers to complete your surveys, you need to make sure they’re short, sweet and user-friendly. Avoid too many open-ended questions and edit your questions to keep wording as simple as possible. Make sure your survey platform is straightforward and easy-to-use too to minimize digital friction.
Learn more about how to capture essential feedback here.
Customer experience is key to Net Promoter Score. To improve your NPS score, focus on delivering top-tier customer support to your customers to help them feel more valued. After all, who doesn’t love friendly, informed, and timely customer support?
Here are 3 strategies to improve customer experience across your organization:
- Empower employees with training: Improve your employee training to empower frontline workers, so they can understand how to best serve customers and deliver top customer service at every touchpoint. Employee training can help to reduce response times, improve responses, speed up case resolution times, and more.
- Empower customers with training: Help your customers understand how make the best use of your product or service at every touchpoint of the customer journey with online training. Providing customer education can help to reduce customer loss, improve product adoption, speed up onboarding, and more.
- Create customized customer journeys: Utilize customer data to provide personalized journeys for your customers, including individualized product recommendations, freebies, and extra recommended resources they might be interested in.
- Consider live support: When it comes to customer support, nothing beats a live person-to-person interaction to help customers feel cared for. If you’re looking to increase your NPS, consider implementing real-time customer support like video chat to boost customer satisfaction.
The exact strategies that are right for you will depend on your organization – but if you want to improve your NPS, you need to find ways to improve the customer experience throughout the customer journey so customers leave feeling happy and satisfied.
As well as improving customer support through employee training and technology, empower your customers to solve their own problems using online resources like courses, webinars, and FAQs.
Online resources have a range of key benefits, allowing you to:
- Provide proactive support to your customers
- Create your own Customer Education Academy to allow customers to discover your product or service at their own pace
- Empower customers to find the information they need to solve problems
- Improve customer success and understanding
- Free up your customer support teams
Here are 3 strategies to help you improve customer satisfaction by increasing customer knowledge and understanding:
- Don’t skip onboarding: Improve customer education from day 1 by investing in customer onboarding and training to help customers learn the basics, get set up faster, and increase feature adoption for your products and services.
- Build a knowledge base: A Knowledge Base can help to earn more customer loyalty by giving your customers the information they need to solve their problems in their own time, without the need to interact with live customer support.
- Create online courses: Educate customers at scale with online courses to improve the customer experience, including support for specific use cases and common challenges.
By making important information available to your customers online, you can help customers help themselves, without them needing to talk to interact with someone in your organization, helping to boost efficiency and customer satisfaction.
If you want to make an impact in your organization, you need to build a plan to continually monitor your NPS over time to identify which strategies are working – and where there is still more room for improvement.
Your NPS is only useful if it’s up-to-date and reflects the true feelings of your customers. Once is never enough. Set up a plan for regular NPS surveys and develop a continuous NPS improvement strategy to help you to retain customers and increase word-of-mouth referrals over time.
Ready to improve your NPS score?
To increase your NPS and boost customer satisfaction, focus on listening to customer feedback and improving support throughout the customer journey. Happy customers are loyal customers. Take the time to understand your customers’ needs to improve your NPS score and transform more people into advocates for your brand.
To learn how to use Thinkific Plus to improve NPS in your organization and get a customized plan built for your organization’s unique needs, book a free solutions call.