How to Improve net promoter score (NPS)

Your NPS reflects your business, services or products. Improving your NPS involves improving aspects of your business. However, there is a systematic way to tackle improving your NPS and by proxy, your business, services or products.

Understand your score

Step one is to understand your score. Understand why customers are detractors, passives or promoters. What were the standout features in their decisions. This is key because moving forward without fully understanding your score may lead you to incorrect conclusions and waste a lot of time.

A technique to help understand your score is segmenting. Segmenting involves sorting your respondents based on identifying factors like demographic, purchase history, geography, product, service or business division. 

Understand the feedback

Understanding the score is one part but understanding the feedback that’s behind the score is arguably more important. Does your NPS system allow for qualitative feedback, as well as the quantitative score? If no, it’s important to add a qualitative element to your feedback so detractors and promoters can have their say and back up their opinions. This can offer actionable feedback you can use to improve your NPS.

Address Detractors

Detractors can do a lot of damage to a business’s reputation. Addressing detractor concerns and feedback can neutralise their negative reach and help turn them into passives or promoters.

You can address detractors in three steps. Listen, action, communicate. First listen to the feedback and understand the issue. Is this a recurring issue that is affecting a lot of people? Perhaps it’s only affecting people in a certain demographic or location? Think of a solution and put it into place. This may be a one-time solution, or it may be a change in procedure. Whatever the solution, feed it back to the customer.Feeding back lets the customer know they were heard, and it won’t happen again. This process is called 'Closing the Loop’ and implementing this into your NPS process can drastically improve your score. There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes, but people want to know they’ve been fixed, and they won’t happen again. We’re only human.

Analyse Passives

If you have the data, looking at the passives can also bear fruit if it ends up being a large percentage of your client base. Passives can be swayed positively and negatively, and answering detractors’ problems may help turn some passives into promoters. Similarly highlighting some of the promoters’ experiences, may also improve passives. Create unexpected moments in the customer journey that wow your customers. Simple gestures like saying thank you or offering a discount on their next order can significantly enhance their experience. These thoughtful touches can turn passive customers into enthusiastic promoters.

Please remember that some industries have more passives than others, and if you’re comparing to non-industry companies you may have an impossible task. Look at our other post here for What Is a Good NPS?

Promote Promoters

Promoters should be treated like an external sales team. These are your mascots, your biggest supporters. Empower promoters to share their experiences and rave about your company. This can be done simply through offering promoters an opportunity to leave a glowing review. Or you could offer a reward like a discount or free shipping. Maintain promoters and keep them happy. Be aware that a few neutral or negative experiences can turn them into a passive, and one negative experience can turn them into a detractor. 

Follow-Up to deal with molehills not mountains

A key way of keeping promoters and passives from becoming detractors is tackling small issues before they erupt into full blown issues. To do this proactively make sure your feedback plan enables people to provide qualitative feedback at various steps of their interaction. A customer experience will have ups and downs. Someone may think payment was easy, but shipping was slow. Someone may have liked the price but not the selection. Keeping tap on incoming feedback, trends in your analytics (if applicable) can help you deal with potential problems before they become obstructive. You may also end up turning weaknesses into strengths.

A final takeaway

NPS reflects your business. A good NPS is an analogue for a success business. Use the NPS system as a tool to identify strengths and weaknesses and make improvements to the customer experience. 

If you need some help implementing an NPS system, or analysing the data get in touch with Viewpoint at alistair@viewpoint-research.co.uk