How to improve Net Promoter Score ® (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is a single metric to represent your customers' loyalty and satisfaction. NPS uses a simple formula to calculate the score that can be used to evaluate your business, products, and services.

The value of NPS varies between -100 and 100, where everything above 0 is considered to be good, and above 40 is excellent.

Depending on where you stand with your NPS, you will need to take action either to keep or improve your score.

What if your NPS is below zero? It is a strong signal that you need to change things around your business and customer experience.

In this article, we will look into different steps you may want to consider to improve your Net Promoter Score (NPS).

While not all steps are relevant and applicable to your case, you may find ideas on what you should do next. The steps are not prioritized or grouped which leaves it up to you where you start and which step you find more important in your situation.

How to improve NPS?

Let's look into ways how you can improve NPS for your business.

Talk to your customers (regularly)

The very obvious and still the most important thing is start talking to your customers. If you want to know how to improve customer experience for your clients, why not simply ask it? Of course, you will get plenty of different answers but you may also discover patterns that you need to address.

An important part of talking to customers is doing that on a regular basis. Just like you measure NPS over time, you need to build a practice to communicate with customers almost daily.

Build community around your business

Building community around your business is extremely important and also pretty easy since there are tons of social platforms.

Community gives you a way to reach out to your customers faster and sometimes directly. Plus, you can rely to peer-to-peer power where your customers can communicate between themselves.

Most of successful businesses out there have strong community behind them. In fact, engaged community can step up for you business - look at the community of WordPress as an example.

Have excellent customer support in place

Never understimate the quality of support. Data shows that up to 30% of customers choose premium software because of support availability.

Customers expect excellent support and this is what you should provide. Address customers' issues on time and with care. Organize trainings for your customer support team to improve their skills.

In fact, many companies involve all employees in providing customer support.

Build relationships with your customers

Build relationships with your most loyal customers. A simple birthday card can be a powerful trigger to keep your customer feeling special.

As you build closer relationships it is easier to ask for a favor like writing a review or providing a case study that you can use for your business goals.

Be honest with your customers

People have sense for bullshit so make sure to avoid it by all costs. Being honest is much more appreciated and mistakes you will surely make can be forgiven if you are honest and transparent.

Admit your mistakes, don't overreact, and don't look for excuses. Leave excuses to your competitors.

Review your roadmap

Review your roadmap on a regular basis and don't be afraid to make changes whenever you have new information coming in. Nothing is written in stone.

Being lean in your business processes can help you to avoid costy and unnecessary work. Your customers are waiting for you to deliver things they need so why not focus on that instead of following some outdated plan you have defined before.

Have delighters in place

It is always nice to get something great you did not expect. A delighter in your product or service can be a powerful trigger when it comes to improving your NPS.

A good delighter may require you to look outside the box and know the next or previous step your customers have to take. Once you know that, offer solution that reduce their effort.

Communicate your mission and vision

Communicate your values with your customers to find common ground and show them what do you care about.

Common values contribute to building stronger bonds between your business and clients.

Work on your reputation

Public relationship is a must for any business out there and your is not an exception.

Your detractors will have a negative impact on your business reputation. Some competitors can harm your reputation on purpose. Your goal is to work on your reputation as your customers are more willing to stick (an appreciate) with the business that has good reputation.

Choose the right NPS software

You want to measure NPS hassle free and do it on a regular basis. Make sure to choose the software that is easy to use and helps you track the progress.

Think ahead and take potential growth into account - make sure that the NPS tool you choose is able to support your business at least year from now.

Do not limit yourself to NPS only

Net Promoter Score is only one metric you should measure as there are lot more.

Customer experience program consists of various methods and measurements you can adapt for your business, like lean feedback loop and 1-on-1 sessions.

Share NPS with your team

Make sure that your employees know your NPS and care about it.

In many companies, NPS is a part of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). All employees share the same goal to achieve certain NPS.

Measure eNPS

Strongly consider measure your Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) as it is a strong indicator of how your employees feel about their work.

Companies with high eNPS are more productive and efficient. Employees of such companies are more likely to take extra step for customer satisfaction.

Overall, eNPS show an internal health of your company and is something you should take seriously. Take actions to keep your eNPS high.

Know your strength

Knowing your strengths (and weaknesses) is crucial since it allows you to build your communication to highlight what you are good at and avoid pitfalls.

Your customers will build their expectations partly based on what you share with them.

Work on user experience (UX)

UX is an essential part of every product and service that has direct impact on NPS.

In fact, UX can be considered as everything that happens to customers once their start discovering and interacting with your products and services.

With that said, it is obvious that working on UX is probably the number one thing you should do to improve your NPS.

Know your market and competitors

You are operating in a certain market with it's own specifics, trends, processes, and competitors.

Knowing your market with competitors in and out can give you an advantage which results in better products and higher NPS.

Make sure to dedicate a portion of your time to investigate market trends and opportunities along with trying out competing products.

Measure NPS and pNPS

It is a good idea to measure both - NPS and pNPS. pNPS stands for Product Net Promoter Score that focuses on your product or service users while NPS is focused on decision-makers.

These scores can be different due to the nature of how certain people interact with your business. To be successful, you need to take care of both parties involved.

Conclusions

Improving your NPS is a tough job that requires a systematic approach and a plan to be executed.

The ideas shared in this article can help you get forward and introduce a customer-centric mindset for your organization.

At the same time, you should never limit yourself to the shortlist since different businesses and industries may have different aspects to be taken into consideration. It is important to run constant experiments to discover what can help you build better products.