6 NPS Survey Best Practices from Real Products

Are you familiar with NPS Surveys? If not, you've come to the right place. If yes, you, again, have come to the right place to learn to get more creative with these survey questions.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a survey that your product managers or your customer success team sends to customers to get a clear picture of customer satisfaction and loyalty level and the possibility of them recommending your service to others.

You can easily understand what a game-changer NPS data is once you look at the most successful businesses out there. Almost all of them are currently using NPS data -instead of running traditional surveys- to skyrocket their customer success by building solid marketing strategies and improving their product development & entire customer journey.

So, today I'll be unpacking this valuable feedback type that allows businesses to understand what their customers are thinking about their products - all the pros and cons, including negative feedback from customers. 

Let's get to it before further delay.

Here are 6 of the best NPS Survey practices from real products that will help you appreciate the importance of detailed customer feedback and understand its role in overall business success:

1. Slack - How to find out what makes promoting customers
2. Masterclass - Timing is crucial for NPS surveys
3. Groove - What to do with detractors
4. Baremetrics - The high scorers are potential WOM marketers
5. HubSpot - NPS results are better when combined with related metrics
6. Magoosh - NPS surveys can measure satisfaction, and much more

1- Slack - How to find what makes users become promoting customers

If you're unfamiliar with Slack, let me begin by saying that it's a messaging app for businesses and right now, it's a company that sets high records for its growth rate, gaining a $1 billion valuation in a year. 

Aren't you wondering how yet?

Let me tell you exactly how with two magic tools.

Word-of-mouth marketing alongside NPS surveys.

When Bill Macaitis, the CMO of Slack, realized that one of the most important marketing metrics that most SaaS marketers mostly neglect is the Net Promoter Score, things took a different turn. For the better, for sure.

The first step towards a customer-oriented business module that's wholly devoted to improvement is paying close attention to the likelihood of your customers spreading the word about you. 

And since NPS is something that needs constant improvement and change according to the current trends and competitors, Macaitis decided to use these surveys to enhance every form of interaction that potential and current customers have with Slack, obtaining a throughout point of view of UX that includes excellent customer service and sales rates. He says explicitly that new users signing up for Slack or becoming paying customers is not enough for him - he's simply more interested in the stage where they start to recommend the platform.

The mind behind this marketing success of Slack even stated that every CEO should use NPS Surveys and ask themselves the question, ''What are the top 3 reasons why people recommend and do not recommend your brand?'' After all, this mindset was the exact thing that brought him what he was aiming for.

It's not difficult to understand how much attention is given to NPS surveys by Slack representatives after all this information, and it's clear how this approach turned out to be a great way that leads to business growth and success for the team.

2- Masterclass - Mastering the timing of NPS surveys

If there is one thing that is vitally crucial when utilizing NPS Surveys, it is timing. 

Yes, collecting customer feedback can enable you to offer an excellent user experience and change how your business operates for the better.. but, nothing worth having ever comes easy.

The feedback process can turn out to be a lot harder than you might think; your customers are occupied, and they may not always feel like dropping a comment or taking the time to rate your service.

What to do then?

Well, first, make sure that you're showing the NPS survey at an optimal time and place during the customer experience. What does this mean?

It means when the action is timed right; chances are the customers will be more eager to let you know how they feel about your company instead of seeing your survey as an annoying interruption.

This is what makes MasterClass' use of NPS surveys special. The online learning platform introduces the users to NPS surveys once they complete one of their courses. The timing here is ideal since the class content will be recent and fresh in the user's memory, so the kind of feedback they'll provide will be accurate and display a more throughout reaction toward the class' usefulness.

MasterClass could have easily waited until the users started with the next class, but what would they get in return? A sloppy memory of this and that course and inadequate feedback as a result.

As seen above, the platform asks its learners to rate their level of enthusiasm to suggest the classes that they took to someone else and take action according to the answers - improve the quality of their courses or keep doing what they're doing right.

With this approach, MasterClass chooses the best time to start communication with the learners without invading their memories and interrupting their learning processes. 

3- Groove - Don't let go of the detractors

Another crucial question: What to do with poor scores and unhappy customers that went through a bad experience?

There will be times when customers leave a poor score on your NPS surveys. It's almost inevitable. However, the important thing is what you choose to do with these negative scores.

The wisest thing you can do is see the bright light of opportunity for your company to dig deeper and gain more knowledge about those negative scores that will provide you with actionable feedback.

Paying more attention to those customers with negative scores and starting dialogues, asking about what went wrong with their experience is the kind of attitude that will do your service, believe me, increase customer engagement and perfectly stand out from competitors.

This approach not only displays an obvious devotion and dedication to customer success, but it also helps your teams understand their audience better. They can start getting to know them and build relationships with them on a personal level and consequently have a better clue about their wants & needs from your business.

Now it's the point where I want to give Groove as an example.

Okay, Groove's practice of NPS Surveys looks like any other right now except that it consists of a space for the answers to open-ended questions such as the one above. So what's more remarkable about it?

Well, what's unique about it is what Groove chooses to with the results it receives. Let me show you.

After following up on a survey respondent with a low NPS score, Groove decides to ask for reasons and give satisfactory answers to its users.

This detailed feedback response by a representative from the customer support team sets a great example of a productive conversation with a customer. She clearly shows interest in the customer's pain point, provides a personalized and in-depth solution to eliminate the issue, and creates room for inspiration and a page to note down must-dos for you!

If NPS is all that great, how do I create one?

You have two options:

• If you build one in-house, you will have to deal with all the time you will lose during development and testing. You could possibly lose your data if anything goes wrong. You could risk losing a customer or two due to the bad surveying and feedback experience, because the incomplete NPS survey made your product look unprofessional and incomplete.
• Or you can get help from a secure 3rd party tool, store and filter your data in-app, and publish a survey in under 5 minutes.

"But there are too many tools to choose from"

Don't worry.

We made NPS and in-app surveying processes easier for product managers, success & support teams, and small-business founders.

UserGuiding now offers advanced (but easy-to-use) surveying capabilities.

With UserGuiding, you can create multiple NPS surveys, adjust the themes and segments for maximum response rate, and see the NPS score flying high.

Do you need how your users found the new feature?

Create a star rating survey to find out, and adjust. Then, roll out the NPS survey, and see all your users scoring 9 or 10.

Do you need to know what actions a user took before giving a score?

Dig into the user activity page easily with their user ID, and find out what patterns create loyal promoting customers.

Make the questions and the feedback system accessible everywhere, on their onboarding checklist, on the resource center, or directly on the screen.

UserGuiding's price starts from $69/month for all features and fast customer support.

4- Baremetrics - High scores should easily turn into free marketing

Before moving on, I can't help but find it worth mentioning what to do with good scores and loyal customers.

Just celebrate a happy customer and move on? Not quite.

When you get a great NPS score, you should be putting the effort to turn that high score and positive experience into an opportunity to boost your business as a customer-oriented company. 

Reach out to the customers who provide you with good scores just like you care about those with bad ones because they are equally crucial to your growth and the improvement of your service for the long term. Thank your users for taking the time to offer you feedback, and check if they would be willing to do more for you by providing you with a customer referral. 

Here's how Baremetrics manages to do this with great sincerity and friendliness. 

Let me explain what I love here. A customer service representative is taking the time to thank a user for leaving a high NPS score, then kindly asking the user to share their ideas about the service and spread the word about the company AND puts the effort to make the user's job easier by providing a pre-existing Tweet that can simply be copied and pasted without further bother. 

This is just a fantastic way to reach out to your satisfied customers and create more meaningful interaction with them and build a great relationship with them which they deserve and allow them to do you a favor in return. A total win-win, am I right?

5- HubSpot - NPS doesn't have to be a standalone data

When utilizing NPS surveys, the process of their integration into your current analytics system is, let's say, a crucial step along the way. However, this shouldn't make you think twice since it's very easy to integrate NPS, for it provides you with a numerical score and a thorough description of quality.

You can easily organize and categorize scores according to the descriptive content, then benefit from this information to identify particular patterns -or pain points, for that matter- in your customer behavior & journey.

Utilizing NPS surveys along with internal resources such as usage reports and statistics will enable your team to fully understand why customers use the tools or products they're using instead of others.

Here's how HubSpot Service Hub uses those internal resources by combining them with NPS and manages to see the whole picture and thus, build a brilliant point of view right there. 

With this approach, HubSpot can tell the number of potential customers who viewed and completed their surveys and the percentage of promoter and detractor responses. Consequently, it sets an excellent example as one of the best practices of NPS surveys I've ever seen. 

6- Magoosh - NPS scores indicate more than the satisfaction rate

Magoosh is an online test preparation company that does an excellent job getting students ready for important exams such as TOEFL and SATs. 

Over time, the company has come to an understanding where they realized one of the most impactful metrics that they track were NPS Surveys.

What did they achieve with them that made them so irreplaceable?

Well, thanks to these tools, they were not only able to tell if their students liked their customer service and user interface, but they were also capable of determining how well the products help the students prepare for the exams. So, basically, NPS practices were the fuel that made their goal achievable. 

Plus, since word-of-mouth referrals were something the company greatly relied on, they found that the NPS Surveys turned out to be the leading indicators of growth in this unique marketing channel.

Of course, there were times when Magoosh needed to go for optimal changes regarding their NPS, -they had slight issues with the exams' timing- but this is completely fine since that's what NPS Surveys are all about, they're here to solve minor issues and help your business provide better value.

You see the result, you act accordingly. You're happy with the results, you aim for more. You're unhappy with the results, you aim for the better. This way, you will realize that one of the best practices you can start today is utilizing NPS Surveys for your future growth. 

Final Word

NPS can be a powerful tool for measuring a variety of metrics. The Survey response rate, when you cross-reference it with the DAU and activation rates, can help you understand how your users tend to behave.

You can figure out whether your onboarding efforts are going in the correct direction.

And you can do all that without taking never-ending minutes from your users.

So, I hope you found these 6 great examples of companies that made use of NPS Surveys and benefitted from them to grow their business inspirational! That was it for me today; let's catch up another time.

Keep engaging and finding new ways to engage, and never stop testing!