Net Promoter Score (NPS) – GatherUp

What Happens If Net Promoter Score Jumps Online Reviews?

Aaron Weiche — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 03:53:54 +0000

I walked into the grocery store tonight and this blog post topic hit me. What if online reviews took a backseat to a business’s Net Promoter Score (NPS)? Pull up Google, Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor and there it is, NPS front and center for each business. Maybe it’s also on a sticker on the business’s door or window.

Why It Could Happen

Review saturation. Consumers continue to get more savvy on the amount, the detail and the type of information they consume in their buying decisions. While many businesses struggle just to get their first few online reviews on the web, certain businesses and markets are almost over saturated. Who is going to read 500 reviews on a popular Manhattan restaurant or hotel?
Still simple, but better. Zero to five stars doesn’t give you as much range either, where as NPS is a -100 to 100 score range. You can get more more detailed with how a business ranks in overall satisfaction with a wider range of scoring.
Companies can contribute. Businesses are often frustrated with how hard it can be to get happy customers to write an online review. Use of NPS could actually be supplied by the business itself to other sites. Companies would be likely to get behind something they can help shape, procure and report. (I’ll leave the problems/needs with this for another post.)

Challenge: The Adoption of Net Promoter Score

One big reason this won’t happen is the public at large being aware of Net Promoter Score. It seems that half of the businesses I talk with on a weekly basis haven’t heard of NPS, so the public at large isn’t likely to use it for judgement on who to do business with (unless someone makes them).

It’s the reason this blog post idea hit me. I walked into the grocery store and was confronted with the store’s promotional stand to make customers aware of the NuVal food scoring system. Simply put, NuVal gives each food item a number from 100 (best) to 1 (worst). It’s like that food’s credit score, for how healthy it is based on nutrition factors. A banana, that’s a 100 and a can of Coke is a 1.

Enough about food scores, this post is about business scores. The thread here is that the public needs to care or be told why they care about NPS in order for this data point to leap frog reviews. NuVal faces it for consumers shopping and NPS would as well.

Opportunity: Start Measuring and Improving Your Net Promoter Score

If this future comes true, you can be prepared. Is it likely? No. But capturing your NPS and putting it to good use is something you can start doing today. Your opportunities with NPS are:

Understand how your customers feel about your business, service or product.
Benchmark and strive to improve your NPS.
Rally your staff around a simple to understand success metric.
Gain a score you can be proud of, market it yourself.

Thanks for entertaining my grocery store trip for ice cream ideas. While the possibility of NPS trumping online reviews might be low, the opportunity that you can do some great things with NPS is very high.

The Simple Guide To Net Promoter Score

Aaron Weiche — Mon, 15 May 2017 14:06:20 +0000

If you’re a business owner, and someone asks you how your customers feel about your business, your response might be something like, “I think they feel good about it?” But if you don’t have any data to confirm this, then you’re stuck in the realm of speculation — and that doesn’t really help you.

With a metric like Net Promoter Score (NPS), calculated using the NPS score scale, you can gain a real sense of customer happiness and loyalty. Why does this matter? Because happy, loyal customers are usually eager to talk about your business to others. And since word-of-mouth referrals, whether offline or online, are a reliable source for new business, using NPS to your advantage is important.

Here’s a simple guide to help you understand NPS more clearly and learn how to calculate your Net Promoter Score on a 10-point scale.

What is Net Promoter Score?

NPS measures how your customers feel about your business and how likely they are to tell others about it. Said another way, it’s a great way to judge word-of-mouth referrals, which are important sources of new business since they come from trusted sources: friends and family vs. an advertising campaign.

In practice, NPS is a number — or score — you get from doing a survey of your customers. The score represents customer sentiment and is easy to understand and communicate. NPS can be used by any business, large or small, to better understand how customers feel and determine if improvements should be made.

NPS has been around for a while; Harvard Business Review first wrote about NPS almost 20 years ago. It remains such a good indicator of customer happiness and loyalty that it’s used by two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 today. And it’s why NPS is still the first question we ask in our feedback process.

What is the NPS Score Scale?

The NPS score scale is a 0-10 point scale with 10 being very likely to refer and 0 being not likely at all. To get your score, all you need to do is conduct a simple survey that asks your customers a single question: “How likely are you to refer a friend or colleague to our business?” The customers then answer the question by assigning a number from the scale, as shown below.

You then divide the answers into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. Before we discuss how to calculate your final score, here’s a look at each category and what they tell us about the customers that fall into them:

Promoters

Promoters rate you a 9 or 10 on the question. As the category name implies, promoters — also referred to as brand advocates — are the customers who champion your business by telling others to buy from you. They might even be so thrilled with your business that they’ll talk about it unprompted.

Real-life example: Your neighbor walks into the neighborhood pool party and out of nowhere starts telling everyone about the company that just painted his house. He raves about how they were affordable, meticulous, and so easy to deal with. While he’s talking, a few people look up the house-painting business on their phones and add the number to their contacts.

That’s a promoter: They give you tons of free marketing by enthusiastically sharing their great experiences and positive opinions.

Passives

Passives rate you a 7 or 8 on the question. These customers may have had a decent experience with your business, but nothing really wowed them. As such, they don’t have anything bad to say about you, but they won’t go out of their way to say anything good either.

Real-life example: You’re talking to a coworker one day and she tells you about the resort she just went to on vacation. When you ask how the resort was, she says, “It’s fine. Nothing great. Nothing bad. But I might try another place next time.”

Passives give you their business once or twice, but are basically indifferent to it. They’re ambivalent about returning and they see no real reason to recommend it to anyone.

Pro tip: Passives actually get left out of the NPS calculation, as we’ll show below. But that doesn’t mean this group isn’t important. You need to know they exist — and how many there are — so you can figure out how to move some of them up to being a promoter, since turning passives into promoters can help grow your business. But you also want to make sure that passives don’t dip down into the category we’ll look at next.

Detractors

Detractors rate you anywhere from 0 to 6. In the eyes of these customers, your business falls short — could be a few inches, could be a mile (especially if they rate you a 0 or 1). Detractors are the opposite of promoters. Instead of singing your praises, they tell their friends, family, neighbors, and anyone who’ll listen to avoid your business at all costs.

Real-life example: You meet up with your best friend for a beer and after some small talk he asks you if he’s told you about his current real estate agent. He then goes on a 10-minute rant about how the agent never answers his calls, doesn’t follow up until days later, and repeatedly messes up paperwork, causing additional delays and wasted time. He’s not going to use this agent ever again and won’t refer them to anyone else either. You realize you’re not the only one he’s going to rant to about this.

Detractors aren’t just disgruntled customers. They can actually take business from you.

How to calculate your NPS score: The NPS formula

Now that you understand the different customer categories, here’s how to calculate your score:

Add up all your promoters, passives, and detractors. Let’s say you have 68 promoters, 14 passives, and 23 detractors, for a total of 105 survey respondents.
Divide the number from each category by the total number of survey respondents to get a percentage. For example: 68 promoters divided by 105 total respondents = 64.7%, or you can round up to 65%. 23 detractors divided by 105 total respondents = 21.9%, or you can round up to 22%.
Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. So that’s 65% (promoters) minus 22% (detractors) = 43. (Remember: passives don’t get factored into the calculation.)
The final number you get is your score — in this case, 43.

If you don’t want to do the math yourself, you can use a free NPS calculator online.

Here’s an easy way to visualize the NPS formula:

And here’s a simplified example of 100 customers answering the Net Promoter Score question and how the results are calculated for that business:

What your NPS score means

Once you calculate your score, then you need to figure out what it’s telling you. At minimum, the NPS ratings scale and formula should help you understand how likely your business is to grow based on how likely your customers are to recommend it to others.

Here’s a basic breakdown of the score ranges, but keep in mind that these ranges can vary by industry. This is just a simple way of looking at it:

-100 to 0: Poor and needs improvement
1 to 30: Average
31 to 70: Good
71 to 100: Exceptional (nobody gets 100, so don’t feel you have to chase that)

Why NPS matters to your business

NPS is an important indicator of how your business is doing, giving you insights into:

Business growth
Customer churn
The customer experience
Customer loyalty
Effectiveness of your customer service
Influence of online reviews

If you run a small business, tracking and measuring NPS can make a big difference in your ability to retain customers and stay competitive. While many businesses may be willing to fly blind and never really know what their customers think, you don’t have to. NPS can give you an advantage over the competition by understanding your own customers that much better so you can make meaningful improvements that focus more on what your customers most like about your business.

If you run a multi-location or franchise business, NPS is a fantastic way to get location-specific insights in addition to brand-level insights. And if you run a digital agency, you can track NPS for each of your clients to help inform branding and marketing strategies.

Any business can benefit from the simple power of NPS to capture customer feedback, benchmark where your business is at, and communicate how your business is doing with your staff so you can constantly improve, grow, and succeed.
To learn how GatherUp’s customer feedback and NPS reporting capabilities can help your business, start a free trial.

How to Conduct and Use an NPS Survey

Holly Stanley — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 11:50:15 +0000

Ever wondered how you can get your busy customers to give you a quick piece of feedback about your business? If you struggle to get customers to fill in longer customer feedback surveys, a quick NPS survey could be the answer.

Customer experience continues to grow in importance in all business industries. In fact, it’s the top priority for 45.9% of businesses for the next 5 years. With good reason too, since 86% of buyers are more willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

Understanding how your customers feel about your business will help you give them a better experience and ultimately grow your business.

So let’s take a look at how to create effective NPS surveys, use them in different industries, and how to implement their insights.

What Is a Net Promoter Score Survey (NPS)?

Net Promoter Score or NPS is a customer satisfaction metric that businesses can use to measure customer loyalty. NPS surveys ask customers how likely they are on a scale of 0-10 to recommend a business’s product or service to others.

NPS helps businesses understand how loyal and enthusiastic their current customer base is.

Each score is allocated to one of three categories:

Promoters are those who respond with a rating of 9 or 10.
Passives are customers who respond with a rating of 7 or 8.
Detractors are those who respond with a rating of 0-6.

To calculate your NPS score, minus the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Passives don’t impact your NPS score.

Here’s a visual of the NPS formula:

Once you calculate your NPS score, you should compare it to some basic NPS score ranges to get an idea of how your business is doing:

-100 – 0: Poor and needs improvement
1 – 30: Average
31 – 70: Good
71 – 100: Excellent

Remember that it’s impossible to score a perfect 100 and that NPS scores vary widely by industry. We’ll be looking at industry benchmarks later in the article.

Put simply, Net Promoter Scores subtract the percentage of disappointed customers from the percentage of your enthusiastic satisfied customers.

To learn more about the metric and how to interpret it, check out our guide to NPS.

How Do You Create an NPS Survey?

Before you begin creating your NPS survey, it’s important to define your goal. Do you want to analyze customer experience throughout the purchase process? Do you want feedback about a new service?

Once you identify what you’re trying to achieve with your NPS survey, build an effective survey by following our step-by-step guide.

Step-by-Step Guide to Building an Effective NPS Survey

1. Include a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions

Since they ask customers to provide their answer as a rating on a scale, NPS survey questions are generally quantitative.

Here are some examples of quantitative NPS survey questions:

Now that you’ve visited our new branch of [business name] how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
On a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend [business name] to a friend or colleague?

Here’s an example of an NPS survey question from a taco restaurant followed by some more specific closed-ended questions:

Qualitative questions should follow quantitative questions as a way of gaining more insights into customers’ opinions.

Here are some examples of quantitative questions:

What’s one thing we could improve?
Which service do you like the most?

2. Ask specific questions about your products/services

Making your NPS survey questions as specific as possible will help you gain more valuable insights.

Try to focus your NPS survey on specific elements of your business. You may want to request specific feedback on new products or new franchise locations for example.

Tailoring your questions to these elements of your business will make it easier to uncover specific parts of your business that require improvements.

Check out our post on how to create an effective customer satisfaction survey.

3. Get feedback at all parts of the customer journey

NPS surveys are best conducted when you use them at different moments throughout the customer journey.

You could send an NPS survey like this one following a visit to your restaurant:

For instance, if you run a subscription business like a gym, you may want to check in with your customers a month after they sign up for membership to see if they’re satisfied with the service.

You might then schedule another NPS survey 6 months later to see if they’d be likely to recommend your gym to their friends and colleagues as well as ask if there are any specific improvements they’d like to see.

4. Use GatherUp’s detailed NPS reporting feature to collect insights

NPS surveys are most valuable when you gather data and can effectively analyze it using powerful reporting tools.

To properly implement any customer feedback and take effective action, you’ll need to use detailed reporting creatures and functions. That way, once you’ve analyzed all responses you can build an actionable plan to put customer feedback into practice.

With GatherUp, you can compare up to 6 elements simultaneously. For instance, if you own a restaurant franchise, you could compare NPS scores by franchise location and identify which locations are performing better than others.

You could also order your NPS results by top NPS scores, the number of responses, and the number of promoters.

It’s easy to save these elements as a reporting template that you could access at a later date.

For more details on GatherUp, NPS reporting, check out our guide to using reporting features.

NPS Survey Best Practices

NPS surveys are most effective when you follow a few best practices. Here are some ways to get the most out of your NPS surveys.

1. Train your employees to properly ask customers for feedback

To ensure brand consistency across the board, all team members should know how to ask customers for feedback and why their approach is important. Employees need to know the best moments to approach customers and understand how to ask them for feedback.

Learn how to approach customers and train team members to ask for feedback in our blog post, how to ask for customer feedback.

2. Collect enough data so that it’s viable

To make your survey statistically valid, you need to collect sufficient responses from your customers. For instance, if you only have 10 responses but have a customer base of 5,000 it could be more challenging to draw any significant conclusions about your business’s customer experience.

To obtain the maximum number of responses, send out your NPS surveys at the right moment, place, and frequency for your customer base. Try sending out your NPS surveys on different days of the week and at different times to see what gains the most responses.

3. Multi-location businesses should be consistent

To get the most accurate responses from a good cross-section of customers, make sure you’re consistent with how and where you’re asking for NPS survey responses. Think about where you’re placing the survey and ensure that it’s the same across your business.

For instance, if one of your city center grocery stores sends NPS surveys out to customers by email, your beachside location should do too.

Remember to consider all the different methods you can use to get your NPS surveys in front of your customers. You could try:

Paper questionnaires
Email following a delivery or product purchase
Text messages
Signage using TextBack

Take a look at this example of using TextBack with a flyer in a restaurant:

Depending on their preferences, you may find some methods work better than others. For instance, those waiting for doctor’s or lawyer’s appointments may be more receptive to paper questionnaires.

Text messages and signage may be better suited to restaurant businesses. We’ll look at more examples of how to best use NPS depending on your industry type later in this article.

How Often Should You Use NPS Surveys With Your Customers?

NPS surveys are a long-term measure of customer loyalty to your business so it’s best not to send out surveys too often. It’s important to strike the right balance between surveying your customers regularly and allowing them time to experience your business.

Create a Regular NPS Survey Schedule

Once you’ve sent out your first NPS survey, it’s important to send out follow-up surveys so you can monitor changes in your NPS scores over time.

After sending an initial NPS survey like this one, you could follow up 6 months later to track any changes in responses:

Send follow-up NPS surveys controlling for events like new location openings and new service launches which can create bias in your score.

NPS measures long-term customer loyalty, so it’s best to pick one or two dates every year to gather NPS scores.

Businesses with larger customer bases could send out NPS surveys monthly, but make sure you don’t ask the same customer base for their rating more than every 6 months.

Don’t Survey More Than You Can Respond

A great general guide to how often you should survey your customers is only as often as you’re able to reply to your customers, process feedback, and build an action plan to make improvements.

Frequent NPS surveys are of no use if you don’t have enough time to effectively analyze customer responses, understand what’s going on with your business’s customer experience, and create an improvement plan.

Consider the Buyer’s Journey

While some businesses may opt to schedule NPS surveys throughout the year, the optimum send-out moment will depend on your business model and industry.

If you plan to send out an NPS survey to your customers every 6 months, consider how it will look at each stage of the buyer’s journey, as it may not make sense for all business models.

For example, if you own a hotel, you could consider sending out an NPS survey following a reservation to check customer satisfaction with the booking process. Then within 48 hours of a guest’s stay, you could send another NPS survey monitoring satisfaction with the overall stay.

We’ll review more industry examples and how to best use NPS later in the article.

How Do You Take the Insights of an NPS Survey and Implement Them in Your Business?

Now you’ve gone to the effort of gathering and analyzing your NPS survey data, it’s time to implement the customer feedback into your business and build an improvement plan.

Compare Your NPS Score to the Industry Average

NPS is most helpful when compared to other businesses in your industry.

Different industry types see naturally higher or lower NPS results, based on factors outside your business’s direct control.

For instance, fast-food franchises have an average NPS score of 31 according to Delighted. Initially, if your fast food restaurant scored 35, you may think it’s a low score. But when compared to the industry average, you’ll see that it’s a few points higher.

The same goes for auto insurance businesses. According to NICE Satmetrix, businesses in auto insurance have an average score of 39 which could be considered low in other industries.

Knowing the industry average can help you set realistic customer satisfaction goals for your business.

If your score is low compared to your competitors and the rest of the industry, you know that you have work to do. If your NPS score is on the higher end of the scale, you can direct resources to ensure your business continues to perform well.

There’s Always Room For Improvement

A high NPS score isn’t a reason to stop improving your customer experience.

While a perfect NPS score of 100 may be virtually impossible, even if your business has a higher NPS score than the industry average, there’s always room to improve your customer experience.

If you own a multi-location business, learn from your top-performing locations. If you have several locations, you’ll probably notice some outliers that have much higher scores than others.

Identify what they’re doing differently – perhaps they put a lot of emphasis on efficient and friendly customer service.

Go Beyond Numbers for Deeper Insights

While NPS scores are great for giving you an indication of how loyal and enthusiastic customers feel, survey scores are most useful when they’re combined with follow-up questions.

While it’s always a good idea to include a few qualitative questions like ‘what is the main reason for your score?’ or ‘what did we do well, you should also follow-up with respondents who leave either exceptionally high or low NPS scores.

Both detractors and promoters will most likely have valuable insights to share about your business.

Multi-Location Businesses Should Create an NPS Floor

If you have a franchise business, implement an NPS floor that acts as a minimum standard for your multiple locations. An NPS floor would essentially indicate that a location is dropping below your business’s required standards. If a location falls below that NPS floor, put your resources and efforts into resolving the problem before it escalates.

These resources could include:

Employee training sessions
Monthly checks on the location
Accessible guides that outline brand policies

Learn more about improving customer experience with feedback in our blog post on reputation management for franchises.

Pay Close Attention to the Promoters of Your Business

Sometimes it makes sense to pay more attention to the feedback of your promoters. This enables you to hone in on the elements of your business that keep your most valuable customers returning.

By focusing on your most enthusiastic customers, you’re also concentrating on another major area for potential growth, loyal customers who not only come back but who recommend your business to their friends.

Simply put, you should keep doing more of what encourages your promoters to choose your brand.

How to Use NPS Depending on Your Industry Type

The best moment to send an NPS survey depends on your industry type, business model, and customers. Remember that you can send NPS surveys at different times during the customer journey.

If you have larger customer segments, you may choose to send out an NPS survey once a month to different segments. Remember not to overdo it though and avoid asking customers for feedback more than once every 6 months.

Here are some industry examples of how and when to use NPS surveys based on your industry:

Real Estate – For buyers, following the completion of a deal or once a search is called off is the best moment to send an NPS survey. Similarly, buyers should receive an NPS request following a successful sale or when the process is halted.

Law Firms – Lawyers could ask regular clients to complete NPS surveys regularly throughout the year (every 6 months). You could also ask clients to fill out a quick NPS survey when they sign up for your services.

Doctors and Dentists – Patients may have time to kill while they’re in waiting rooms and might be receptive to filling in paper NPS surveys that ask about the booking process and waiting room. You also should check in with patients following an appointment to evaluate if they’d recommend your business to friends and colleagues. If you have regular patients, you could send out a yearly or twice yearly NPS survey. If your doctor’s or dentist’s office is part of a larger multi-location business, an allocated team member in charge of customer satisfaction should compare NPS scores between different locations.

Home Services (Plumbers, HVAC, landscapers) – Since customers tend to use home service businesses more randomly (eg. when their shower drain blocks or their boiler breaks) it’s best to send out an NPS survey within 48 hours of completed service to monitor customer satisfaction with the service.

Salons – Salons that deal with more walk-in customers could send out a quick NPS survey following treatment to see if clients would recommend the service to friends and if they’re likely to return. For established salons that have a more long-term customer base, a once or twice yearly NPS survey would provide useful insights into overall satisfaction.

Insurance Agencies – Brokers should send NPS surveys once a client has made a claim. Results from these NPS surveys will provide you with an insight into if your clients’ insurance needs are being met.

Restaurants – Customers are most likely to be most receptive to an NPS survey right after a meal in your restaurant. You could experiment with customer segmentation to work out who are your most loyal repeat customers and send them an NPS survey once or twice a year too.

Source

Final Thoughts

Conducting regular NPS surveys will help you evaluate how your business is doing when it comes to customer experience. Knowing who your promoters and detractors are will help you better direct your resources to the right places and improve your business.

Although NPS is a vital benchmark for understanding customer satisfaction, its real value lies in the follow-up and qualitative questions that you can use to uncover more specific details about your business’s offering. Ultimately, customer satisfaction and a solid group of promoters who talk about your business enthusiastically are key to maintaining loyal customers and gaining new ones.

Related reading:

How to Conduct 2 Types of Surveys Critical to Customer Loyalty

GatherUp — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 16:14:40 +0000

A big part of running a successful business is knowing what your customers think about it. Are they mostly satisfied, or are they often frustrated? Are they enthusiastic about your business, or indifferent? Are they likely to refer your business to others, or warn people away?

To truly know what your customers are experiencing when they interact with your business, it’s critical to gather customer feedback. Surveys in particular can give you the information you need to not only identify and fix problems but to also expand on what’s working well — all which can help increase customer loyalty and help you avoid losing out to the competition. After all, over half (59%) of customers will walk away after several bad experiences, and 17% will walk after just one.

There are two types of customer surveys you can use to get a comprehensive picture of the customer experience. We’ll take a closer look at both types as well as how to design and conduct them effectively to get higher completion rates and ensure more accurate answers.

1. Customer satisfaction survey

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys dive into how satisfied or unsatisfied your customers are with a product or service you sell, or an interaction they’ve had with your team. CSAT surveys can be formatted in a variety of ways — from a single question to a multi-question survey — but all are intended to illuminate the sentiment or emotion at the center of the customer’s experience.

Why does emotion matter? Recent research by Gallup shows that 70% of customer decisions to stay loyal to a brand are based on emotional factors, and only 30% on rational factors.

You can use a CSAT survey when you want to uncover the potential weaknesses in your brand or business, or figure out what your strengths are so you can capitalize and expand on them. CSAT surveys help you pinpoint opportunities for change and improvement so that problems don’t turn into a ripple effect of bad reviews, fleeing customers, and lost revenue.

How to conduct a CSAT survey

To conduct a CSAT survey effectively:

Come up with a goal for the survey: Before you get started, decide what you want to get out of the survey. That way you can avoid asking every question possible and risk over-complicating it — for yourself and your customers. For example, you could focus the survey just on a new service offering or how well your customer service team is performing (or not).
Keep it simple and brief: When was the last time you voluntarily filled out a 30-question survey that involved a bunch of reading and deciphering? The truth is, most people won’t even bother. To respect your customers’ valuable time and help ensure they’ll respond to your survey, keep it brief — no more than four to five questions is ideal — and use simple, easy-to-understand language.
Include open- and closed-ended questions: Open-ended questions invite customers to share their opinion about something without you guiding their response. While closed-ended questions are easy to compile into data — such as 40% of your customers said yes and 60% said no. Asking both types of questions in your survey will give you a well-rounded view into customer perspectives and experiences.
Choose the right time to survey: A good guideline is if you have quick or frequent interactions with customers — e.g., they make a purchase at the counter and leave, or they call and book an appointment — then send the survey right after the experience or within a day or two so it’s fresh in the customer’s mind. If you have less frequent or more involved interactions with customers — e.g., they come in for an hour-plus meeting or appointment once a year — then send a survey every six months or so that focuses on their overall satisfaction with your business.
Follow up as needed: Survey answers can reveal a lot on their own, but you may want to dive deeper into certain aspects of the feedback. At the end of the CSAT survey, ask if the customer is open to providing additional feedback. Not everyone will be open to it, but for those who are, you can get even richer insights from them since they’re likely to be genuinely invested in your business and want to see it improve or succeed.

2. Net Promoter Score survey

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys are quick temperature checks that help you understand how likely — or unlikely — a customer is to recommend your overall business, product, or service to others.

NPS surveys typically use a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being “not likely” and 10 being “very likely.” Customers that give scores in the 9-10 range are “promoters,” customers that give scores in the 7-8 range are “passives,” and customers that give scores in the 0-6 range are “detractors.” Promoters enthusiastically talk about your business while detractors speak negatively about it, and passives tend to behave indifferently toward it.

To calculate your NPS score, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. NPS scores can be understood like this:

-100-0 = Poor
1-30 = Average
31-70 = Good
71-100 = Excellent

You can use an NPS survey when you want to measure customer loyalty and enthusiasm. If your customers love your business, you’ll see it in the NPS score. If they don’t, you can look at it as a catalyst to make necessary business improvements and re-engage with passives and detractors.

How to conduct an NPS survey

To conduct an NPS survey effectively:

Make your question quantitative: Since you’re asking customers to give an answer on a scale of 0-10, the question you ask needs to be worded so that it can be rated numerically, which means wording it such as “How likely are you…” or “On a scale of 0-10…” Though not calculated into the NPS score, you can also follow up with open-ended, qualitative questions to get more insight. For example, ask why they gave you that score.
Get specific: Understanding how customers view your overall business is helpful, but to get even more value out of the NPS survey, try being as specific as possible. You could ask something like: How likely are you to book [insert service] again? If you have a multi-location business, you can also get specific with branches and locations, such as: How likely are you to recommend our new branch at [insert location] to a friend?
Use NPS surveys throughout the customer journey: Since NPS surveys function as a great customer check-in, you can inject them at different points in the customer journey. For example, you can survey customers right after making a purchase to understand how satisfied they were with the experience. Then, a few months later, you can check in again to find out how likely they are to recommend your business to others.
Collect enough data: You want enough data to be able to draw significant conclusions. It’s harder to understand how customers really rate your business if you only get a handful of responses — even though your customer base may be in the hundreds or thousands. To maximize participation, send your survey on different days of the week and at different times until you can gather enough data. This will also help you set a benchmark for what works and how to get the most responses going forward.
Don’t survey too often: Though you want enough responses to get accurate insights, there’s a delicate balance between not surveying enough and surveying too often. Remember, you want to give your customers time to form an opinion about your business, product, or service. After sending an initial NPS survey, wait several months to send the next one, and ensure you’re controlling for events like new branch openings and new product or service launches to avoid a biased score. Sending NPS surveys frequently enough can help you measure long-term customer loyalty.

How GatherUp helps you gather and analyze customer feedback

In an overly digital world where it’s easy to lose sight of people, GatherUp makes it possible for you to listen to, understand, and engage customers through the power of customer feedback. Customer surveys remain a viable way to understand how customers feel about your business so you can identify and implement the improvements that will win you customers for life — and keep your competitors at bay.

But surveys are ultimately meaningless without a good way to analyze the responses.

GatherUp’s comprehensive customer feedback and review management platform allows you to conduct CSAT and NPS surveys and gather, analyze, and report on the data — all in one place. You get powerful insights you need to fully understand the customer experience, come up with a road map for improving customer loyalty, and better promote the strengths of your business to help earn new customers.

How does it work?

You can listen to customers by gathering reviews, CSAT and NPS scores, and other survey responses, then analyze that feedback for actionable insights. You can act on those insights through review replies, widgets, social, email, SMS, and webchat to attract, engage, and retain customers – at scale, and all within one platform.

With GatherUp, you can turn the customer voice into customer loyalty and grow your business.

To learn more, schedule a demo.

The Importance of Reviews And Feedback For A New Business

Aaron Weiche — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 13:57:52 +0000

For the first time, you open the doors to your first customers. After all of the dreaming, planning, preparation and hundreds of other tasks big and small, your small business is now open for business. What took months or maybe even years of work to get to this point is about to take flight.

But what can you do to make sure your first days, weeks and months are the start you need? You need customer feedback and online reviews right from the start.

The Power Of Moving Past Zero

When you start your new business almost all will have zero customers and of course zero online reviews. You need to work from minute one of being open to change that.

Mainstream Boutique is a new retail store that opened in Edina, MN recently and has this challenge. While the business is part of a franchise of 40 locations, this newly opened location has no reviews online and no way to capture how their first customers felt about their shopping experience.

For a new business, establishing a way to listen to what customers like and don’t like is incredibly important. To gain new customers, having the first reviews to prove your are worthy of their visit and money with Federated Financial management can make all the difference in your start.

Customer Feedback First

While our company vision believes that customer feedback is more powerful than any other form of consumer voice, it’s magnified 100x in your first weeks and months of business. Finding out what your early customers think is massively important. It’s actually everything.

You don’t have history to go on, it might even be your first voyage on running your own business and you need to know how your customer’s experience was with you. Did they love the selections? Did they feel the service was amazing? Was the wait time to pay too long? You have to know.

Understanding where you are falling short is a must. These are areas that you can improve instantly in a new business to make sure your customers become repeat customers, who tell their friends and neighbors they need to buy from you.

Specifically in our product, our feedback process will help you capture the following:

Net Promoter Score – Find out how likely your early customers are to tell others to buy from you. This “word of mouth index” will be your best advertising to help you grow.
Survey questions – Our lightweight surveys will help you capture the customer’s rating in areas like value, experience, customer service and more.
Open text customer feedback – By asking the customer to tell you about their experience you can learn a ton on what’s right, just average and what’s wrong so you can spring into action.

On top of the business benefits of capturing all of this valuable data and insight, you can also take your customer feedback and display it as reviews on your own website to help your SEO efforts on Google and convert web visitors into store visitors.

Start The Flywheel Of Great Reviews

With zero reviews on important sites like Google and Facebook, you are forcing consumers to take the first chance on you. They might not have any idea you just opened.

Getting some of your first customers to write glowing reviews about your new business will bring in your next round of customers. 4-star and 5-star reviews will solidify your business for consumers finding you in the search results or those looking to validate the good things they might have heard about your business.

A new brewery located near me just opened a couple weeks ago. They have already jumped out to a handful of good Google reviews and a couple dozen Facebook reviews. This will only help bring people in the door as they research what other customers think before stopping in themselves.

Starting off with great online reviews shows why it’s even more important to be asking for feedback right away. Then you can find out what needs fixing or improvement ASAP and avoid some of your first reviews being 1-star or 2-star reviews.

Launch Your New Business AND Launch Your Feedback Process Day One

Now you can see the importance of customer feedback and an online review generation plan right from the get go. That first customer, that helps you earn your first dollar, can actually help you earn hundreds or thousands more faster by giving you feedback and a Google review.

How to win at customer experience by communicating in the customer’s channel of choice

Holly Stanley — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 21:34:00 +0000

Research shows 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Providing an excellent customer experience means meeting and surpassing customers’ expectations of your business. And to offer a top customer experience you need to communicate with customers in their channel of choice.

In today’s ultra-competitive local business landscape, customers have a choice of who they do business with.

Customers expect quick responses, easy transitions between communication platforms, and the choice of how they communicate.

So how do you provide a top customer experience and make life easy for your customers? Offer them a choice of communication channels.

Why are communication channel options important to businesses?

When customers get in touch with your business it’s likely because they need to. Most customers don’t get in touch with businesses because they want to. It’s usually because they’re experiencing some kind of issue, have a question, or need assistance.

To keep customers happy, you need to ensure you’re offering enough support and solving problems quickly.

Strong communication with a customer from the outset impacts the customer experience. If customers find it easy to communicate with your business they’ll have a better experience and be more likely to return to your business.

And as we’ve said before retaining existing customers is always more cost-effective than attracting new ones –– it costs 5 times as much to attract a new customer than to keep a new one.

The key is to make life easy for customers and give them multiple communication channels to choose from. Customers need to feel they can easily communicate with your business whenever they need to.

Keep in mind that each customer has unique communication needs and preferences so it’s important to give them options. Ensure your communication channels are accessible to all customer types.

Aim for omnichannel communication –– where you cover all communication bases. This means personalized customer-focused communication and broader messaging that reaches a larger group of customers.

You’ll also find that each communication channel has a different set of benefits and works best in certain situations.

4 different communication channels for communicating with customers

Offer your customers as many different communication channels as you can manage effectively. That way, your customers will be able to contact you in the way that suits them best.

Using multiple communication channels also helps you see how customers interact with your business. It’ll also help lower the pressure on different team members responsible for each channel.

To help you decide which customer channels are best for your business, here are 4 different options along with their benefits, downsides, and best customer segments.

1. Social media

Social media is a popular way for people to discover new brands, engage with their content, and later ask questions. Younger generations like millennials and Gen Z customers are more likely to prefer communicating with businesses on social media. Try to have a presence on a few popular social media channels. Depending on your business you might want to create profiles on:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

The key is to concentrate on a few social media platforms and not spread yourself too thin. Choose the platforms that make sense for your business and where your target audience is most likely to spend time. For example, Facebook and Instagram might be great communication channels for local businesses like grocery stores, gyms, and dog groomers.

As well as a Facebook Page, a lawyer might also want to use LinkedIn to communicate with clients. But personal trainers or real estate agents might find Instagram or Facebook Pages best for communicating with customers.

Social media pages have the additional benefit of being marketing tools –– you can use them to attract new customers as well as engage with current ones. You can also use your social media profiles to broadcast messages to larger customer bases about things like your store opening hours or new product offerings.

The downside of social media pages is that it can be hard to keep track of all the DMs, comments, and tags, so you might end up forgetting to reply to customers on time.

2. Face to Face

Brick and mortar businesses need to provide top-quality in-person customer service. Speaking to your customers in person is the best way to give them personalized support.

If customers feel comfortable in your business’s environment, you’ll help build feelings of trust and loyalty. When customers feel they can trust your business, they’ll be more likely to continue buying your products and services.

As well as in-person support, you can offer face-to-face help over video calls. This is great for customers who may live further away from your brick-and-mortar stores or offices.

Face-to-face customer support allows you to treat customers as individuals and give them an ultra-tailored experience. But the limitation is that customers short on time may find face-to-face customer support inconvenient.

Although best for building strong customer relationships, face-to-face communication isn’t the most efficient communication channel for team members. Since it’s more time-consuming and requires a team member’s physical presence, it’s harder to resolve multiple customer issues or questions at the same time.

3. Phone

Phone-based communication is one of the more traditional choices of communication channels. Customers generally like the convenience and familiarity of phone customer service.

While it’s not as personalized as face-to-face communication, using the phone as a communication channel still allows you to tailor your communication to each customer. Engage with your customers’ individual needs and ensure you take the time to fully understand their unique requirements.

To personalize your phone-based customer interactions, follow these tips:

You’ll find that older generations (55+) are most comfortable using phone communication channels and are likely to prefer speaking over the phone as opposed to using a live chat or social media.

The main limitation is that customers may have to wait in a queue before speaking to a team member. This can be frustrating for time-pressed customers who need a quick solution.

4. Email

Email is a top marketing tool and communication channel you can use to engage with customers.

It’s a good option for when you need to broadcast business information across multiple customer segments. It’s one of the best communication channels for when an instant reply isn’t necessary. When your customers require a quick response, email might not be the best communication channel.

Many businesses use email addresses as customer identifiers, especially when they’re using CRM software. Even if you don’t plan on using email as a primary communication channel, it’s still worth collecting customer email addresses for marketing and identification purposes.

3 ways of using GatherUp to better communicate with customers

Effective customer communication also means using the right tools to help you better understand customers and their needs. When you understand customer needs, you’ll find it easier to fine-tune your communication and satisfy more customers.

1. Customer Activity Dashboard

Knowing how your customers feel about your business’s customer experience and communication channels will help you give customers more of what they want and help improve your offering.

The Customer Activity Dashboard pulls together all your 1st and 3rd party reviews in one screen to give you real-time insight into your customers’ opinions. By viewing all of this customer feedback data in one place you can glance at which communication channels customers prefer.

You may see that customers repeatedly mention positive or negative elements of your business’s communication in their reviews and feedback. For example, you might see customers consistently praise your in-store team members but get frustrated by your slow email response times.

Alternatively, you might find that instead of phoning, customers would like to have the option of making dinner reservations through social media channels.

You can also view results from any NPS surveys you run. For example, you may choose to run an NPS survey to determine whether customers are satisfied with solving problems in-store or on the phone.

Once you have the results from the NPS survey, you can quickly check on your customer activity dashboard the percentage of detractors and promoters. You could then follow up with the detractors with personalized emails to find out which elements of the communication channel they are unhappy with and how they would like to see improvements.

2. Inbox for better managing customer feedback

Taking customer feedback seriously and being prepared to make proactive changes across your business is key for keeping customer satisfaction levels high. Every piece of feedback you receive from a customer –– positive or negative –– represents a key opportunity for improvement.

By using the GatherUp feature, Inbox, you can help your employees better communicate and connect with customers. Instead of sporadically remembering to reply to reviews and implement feedback, Inbox takes customer feedback and immediately routes it to relevant employees.

Instead of having to manually relay reviews back to the support team to reply to, you can use ticketing and automated smart routing to prioritize and send customer feedback to the right team members.

You can also create templates to help your employees reply to customers in different scenarios. That way you can help team members reply on a consistent basis in your brand’s voice.

By streamlining your feedback replies and making it easier for team members to reply efficiently and consistently, you’ll improve how customers feel about leaving feedback with your business.

3. Build a customer satisfaction survey

Regularly surveying your customers is vital for understanding how they feel about your business’s chosen communication channels. You can ask customers to tell you how they feel about how easy it is to contact your business with problems or questions as well as how easy it is to solve them.

Make it a priority to survey different customer segments quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. For example, you could survey all customers in an extensive annual customer satisfaction survey. You could also survey new customers a month after doing business with you.

Making time for regular surveys will help you understand how customers feel about their regular interactions with your brand and employees. Once you’ve collected customer feedback, the key is to create an actionable plan to improve customer interactions.

Using GatherUp, you can build visually pleasing and on-brand CSAT surveys that help you dive into customer sentiment. We recommend using a mix of open and closed questions and keeping to a survey length of around 5 questions to improve completion rates.

Final thoughts: Communicate with customers in their channel of choice

Communicating with customers through their chosen communication channel is key for improving your business’s customer experience and building a solid base of satisfied customers.

Take time to understand your customers’ needs and preferences when it comes to communicating with your business. Try a few different channels and see what sticks with certain customer segments and team members.

Monitor your customers’ responses to your channels and make sure to take their feedback on board to make improvements to how you communicate.

Ready to start communicating to your customers in their language? Enjoy a free 14-day trial of GatherUp and see how you can improve your customer communication.

Related reading:

Reviews Signal The Change Needed

Aaron Weiche — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 12:23:43 +0000

You have to know what’s wrong to fix it. That sounds simple enough but during COVID-19 with change and adaptation almost daily it can be difficult to find the signal through all of the noise. Here is another use case on how we are helping businesses during COVID-19 learn, adapt, and succeed.

We recently came across a client of GatherUp who leveraged our feature set to discover they had an issue with the consistency of their staff using masks, gloves, and social distancing contrary to their customer’s expectations. It was resulting in low review ratings, disappointment and most importantly customers feeling unsafe.

The business where this took place is a ~100 location fast-casual restaurant franchise. We’ve opted not to name them but they did share some of their insight and comments about what took place to help other businesses understand how they discovered and solved their issues using GatherUp.

Net Promoter Score – The Canary In The Coal Mine

The first tip-off came when their Net Promoter Score (NPS) went down 11 points during the start of COVID-19. This change, in a usually steady NPS rating, caused the team to start looking into the “why.”

“We noticed a dip in our NPS score by a few points during COVID and we wanted to get to the bottom of the issue. We had seen a lot of reviews coming in mentioning staff members not wearing masks (the local mandate was not requiring masks at this point) and we had our suspicions that these reviews were dragging us down,” shared their team.

Tracking And Reporting On Your Review Content

After forming a quick hypothesis that masks and other Coronavirus hygiene guidelines might be an issue the team took action to use other GatherUp features to dig deeper and analyze their reviews for what was happening.

Step one was to create an Auto-tag for the keywords of masks and gloves to isolate these terms for tracking and analysis. The Auto-tag feature allowed them to create a list of keywords that GatherUp automatically detected and then tagged those reviews that matched the criteria so that they could track their occurrences.

Step two was to use the Insights Report powered by IBM Watson to understand the impact this was having on the customer experience.

The team stated “After setting up a ‘Mask’ tag we used the Insights Report on GatherUp to see where those reviews fell on the spectrum when compared to other KPI tags. Turns out, our “Mask” tag fell right next to our “Bad Service” tag (tracking the keywords: angry, bad, bad service, mad, rude, terrible, unhappy) – not good! This was one of the deciding factors in issuing a policy for all stores nationwide to wear masks.”

Below is the Impact Chart from their GatherUp Insights Report outlining that reviews mentioning “masks” or “gloves” showed up in 234 reviews and those reviews averaged a 3.0 rating. As they shared, only the tag “Bad service” has a lower average with a 2.8 rating in 357 reviews. Both of these are well below the brand’s average review rating of 4.6, dragging down their reputation.

We also wanted to share some insight into how this client acquired this extremely valuable customer experience data.

182 of the 234 reviews receiving the “mask” tag were 1st-party reviews. Just 52 were 3rd-party reviews on Google, Facebook, and Yelp. This accentuates a point we often raise that 1st-party reviews are the real key to listening to your customers. Without the volume of 1st-party reviews and NPS as the first signal, this business’s learning would have been much slower or they possibly might not even been aware that this was a big issue. You can’t risk that.

For the well run business, reviews are the end point of the customer path deriving from multiple entry points that are both proactive and passive. Leading the way as an entry point was their website that uses our feedback locator. Customers, in their frustration, felt the need to seek out how to talk to the business directly to be heard. Without that channel, they might have gone straight to Google or Facebook to share their concerns and causing increased damage to their online reputation.

These three points are key and core:

Listening to your customers is more important than where they post it.
Make talking to your business easy. Proactively ask for feedback and make it simple for customers to find how they can talk to you.
Read #1 and #2 again until you fully accomplish this.

Taking Action Thanks To Data

This quick case study outlines the importance to have the right tools to turn hunches into data and then into action. By leveraging Net Promoter Score, review monitoring, auto-tagging, and reporting this business was able to quickly identify and take action to correct an issue.

These quick cycles of listen, learn and adapt have been key for so many GatherUp clients during the pandemic.

“During COVID we had to react quickly to what was happening in the restaurant world. How can we make the experience better for guests who are still coming in and supporting us? Is there something holding them back from visiting that we were missing? The ability to tag and filter all reviews from different platforms and get a quick snapshot of where guest sentiment is trending is very valuable” shared their team.

As the client so aptly noted: “Information is power, and in a few minutes you can see what your guests are saying about you and use that feedback to generate positive change.” .

We agree and love seeing our platform help turn losses into wins.

How Customers Can Build & Defend Your Online Reputation

Aaron Weiche — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 16:39:07 +0000

Here is something you probably see daily online. An upset customer takes to the Internet to voice their disappointment with a business. More and more it’s not just on review sites, it’s in your Twitter stream or your Facebook feed.

I came across this post on my local community group page this week, the group has about 6,000 members.

To give you a little background, Little Caesars in my city used to be owned be another group who didn’t have a good reputation, in fact they had a horrible one. Not just with customers and reviews, but even with employees thanks to payroll issues. Then about 3 months ago new owners came in, owned the customer service and employee issues, addressed them and turned many frustrated customers into fans. Thus Matt above stating the “New” Little Caesars.

These are the types of reviews the business was getting under the past ownership.

The Angry Mob

The majority of the time when a post like Matt’s above goes up, I see the angry mob go into action. The majority of comments that follow are consumers with their own stories of disappointment with that business that decide to pile on with the angry mob mentality.

I’ve watched as a few loyal customers, friends of the business or even the staff/owners try to jump in and help only to have the mob drown them out. The quick take-away is if you have a lot more haters than fans, it’s hard to stop the angry mob.

Pro Tip: You should know how many more fans (promoters) you have than haters (detractors). One more reason to use Net Promoter Score with your customer feedback strategy.

Happy Customers To The Rescue

In this case, the angry mob didn’t win. In fact, the mob turned out to be 2 or 3 people at most with over 50 comments as I write this defending the business, it’s owners and actually forming an angry mob on Matt who posted the complaint (I don’t know if that’s right either).

These customers knew the place was in bad shape, supported the new owners, gave them a chance and have been nothing but pleased with the turn-around of this Little Caesars location. As you’ll see in the comments from the Facebook post below, customers alerted the owners (Scot & Paul) to the comment, defended them, cited their work to improve it and let Matt know his issues were small, ridiculous and not the normal.

In the first set of comments above, here is the biggest win, created by the owners themselves as their customers know they care.

“What I l love and what I have observed with the new owners is that they genuinely care about customer feedback.” – Emily

Winning, big time. Do your customers think this? Would they openly tell others about your dedication to customer feedback?

The Owners Step In & Own It

You’ll notice above that the very first commenter tagged the owners Scot and Paul to alert them to this complaint. Before they could respond, a dozen customers already had, letting that customer know he was wrong about the business, too critical of them and that he should communicate to the business, not Facebook.

But these guys get it. They stepped in and addressed Matt’s concerns without belittling him, without saying he was wrong or that their customer comments are proof it didn’t happen. They owned it.

They truly didn’t have to own this one, their customers were there in droves, but they did. Not just one of them but both of them.

The entire thread is an amazing combination of common sense, customer loyalty, fantastic business owners and even entertainment. I wanted to write about this because of the things I pointed out above and to give other businesses an example of how caring for your customers can pay off in many ways.

Building & Defending Your Online Reputation

Building your online reputation from nothing is a tough job, even tougher is when you take over a bad one and need to turn the tides. As outlined above, the guys that own my local Little Caesars are doing just that. Here are the main things they have done to make that happen that you can do too.

1- Stepped in and acknowledged there was a problem and they would be dedicated to fixing it. They did this on Facebook multiple times when they took over. They asked customers for another chance and many gave them one.

2- They made it happen. You can’t fake great service and they did what they said they would do and their customers took notice. Here are the types of Google reviews they have received more recently.

3- They turned the haters into fans. The kind of fans that will defend them and their reputation.

4- They build a reputation of caring about feedback, enough so that their customers notice.

5- They own problems, even when others feel it isn’t even a problem they own it. They respond, are rational, with care, with an apology and a dedication to make it right.

If you want to make giving customer feedback to your business easier, if you want to know how many more fans you have than haters or you need help marketing your happy customers experiences across the web, we’d love to help.

Net Promoter Score – Your Word of Mouth Index

Mike Blumenthal — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 15:56:59 +0000

Most businesses track their online reviews religiously yet they have no metric to assess an even more important marketing tool; word of mouth. Despite its significance, many small businesses either weren’t aware or found it too difficult to measure this important growth metric.

It’s Not Dificult, Enter Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS), familiar to most Fortune 500 companies, is just such a measure and it is increasingly available to local businesses.

The NPS survey, by design, is crafted to calculate how well you are doing amongst the subsets of your customers most ready and willing to affect your word of mouth marketing.

The NPS survey asks one question; How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? It then allows the customer to signal how likely their word of mouth potential by rating this question from 0 (not likely) to a 10 (very likely).

The methodology of Net Promoter Score evaluates the 0-10 answers not by a simple average of your over all customer service but rather by looking at the two poles of your customers; those that love you (promoters rating you a 9 or 10) and those that found your service lower than average (detractors rating you a 0-6).

These two groups are the most likely to either encourage or discourage others from frequenting your business.

Essentially the NPS score, calculated by subtracting the detractors from promoters and dividing by the total respondents, is a single number that captures the likelihood that you will have good word of mouth. The scale runs from -100 to +100 and the higher the better. Remember it measures how willing folks are to talk about you and how willing they are to encourage their friends to do business with you thus the index has turned out to correlate well with your future growth.

Word Of Mouth Drives New Business & Your Success

Reviews, since their appearance on the national scene in the early parts of the decade, have certainly increased in importance as form of digital word of mouth.

New customers can learn about your business by reading reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook and others, but research in 2012 and earlier found that as many as 85% of new customers acquired by small business came via traditional word of mouth.

In my more recent consumer research I found that two and a half times as many folks found their lawyer through asking family, friends or a work colleague than through the next most popular source, the internet search where reviews play a role.

There are certainly indications that younger consumers are increasingly reliant on reviews but word of mouth continues to be the leading way to find new customers.

Humans, being social creatures, will very likely continue to tell those closest to them of their experiences, so word of mouth referrals will continue to be a huge driver of your new customer sales.

The Net Promoter Score creates a single score, by looking at your promoters and detractors, that is effectively a word of mouth index for your business. And given that it correlates well with future sales you should be thinking about NPS as one of the most important metrics for your business. Best of all, we’ll help you start capturing it for your business.

Make Using Net Promoter Score Your Small Business’s Next Big Move

Aaron Weiche — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:19:17 +0000

Running a small business involves making a lot of decisions on a daily basis, some big and some small. One decision every successful small business makes on a daily business is to provide great customer service. But has your business made the decision to capture and evaluate your customer’s experience? Using Net Promoter Score (NPS) you can easily capture, evaluate and improve your customer’s satisfaction.

What Net Promoter Score Is

NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three main categories: promoters, passives and detractors.

By asking one simple question – How likely is it that you would recommend this business to a friend or colleague? – these responses are captured to provide a clear and simple data point of a company’s performance through the rating of its customers.

Net Promoter Score is calculated by placing the numeric ratings into the three main categories:

Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

So by subtracting the percentage of passives from your percentage o promoters, you achieve your NPS number on a range from -100 to 100. It’s simple, straight forward and gives you a customer satisfaction data point your can track.

Making The Decision To Use NPS

Implementing NPS is an easy way to keep track of your customer satisfaction and business health, and it’s just as easy to implement. In fact, it’s the first step of our offering to obtain customer feedback. You can use GetFiveStars to ask every customer to submit their opinion by rating how likely they are to refer your business to a friend.

In just 30 minutes you can start measuring the NPS of your business. Simply create an account with us, and add some information about your business. We will help you automate the rest. No deep integrations, just our platform (which does all kinds of other great things too), we make sure to use the best ERP software solutions. You can get more information about Infor M3 here.

What Using Net Promoter Score Gives Your Business

Simplicity. As I’ve outlined already, NPS is easy to understand and easy to start. While complex surveys offer up more information, it can become overwhelming trying to evaluate open ended feedback.
Consistency. Your NPS serves as a consistent and common goal among your business and team. Easily understood, evaluated and then communicated by owners, management and staff – it’s a great way to get everyone on the same page.
Tracking. Your Net Promoter Score can be benchmarked and tracked over time. Whether you work to improve your NPS month over month or quarter over quarter, you have the ability to see where you are at now and work to get better (Our reporting tracks this for you).

Interestingly, our data based on thousands of customer interactions shows that business with higher NPS scores get more testimonials and online reviews.

A high level of customer service doesn’t happen by accident. You choose how to engage, communicate, service and follow-up to please your customers. Once small business owners are aware of how easy Net Promoter Score is to utilize and get started with, they make the choice to start capturing and measuring NPS to help them improve their business.