It’s Friday afternoon, but Jayne is not feeling the Friday vibes. Instead, she’s feeling dread: It’s time for her weekly email to the CEO reporting the company’s current NPS.

Week after week, Jayne sends an email that includes the Net Promoter Score, an explanation of any fluctuation, and a plan for how they’ll improve next week.

Week after week, it takes her a long long time to write this email. Her “explanation” is usually a complete guess and her “plan” is more or less a shot in the dark. While Jane’s pretty confident about the actual NPS, she’s not at all sure why it matters. If asked, she’d probably respond “Because my boss thinks it’s important.”

Sound familiar?

For all the value placed on Net Promoter Score, the practical elements don’t always filter down to the folks implementing CX programs. In this article, we’ll take a step back to catch up Jayne and everyone else struggling to see the point of NPS.

What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

NPS is one of the most revealing metrics in the customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) arenas as a measure of loyalty at any point in time. It revolves around a single survey question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend (company / product / service / brand) to a friend or colleague?”

Why does it work so well in getting to the heart of EX and CX? Friends are the last people you want to let down or lie to. In other words, recommending something to people close to you requires genuine loyalty and belief in its value proposition.

NPS score analysis

The NPS question offers participants a rating scale that stretches from 0 (“not at all likely”) to 10 (“extremely likely”). Each participant’s response classifies them into one of three categories:

• 9 or 10 as Promoters
• 7 or 8 as Passives or Neutrals
• 0 to 6 as Detractors

How to calculate your final NPS score:

% Promoters – % Detractors = the NPS score. Passives don’t count.

The NPS score can range from +100, where every respondent voted 9 or 10, to -100, where every respondent voted 0 to 6.

Consider the following NPS score analysis:

• Minus 100 and Minus 1 – Indicates a long road ahead toward improving employee or customer experience.
• 0 and 19 – You’re on track, but there’s significant room for improvement.
• 20 and 49 – A favorable rating but leaves a greater than 51% opportunity to uplift Passives into the Promoter category and diminish Detractors.
• 50 and 79 – An excellent NPS performance.
• 80 and 100 – A second to none NPS rating.

How do you get a good Net Promoter Score?

The outline above under NPS Score Analysis is your best guide. Notably, your first NPS survey establishes a baseline (a yardstick or NPS benchmark) to compare ratings in the future.

Many believe that NPS is industry-centric, but frankly, that’s shortsighted. For example, suppose you operate in markets where business entrants traditionally downplay engagements with customers, employees, or both. In that case, you have an incredible opportunity to make a meaningful difference. Nothing should hold you back from hitting your NPS out of the ballpark.

In our modern competitive work and customer environments, companies have no excuses for not treating their employees and customers with a white-glove approach. Why? The Great Resignation in 2021 and disruptive entities/brands tearing through enterprise market strongholds as if they were tissue paper continue to drive that message home emphatically.

In fact, placing CX and EX on a pedestal can be the key to expanded retention. The undesirable alternative is standing by as you watch loyal, valued participants jump ship, creating a crippling churn that attacks ROI. Indeed, in our fast-paced lifestyle, it takes only one defective touchpoint on an EX or CX journey to U-turn an excellent baseline NPS score, sending it in a negative direction.

How do employee and customer engagement fit into NPS?

Employee engagement and customer engagement  lie at the core of NPS. Why? When someone says they are neither for nor against your value proposition (Neutrals or Passives) or openly detest it (Detractors), you can be sure (especially in the latter cases) that defective touchpoints are to blame. It could be something as innocuous as:

• A frustrating customer support call (or chatbot), in which the service left them hanging for too long and finally never delivered the advice they wanted.
• An upsetting team interaction that minimized an employee’s ideas.
• Confusing brand instructions.
• Inadequate after-sales service.

In short, NPS scores reflect feelings that, if intense enough, can destroy years of goodwill built between the brand/company/service and the customer or employee. Did you know that loyalty can dissolve in the blink of an eye?

Because knowing what drives your participant’s rating is critical to making improvements, sentiment analysis is crucial to understanding the inner emotions that drive a respondent to leave a good NPS. After the NPS question, add an open-ended question to uncover all the insights you can.

You might choose something simple like “Please explain why you answered the way you did.” Or, you may choose to differentiate the phrasing of the follow-up question to reflect the participant’s answer. For a positive rating, you might use “Happy to hear! What made your experience positive?” For a negative rating, you could use “Sorry to hear! How can we improve your experience next time?”

Why ask a follow-up question? Let us count the reasons…

• Because of the daily plethora of pressing priorities, defective touchpoints are frequently and unfortunately buried, thus evading stakeholder attention.
• Many customers and employees are likely experiencing similar aggravation as they connect with the same obstruction.
• Open-ended NPS feedback collected through a customer experience platform is an excellent path to closing the loop, providing extraordinary actionable insights.
• Participants’ insights, in their own words, will improve your Net Promoter Score and uplift profitability simultaneously—the sooner, the better.

Another compelling reason for motivational insight is to distinguish whether isolated or single touchpoints influence customer/employee satisfaction (a distinct possibility) or whether something broader is the root cause. Indeed, NPS may converge on relationships with the entire brand or feelings about the expansive corporate culture.

How to increase NPS score by encouraging survey participation – 10 tips

Remember, disruptive touchpoints connect to organizational pain points that erode ROI. Therefore, knowing how to improve the NPS score goes to the heart of erasing these sizable obstructions and clearing the path forward. See ten groundbreaking recommendations below:

1. Respondent feedback represents crucial strategic insights as long as it emerges from a broad employee or customer base that is encouraged to provide honest answers without fear of adverse reaction. Therefore, including anonymity as a survey feature is a viable and effective option.
2. Interview respondents at the right time, channeling it through media that the audience aligns with (emailing is most popular). In other words, the response rate is vital to success, as is how you distribute your NPS surveys, when you do it, and how you detect the appropriate survey trigger points.
3. Personalize the outreach by emphasizing how much you value respondents’ viewpoints.
4. Act on the feedback by following up on any negative experiences to vastly improve employee and customer loyalty, as follows:
   1. If IDs are transparent, thank the respondent (with a personal message) for the insights.
   2. In anonymous NPS surveys, act on the provided data by publicizing changes via media you know will reach your audience.
   3. Do everything you can to convert Detractors into Promoters and move Passives in the right direction.
5. Track your score trends over time to assess progress in meeting employee and customer expectations. In other words, hold a finger to the NPS pulse as a guideline for future strategy planning.
6. Senior management should lead and drive NPS initiatives but will only do so with enthusiasm if they see the long-term benefits:
   1. Go the extra mile to impress the need to understand employee and customer insights that can move the needle.
   2. In other words, don’t allow the goal of improving NPS as a priority to lose its definition and context in an attitude that dismisses it as “just another ho-hum survey.”
   3. Also, the leadership role is critical regarding item (4) above, where senior managers are responsible for implementing pivotal changes as CX and EX disruptions emerge.
7. Spread the NPS doctrine: Suppose the stakeholders buy into the NPS program. In that case, it will likely filter down to the teams reporting upward, and customers will sense that this feedback style is part and parcel of the company culture.
   1. Spare no effort in conveying the message with comprehensive leadership involvement.
   2. The objective is for everyone to appreciate that touchpoints are sensitive junctures in employee and customer journeys.
   3. Disruptive touchpoints can quickly derail hard-earned loyalty and retention; it sometimes only takes one to wreak significant damage.
8. Maintain the NPS results on a transparent platform so that all relevant stakeholders and strategists can appreciate the impact readings have on the people inside the business and in the marketplace. It ultimately drives organizational success.
9. Remember that a NPS program is more than a traditional survey. If you think about it, this caliber of research calls for a culture of “company change and adaptation” to be successful.
   • It involves extensive metrics training/education around the implications of Detractor and Promoter scores and the options for improving them from the initial baseline.
   • In short, there’s no substitute for group effort in meeting NPS survey challenges head-on.
   • Closing the loop on negative feedback is a fundamental approach to a healthy and vibrant organizational culture.
10. Utilize AI and ML support: NPS score analysis and developing steps on how to improve NPS score depend on listening, understanding, and acting. However, the process simplifies considerably with automation and AI technologies. In this regard:
    • Sogolytics is at the cutting edge of the NPS research arena, providing the software you need to make it a spearhead program in creating employee and customer retention.
    • Their employee experience platform is capable of speedy data analytics and identifying trends from surveys in a fraction of human time.

Conclusion

To ensure success, your Net Promoter Score improvement plan must carry top-down endorsement to create a transparent corporate culture that’s employee and customer-centric. Unraveling customer/staff pain points in their journeys is at the foundation of a strong NPS. Leverage detected Promoters as possible ambassadors and convert Detractors wherever possible to gain even more traction in the respective arenas.

When your whole team understands the goals and benefits of NPS, it becomes more than a number. When you have the data you need, you can develop a holistic, strategic approach, responding to disruptive touchpoints and insights as they emerge. Remember that a well-implemented NPS program isn’t a one-time stat check. Instead, it’s a continuous process of seeking answers to complex questions, acting decisively, and delivering the best solutions. Companies like Sogolytics, with its state-of-the-art technologies, provide the NPS support you can capitalize on to achieve the results you expect and deserve.

Where are you in your NPS journey? Whether you’re looking for a simple NPS survey template to start with or you’re ready to build a stronger customer journey, let’s connect!