Explaining the Net Promoter Score (NPS) 

By John Heffernan, EVC Marketing

During a recent webinar, Do You Have A Five-Star Reputation, Bob Kobek, President of CustomerCount explained the unsatisfactory reliance by a business on star ratings and reviews.

Let’s be honest. Fake reviews, unwarranted poor reviews and outrageous 5-star glowing reviews all add to the lack of reliability in the consumer’s mind when it comes to review and rating websites. All too often painting a picture that is not necessarily accurate and untrustworthy.

Human nature ensures that personal recommendations are not only valued but more acceptable to friends, family and potential customers. But the influence on the decision to purchase should never be underestimated.

Welcome to the world of Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Do you know your score?
• Do you know how you attained that score?
• Is your score great, good, average or oh dear?

Let’s start with an introduction: What is the NPS?

In its simplest definition, the NPS is your loyalty score and is indicative of the percentage of customers rating their likelihood of recommending a company to a friend or colleague.

How do you find out your Net Promoter Score?

Do you know what your clients and potential customers think about your business? Would they recommend you? Well, you need to ask them.

Have you ever asked your customers this question?

How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague? Perhaps with a score from 0 thru 10? 

If you have, then you are at the beginning of determining your NPS.

When should you ask your customers?

Should you ask the question and gain valuable customer feedback:

• Via a survey?
• When collecting reviews?

And when you have the responses, what’s next?

With the NPS, your customers will fall into specific categories:

• Promoters (marked 9 or 10)
• Detractors (marked 0-6)
• Neutral (marked 7-8)

Of course, as a business, we all want promoters – the clients who buy and are likely to keep buying or provide positive recommendations for your business.

Could those neutral in-betweeners be influenced to become promoters? Identifying the strength of the middle ground may be a vital first step.

Detractors can be annoying and, at worst, damaging to your business. The impact measurement of the negative response is paramount to understanding and improving your business’ reputation and authority.

What else should be included?

Following your well-formed NPS survey, you may need to include additional questions to understand the score submitted.

One solution is to provide a free-form text box after the main rating question has been asked with the following question:

What changes would this company have to make for you to give it an even higher rating?

This additional question allows customers to share their personal feelings about your company and their experiences.

With text analytics and sentiment analysis, this data provides you with the feeling and sentiment behind the written responses, so this data is extremely valuable. It gets to the heart of the rating they have given.

How do you calculate your Net Promoter Score?

The NPS calculation is simple.

Add up the total number of responses from each of three groups (promoters, detractors and neutrals). To calculate the percentage, take the group total and divide it by the total number of survey responses. Now, subtract the percentage total of detractors from the percentage total of promoters. This percentage is your NPS score.

But what does it mean?

• Is your score great, good, average or oh dear?
• Is your score improving?
• Is it trending up or down?
• Can you benchmark your score against your competitors?

How can CustomerCount help?

Regular measurement of your NPS score will help you evaluate what your customers think about you.

You may have the ability to predict positive sentiment and prevent negativity. You may not even know the “why” behind the negativity until you ask!

And being positive, share the good news! Positive promoters can add to your brand reputation in your case studies, marketing campaigns and social media promotions.

If you’d like to find out your Net Promoter Score, and fully understand the data behind the score, then contact Bob Kobek today on [email protected]. CustomerCount offers a fully customizable, cloud-based customer feedback management system that not only calculates your NPS score through regular surveying, but their experienced team will work with you to thoroughly understand the results.

It is this level of personalization, experience and knowledge that sets CustomerCount apart from other NPS score providers. Collecting the data is just the first step. Managing the responses, understanding the data and what it means to your business is critical to your NPS success.