Drive new business with your Net Promoter Score

Tracking and calculating Net Promoter Score is often pushed into the remit of the marketing team and it’s tempting to see NPS as a customer service tool. You track the percentage of customers who would recommend you. You take action to improve it. The reality is that NPS is as much a tool of perception than it is of customer reaction. How potential customers contribute to your NPS surveys - and other online reviews for that matter - plays a significant part in whether they buy and then recommend your company, product and brand. 

This means that NPS surveys and tracking and calculating Net Promoter Score is often pushed into the remit of the marketing team. Fear not though - it’s not just a constant reminder of how much better you could be doing; NPS can also provide some useful insights into your competitors are doing, and if you plan well, it can also become a central part of your more successful marketing campaigns. 

If you put a lot of emphasis on analytics within your department, it’s easy to gloss over the comments in favour of your quantitative, trackable numerical score. 

Don’t do this. The comments are an absolute goldmine for your marketing and product teams because:

Drilling down into the comments allows you to be specific about which bits of your business are working and which aren’t. 

On examining the comments they received month in, month out from their NPS surveys, Homeswapper discovered that their social housing exchange platform was rated particularly well for one area, but was lagging behind in another. “The Promoter comments tend to relate to the functionality and efficiency of the service; whilst, detractor comments tend to relate to other users and the interaction between users” they explained.

“These findings have allowed us to develop two separate streams of improvement work: one stream of work which is centred on making sure that all users are actively engaged in using the service whilst another stream of work is looking at new features and functionality. By addressing both of these areas, we will be more effective in improving customer satisfaction.”

Particularly if you’re in the launch phase, NPS tools can help inform essential strategic decisions. 

“Our approach is to unpick assumptions and remain focused on providing value to the user; NPS tools are fundamental to assess whether our products are providing the impact we expect” explains Ben Blomerley, COO of Startup consultancy business MOHARA.

“During one project with a client, building a highly-sophisticated career development tool, our ongoing NPS efforts helped us shape the business in a way we hadn’t considered – we’ve learned that listening to users is essential when striving for excellence. In this case, the product we’d built was so beloved by employees that many expressed an interest in using it independently - rather than within an employer.”

It’s important to remember that NPS isn’t just a reactive tool and that using it in a ‘find issue, fix it’ capacity is not making the most of its potential. Scanning feedback as inspiration for new directions is a great way of exploring how your product should develop - and by extension understanding how to present it. 

The comments - especially negative ones - also act as a handy little heads up to your social media team. 

If your surveys return negative comments about one particular aspect of your business, you can bet your house you’ll be receiving similar comments on social media. How you address these in the public sphere will absolutely affect public perceptions of your brand and whether potential customers would consider purchasing anything from you. 

So, once you’ve analysed the comments, sit down with your social media team and think about the language and the positioning you’re going to use whilst addressing these comments. Done well, this approach can win back customers who may have drifted away otherwise.

SightMill has built-in tools to automatically generate tags about the theme or sentiment of customer comments, which you can then view and track trends as you address problems.

If your NPS score is really good, it becomes a marketing tool in its own right. 

To put it simply, people buy things with good reviews more than they buy things with bad reviews, so if your score is stratospheric, make sure you shout about it. Those adverts which boast that ‘95% of customers would recommend…’ - they’re a good starting point. 

If you’re looking for an example of how this works, check out digital estate agent disruptors Purplebricks. They’ve used customer satisfaction as a cornerstone of their brand identity, with Trustpilot and Feefo ratings splashed across their homepage and NPS a key talking point in any PR they do. 

“We are relentless at working to ensure we understand our customers' needs and meet their expectations and are proud of our 27,000 Trustpilot reviews and our NPS score of +80” their CEO Michael Bruce said.

The fact that this is their CEO talking is significant - it pushes the message that NPS and other customer satisfaction metrics are woven into the fabric of the company, rather than ‘just something customer service have to deal with’. 

Use NPS to drive new business by placing it openly at the heart of your organisation. After all, everything you do is for the customer - and using NPS as a key indicator of whether you’re achieving this sends out a strong message to potential customers.