Get your Net Promoter Score® using SMS
We recently attended the Traction Conference in Vancouver, Canada. They brought founders and growth experts from the fastest growing SaaS companies from around the world to share their knowledge and strategies.
Speakers came from Atlassian, Calendly, HubSpot, Shopify, Twitch, and Zapier, to name a few, and there was a common theme among many of their presentations—Net Promoter Score® (NPS®).
They kept emphasising how important it was for businesses to use this simple survey to understand how their customers experienced their product or service. We can all agree that the better we know our customers, the better we can serve them, and the great news is that this industry-standard feedback survey is easy to do with SMS.
What is Net Promoter Score®?
Net Promoter Score® is an industry-standard customer feedback survey, designed to help businesses measure and evaluate customer experience and loyalty.
The survey has two questions. The first is quantitative, asking customers how likely they are to recommend a business on a 0-10 scale. The second is a qualitative question, asking why they provided the rating that they did.
There are many ways to deliver this survey, but you may find that SMS is the quickest and most simple way. If you need a reason to send an SMS campaign, this is an excellent one.
How do you calculate Net Promoter Score®?
Your score will sit between -100 to +100, with the negative being the worst and the positive being the best.
To find your score, group your respondents based on the rating they gave you into three separate categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.
| Net Promoter Score® Categories | ||
| Promoters | Passives | Detractors |
| Score 9-10 | Score 7-8 | Score 0-6 |
| These customers are loyal enthusiasts who will continually buy your products or services and refer others to your business, helping you achieve growth.
They are less price-sensitive because they believe they get value from your business. They also buy more and are more willing to try new products and services. | Unenthusiastic is the keyword here. That said, they are satisfied customers, but another competitor can divert them away with attractive offers. You can consider Passives as neutral players. | Bluntly speaking, these customers are the exact opposite of a promoter. They can damage your brand and impede your business' growth by negative word of mouth. |
After separating your respondents, calculate the percentage of them that are promoters, passives, and detractors.
For example, let’s say that 25% of your respondents are promoters, 55% of them are passives, and the final 20% are detractors.
Now subtract the percentage of promoters by detractors. For the above example, your NPS® is +5 (25-20). A positive number is good, and it usually signals business growth. Passives don’t play a role in the calculation because they don’t add or take away value from your business.
Compare your score to your industry average
Like a credit score, monitoring your NPS® can help you understand if your initiatives positively impact your relationships with your customers.
It’s very important to see where you stand against the rest of the industry. If you’re below average, your competitors are likely outgrowing you, so may still have a lot of work to do even if your NPS® is positive.
Source: netpromoter.com/compare (2016)
By global standards, a score of 50 or above is excellent, but it’s hard to achieve.
Get your Net Promoter Score® with SMS
While there are many different ways to get your score (i.e. email or survey forms), SMS is more effective.
Yes, we’re a little bit biased, but SMS has a high open rate of 98% and 90% of them get opened within three minutes after successful delivery. Plus, no Wi-Fi or data connection is necessary to receive the survey or reply to it.
Aside from the high open rates, your customers don’t need to leave their messaging app to answer you. People have shorter attention spans than goldfish, and leaving the app may cause them to drop off. With text messaging, they can quickly reply with a number and then answer the follow-up question on the go.
Our online SMS service lets you set each number to be an SMS keyword, which means that it can trigger other SMS functions, like an auto-reply. In this case, the reply will ask them why they gave you that rating. You can also separate them into different lists for remarketing purposes.
If you want to have us help you do it, then check out our award-winning customer experience platform, Conversr.
You might also be interested in learning about how SMS keywords can create automated SMS sequences.
Final Thoughts
Net Promoter Score® is not the end all be all, but it can help you understand how your customers perceive your brand. Use that to help you make future business and marketing decisions. If you track your score quarterly, you can learn about customer sentiment over time and identify top issues that create detractors before it damages your brand irreversibly.
