How to Use Net Promoter Score to Boost Customer Retention

How can you use a net promoter score to boost customer retention?

1. Make sure the survey is accurate and effective
2. Reach out to detractors
3. Learn more about passives
4. Engage promoters

Doing business amidst the highly competitive market is challenging. You don’t just want to appeal to new customers to increase brand awareness — you also want to have repeat customers to boost income. Not only are repeat customers more familiar with your products/services, but they also tend to spend more on each purchase compared to first-time customers. For this reason, you might want to know more about how to use a net promoter score to boost customer retention.

Net promoter score (NPS) is used as a market research metric. Simple to understand, a free NPS survey tool like Qeryz can help you understand your customers more and improve your brand. As a result, it can retain more customers and drive new leads for closing deals.

What Is A Net Promoter Score?

Before you can learn about how to use this powerful metric to boost customer retention, you must familiarize yourself with what a net promoter score exactly is.

A net promoter score is collected through a survey that asks participants, “How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”. The participants answer by giving a rating between 0 (not at all likely) to extremely likely (10).

The answers are broken down into one of three categories:

• Promoters – Participants with a score of 9 or 10. Promoters are your company’s loyal and biggest fans. They are enthusiastic about your products/services and are more likely to recommend them to other people. They are also likely to spend more money with your business.
• Passives – Participants with a score of 7 or 8. Passives are customers who are satisfied with your products/services but are not as enthusiastic enough to refer them to other people.
• Detractors – Participants with scores of 0 to 6. Detractors are your unhappy customers who are unlikely to make a purchase with your brand again. It is important to sway these customers to become Promoters or Passives as they can spread negative word-of-mouth, which can greatly impact your brand.

The goal is to increase your NPS over time, but its most important benefit is the customer feedback garnered. After participants are asked for their score, they should be prompted to answer an open-ended question of why they chose that score. The response is gold to your company.

Now that you know what NPS is, it’s time to take a look at how you can use it to improve your customer retention.

Make Sure The Survey Is Accurate and Effective

First, you need to make sure you have an accurate and effective net promoter score survey. More often than not, business owners make a few common mistakes including asking leading questions on the survey, using methods that increase bias, only surveying happy customers, and asking too many questions.

Address all these pitfalls beforehand. Having an inaccurate and ineffective net promoter score survey is harmful for any business because issues will go unrecognized and unresolved.

Reach Out To Detractors

While you might want every customer to be satisfied with your products/services, not everyone will be pleased all the time. Keep in mind that when customers give low ratings, there is a big potential they want to share pain points. This is why reaching out to detractors who give you lower marks is beneficial in more ways than one. Doing so can find out why they gave the score and how you can make your product/service better.

Contact detractors as soon as possible. To boost customer retention, you should effectively address their issues. Even if you cannot meet their needs because of certain factors, it is important to acknowledge their feedback. If you cannot personalize your response, mitigate negative feelings by automating your survey response.

Reading through the feedback of detractors will provide you with valuable insights about why they would not recommend your products/services. Then, you can adjust your operations accordingly to avoid the same mistakes.

It pays to analyze detractor feedback because there may be instances that you already have solutions to their problems. For example, if your customer is not satisfied with slow delivery times, you might already have options for express delivery. In the end, you can potentially turn your detractors into passives — or even promoters if you reach out.

Learn More About Passives

Don’t ignore the group of passive customers. While they are not exactly putting your business at risk, passives are likely to abruptly stop doing business with you as well. There may be a few factors that hold them back from being promoters. If a competitor’s product captures their attention and needs, they may consider switching.

It is your job to find out what is behind their lack of enthusiasm. One way to do this is to have an NPS survey follow-up question. For example, if a customer gives a score of “neutral” or 5, you can ask them “How can we improve this”?.

Engage With Promoters

Promoters are more likely to recommend your brand to other people. So make sure to engage with them and ask for reviews or personal testimonies. You can use their responses for increasing brand credibility and loyalty. In addition, you can roll out a referral marketing scheme to target promoters. This boosts customer retention because they receive special offers, while you gain more leads. It’s a win-win.

Key Takeaway

In this article, we’ve provided actionable tips on how to use net promoter score to boost customer retention. NPS is a powerful marketing metric that retains more customers by taking action from feedback.

At Qeryz, we offer on-site website survey tools for net promoter scores. Sign up for a free NPS survey tool by clicking here, register for a Qeryz Starter account, and copy-paste your Qeryz tracking code on your website. It’s that easy!