No matter how well you run your business, there’s always room for improvement. It’s hard to know what areas you need to do better in unless your customers tell you.
That’s what your NPS score is for. By crunching the numbers, you’ll get actual tangible data that you can use to make your clients happier and get fresh faces through your doors.
The question is, what is an NPS score, and how do you go about tracking it. We can help you do the math. Keep reading this guide to learn about Net promoter score benchmarks and improve your score.
What Is NPS?
Before you calculate your score, it helps to know what NPS is. It’s a survey that you send out to your customers. In this survey, you’ll only ask one simple question. How likely are you to recommend us to your family and friends?
Your customers will rate their experience on a scale from 1-10, with 1 being the worst and 10 being the best. Most business owners provide optional text boxes that clients can use to tell you why they gave you the score that they gave you.
Who Are Your Customers?
To understand the average score, you’re going to need to collect a little data first. You’ll be using the numbers that you get from your promoters, passive customers, and detractors.
Promoters
Your promoters are the people who loved everything about your business. They’ll usually rate their experience anywhere between 8-10.
They’ll likely tell all their family and friends to use your goods and services. It will take a lot for one of your competitors to steal one of these loyal individuals away from you.
Passives
Your passive customers are indifferent about your business. They didn’t have a terrible experience, but they didn’t have a great time either. They may recommend you to people that they know, but you shouldn’t count on it.
You won’t be using these clients’ responses in your calculations. That doesn’t mean that their feedback is useless. If they elaborate on their experience, you can still use their comments to make improvements.
Detractors
Detractors are the exact opposite of your promoters. They had a horrible time at your place of business and they aren’t shy about letting you and everyone else know about it.
They take business away from you by leaving negative reviews and telling people they know not to use your goods and services. You’ll be lucky if they give you a 3.
Calculating Your Score
Now that you have all your data together, you can calculate your score. To do this, you’re going to take the percentage of promoters and subtract them from the percentage of your detractors.
This should give you a number that ranges anywhere between -100 to 100. The worst possible score that you can get is -100. The best one that you can get is 100, but it’s rare for any company to get a score that good.
For the most part, as long as you don’t dip below 0, you’re good to go.
How to Improve Your Score?
Of course, just because 0 puts you in the positives, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive to do better. Here are a few NPS tips that will help you improve.
Dig Deeper
Again, most business owners provide optional boxes that customers can fill in to talk about their experience. There are ways to dig even deeper than this, however.
You can request interviews or send follow-up emails to get more in-depth information out of the client. From here, you can use what they have to say to improve your business.
The customer will appreciate that you cared enough about what they had to say to get better, which may turn their negative review into a positive one.
Get Your Managers on Board
All your managers should be familiar with what an NPS is. You need to sit down with them and let them know how to track the numbers.
Come up with a plan to improve NPS and get all of them on board. Hold weekly meetings to talk about what they’re doing to meet net promoter goals.
Train Your Staff
You shouldn’t stop at your managers. While you don’t need to go in-depth about what promoter scores are with all your team members, you should at least train everyone on basic customer service.
Provide them with all the tools they need for success and teach them how to use them. Make sure that they are familiar with what kind of clients come through your doors as well.
Root Cause Analysis
The last step is root cause analysis. As you read through your net promoter surveys, you’ll begin to notice certain patterns. Some of your departments may have more detractors than others.
The reason for the problem isn’t always black and white. For example, your customers might not have issues with your product or even your departments. What you are seeing is that a lot of people are complaining about one employee in particular.
This could be what’s dragging down your score. Get rid of the employee, and the numbers may start to go up.
Get Your NPS Score in the Positives
You’ve got a great company going on, but there’s always room for improvement. It’s never a bad idea to get customer feedback and calculate your NPS score.
By crunching the numbers, you’ll have tangible data that you can use to keep clients going through your doors. For more ways to track customer data and use analytics to make your company better, check out our resources.