6 strategies to increase your NPS (Net Promoter Score)

Published on October 05, 2020  - Updated on December 04, 2023

6 strategies to increase your NPS (Net Promoter Score)

The NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is an indicator used to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. It has become key in optimizing the customer experience, but how can it be improved?

The customer experience is now the only major difference between competing companies offering the same range of products or services. It is what builds customer loyalty and connects them emotionally to the brand. Moreover, when they are satisfied, customers consume more, spend less time with support, are less attentive to price (or are willing to pay more to be assured of getting the expected level of service), and finally will tend to recommend the brand to their entourage. 

To measure the performance of the customer experience, satisfaction indicators must be used. One of the best known is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), developed by Fred Reichheld, consultant at Bain & Company, in 2003. It allows you to evaluate the percentage of customers ready to recommend a company, a product or a service to their friends and family. But how to use it to improve the customer experience?

In this article, we will discover 6 strategies to improve your NPS.

Strategy 1: Define specific actions for each customer segment

In order to correctly target your customers and carry out specific campaigns, segmentation will help you greatly. Through your NPS surveys, you will be able to segment your customers based on their responses, either as detractors, passives, or promoters. Indeed, according to their NPS score, you can classify them as follows:

- 0 to 6 = detractors

- 6 to 8 = neutrals

- 9 to 10 = promoters

It is through this segmentation that you will be able to take action to primarily target your detractors and try to convert them into promoters. You can also target your promoters with a campaign to encourage them to refer friends for example.

Another way is to focus on neutrals. Often, this is an under-exploited segment, and the effort required to turn them into promoters is often less. This depends on the average score of the neutral segment. In fact, if in your customer base, this segment is rather oriented towards a score of 8, then it will be easier to turn them into ambassadors.

Thus, performing a semantically and emotional analysis of your customer reviews is a proven method for identifying the actions to be taken for each of your segments and maximizing your NPS.

Strategy 2: Collect and analyze feedback from your customers

As mentioned in the previous strategy, the collection and analysis of customer opinions are complementary to segmentation.

If you are looking to improve your NPS (if you are reading this article you should be), the feedback from your customers is a real gold mine. It is mainly thanks to these comments that you will be able to anticipate alerts or, conversely, verify the impact of your actions.

There are multiple sources for collecting these customer opinions, via surveys, public or non-public online platforms, social networks, etc. (we have detailed our top 5 best sources in this article). Depending on your industry, each source will have a different interest and will provide you with insights to build customer loyalty.

The main advantage of analyzing customer reviews is that they will tell you by themselves how they have lived their experience with your brand.

On the other hand, the disadvantage is the time required for the analysis. If you have a few comments, you can take the time to do it manually by reading the comments and identifying the main topics raised. On the other hand, if you have a large number of comments, then it immediately becomes more complicated and you will probably have to turn to automation.

Whether automatically or manually, collecting and analyzing your customer reviews will bring you certain results. If you are short on time, there are automation solutions like Q°emotion. It is a SaaS platform that will take care of semantically and emotionally analyzing your customer comments in order to gain insights quickly. In addition, this solution also allows you to combine customer reviews with NPS metrics. This will allow you to drastically reduce the time spent analyzing customer reviews and track your NPS within one platform. To learn more, request your live demo of our platform.

Strategy 3: Provide a comprehensive FAQ

Another important point, the answers of your FAQ can be directly integrated into your Live Chat in order to save time on the processing of your customers' requests. It is therefore in your interest to take care of your FAQ and to make it as complete as possible. Indeed, 40% of people prefer to have access to the answer to their questions by themselves rather than through human contact. For many, finding their answers on their own would be faster and more efficient because they know exactly what they are looking for without needing to explain it. It is therefore essential to put yourself in the customer's shoes and understand all the questions that may arise and prepare the answers in your FAQ. The more complete it is, the more satisfied your customers will be!

Strategy 4: Take care of your customer service (speed of response, live chat response, etc.)

Is your product of good quality and your sales doing well? This is good news, but it is not enough! After-sales service is just as important as the quality of the product. This is why it is important to pay special attention, to make your customers feel that they are necessary that you make a point of responding to them. To do this, the speed of processing their requests is essential. It's not always easy to respond within a minute, but setting up a live chat (or chatbot) or being able to speak to customer service via social media can help reduce response time. In addition, as seen previously, it is possible to add pre-recorded answers directly from your FAQ, and in this case, if your customer has a question whose answer has already been recorded he asked for it immediately. According to a study by Statista, the use of live chat improves customer satisfaction rates in all industries.

With such a quick response, your customers will be happy with your service which increases your NPS.

Strategy 5: Monitor the effectiveness of your measures by analyzing the evolution of the NPS

Once you've measured your NPS and implemented measures to improve it, it doesn't stop there. It is over time that your customer's satisfaction will increase. It may seem obvious, but it is very important to keep track of your NPS over time.

There are two ways to do this: 

- Manual monitoring. This is the method that will require the most rigor. To do this, you simply analyze the results of your NPS surveys and compare them with your previous surveys. This is perfectly feasible, but if you conduct a large number of surveys with different customer segments, for different products, etc., it can quickly become tedious. It can quickly become tedious and time-consuming. This is why some people prefer the second method.

- The use of an automatic analysis tool to make the task more accessible. Indeed, on cxinsights.io (Q°emotion's semantic analysis platform) when verbatims are added to your project, you will be able to directly compare your NPS score with the previous period.

Moreover, as you can imagine, it is also much easier and faster to compare results by product, by customer segment, by geographical location, etc. The information is available in one click, even for your past surveys if the date is specified in your data. 

Thus, as you take action to meet the needs and questions of your customers, you will be able to monitor the impact of these on your customer reviews.

Strategy 6: Anticipate and predict attrition

The last method we will discuss in this article is to use the NPS to predict and understand attrition. Indeed, if you are able to understand why your detractors leave you, you will be able to implement corrective actions and reduce it, which will naturally increase your NPS. Indeed, by performing a semantic analysis on the verbatims written by your most critical detractors, you will understand for what reasons they are dissatisfied and what pushed them to leave you. Thus, you will be able to prioritize the corrective actions to implement in order to decrease the volume of detractors over time.

As you can see, the NPS is a particularly useful indicator for managing and improving the customer experience. Relatively simple to implement and to follow over time, it will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your actions and the impact they have on your brand.

If you want to go further, it is wise to use other indicators in addition to the NPS. We detail the Customer Effort Score (CES) on our blog.

If you would like to test the Q°emotion tool, request your demo here.