The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an incredibly important metric that you should be monitoring and iterating upon at your B2B software company.
To put things simply, the higher your net promoter score, the better off your company is going to be. A high score means a high percentage of your customers are likely to recommend your product. A middle of the road score means your customers don’t necessarily dislike your product, but they’re also not going out of their way to recommend it. Finally, a low score means you’ve got a problem: your customers are likely to be dissuading others from trying your product.
In addition, your net promoter score can also shed light on a lot of other key customer metrics that you should be tracking as well, such as acquisition, retention, and churn numbers. But before we get into any of that, let’s first start with the basics.
How do I calculate my net promoter score?
Net promoter score ratings can range anywhere from -100 to 100. While ideally, the best score you can hope for is a perfect 100, more realistically, you should aim to be above 0 at the very least. Fred Reichheld, the developer of the scoring system, considers a rating of above 50 to be outstanding, so anything north of that is a good indicator that you’re heading in the right direction.
In order to calculate your net promoter score, you’ll first need to send a survey to all your customers. This survey can be as short or as long as you’d like, provided of course that you include one key question: On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to others? Once you receive the results from this survey, you can quickly calculate your net promoter score. The calculator below is from SurveyMonkey.
Once you start to get some survey results back, the next step is to begin to analyze them. Generally speaking, a customer who answers a 6 or less to the above question is considered a detractor. Customers who score a 7 or 8 on the above question are considered passive or neutral. Finally, customers who answer a 9 or 10 are considered promoters.
What should I do once I know my net promoter score?
Although it probably goes without saying, you goal here should be to to maximize the number of promoter customers, while at the same time minimizing the number of passives and detractors. In order to get more accurate results, we encourage companies to include at least two additional questions in their net promoter score surveys: The first: “What do you like about our product or service?” The second: “How can we improve our product or service?” Hopefully, the addition of these two questions will help shed further insight on your net promoter score.
When determining net promoter score, it’s important to look at what your promoter customers enjoy about the product, and see how you can market or expand those features. On the other side, investigate what issues your passive or detractor customers are having, and work to minimize those issues or improve those customers’ experiences.
Analyzing your net promoter score should not be a one-time event. You should continue to collect feedback from your customers and update your net promoter score, since it’s a quick and easy indicator of how your customers are feeling about your product and company. Keeping an eye on this score is an easy way to figure out how to retain your current customers and acquire new ones.
