Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been around for decades, and continues to be an industry-leading strategy for collecting and evaluating user feedback. The combination of quantitative and qualitative insights from NPS can be a gold mine for product teams looking to use the voice of their customers in product roadmap planning.
The problem is, though, that the more NPS data you collect, the harder it can be to understand.
To help solve this problem, Pendo recently released a new product, NPS Insights, into open beta. NPS Insights uses Machine Learning (ML) to comb through your textual NPS responses and extract common themes in your data. Simon, Pendo’s ML tool, does the work to find the common thread in NPS responses so product and success teams can spend their valuable time actually acting on these insights.
Simon requires a minimum of 800 textual responses in one active NPS survey to effectively find themes. While this number may seem daunting, there are some simple tactics you can implement now to drive more engagement from your customers, and hit the minimum to become eligible for NPS Insights.
Here are six best practices to help you generate more textual NPS responses:
1. Customize your NPS survey
While NPS surveys all contain the same general components, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a little creative. In the follow-up question after a user selects a number from 0-10, you can use specific language to encourage a textual response—and even customize this follow-up language based on the score a user gives you. Simple language updates might be all it takes for users to take a few extra seconds to give you that valuable qualitative data. Learn more about customizing your NPS survey in Pendo here.
2. Incentivize textual responses
Incentives are an effective mechanism to drive customer behavior, especially when you’re asking them to do something that helps you (like providing feedback). Set up an incentive program, such as a monthly e-gift card drawing, to encourage users to fill out your NPS survey. Be sure to explicitly highlight that the drawing is only for those who fill out a textual response.
3. Promote your NPS survey via other channels
While we’re huge fans of in-app NPS collection (because it is really effective), that doesn’t mean it should be your only channel. Using a Guide permalink, you can promote your NPS survey within your most effective marketing and support channels and drive customers right back into your product to quickly submit a response. Do you send a regular customer newsletter or have an upcoming customer event? Do you have an energetic user community? Identify your high-impact marketing channels and be intentional about injecting NPS to drive more responses.
4. Add a follow up to those who ignore your first request
Your users are busy and you of course don’t want to interrupt their workflows. But it’s possible that you previously reached out about NPS at the wrong time, and they do actually have valuable feedback to give. Could you build in an automatic follow-up that doesn’t display until they’ve completed a core task in your product? Could you only display the NPS survey on a specific page where users are less likely to be in deep focus? Get creative with when and where you follow up with quiet users to get their feedback.
5. Incorporate NPS collection into your existing customer touchpoints
While product or marketing teams might feel like they’ve exhausted all the valuable channels to drive NPS responses, there are other teams within your organization that have their own touchpoints.
For example, customer support is likely calling or emailing customers all day; could you add a simple footer to the emails they are already sending? If your organization has a customer quarterly business review (QBR) process, create a program to ask for an NPS response as pre-work, or follow-up, from a quarterly meeting. These are a few simple examples, but don’t be afraid to get creative and explore where else NPS can show up in your organization.
6. Be intentional about engaging with textual NPS responses
While not an immediate way to drive more NPS responses, responding to those who have filled out your NPS survey is a great way to prove the value of giving this kind of feedback. Did a customer call out a specific product area that’s giving them trouble? Take the time to respond and offer support. Did a user leave a feature request? Thank them for their input and let them know the product team has seen it. By engaging with users who took the time to leave textual feedback in their NPS response, you can reinforce that positive behavior and increase the likelihood they’ll do it again in the future.
Carving out the time to invest in an NPS strategy means your organization can collect a mountain of valuable data, straight from the mouth of your users. And Machine Learning capabilities can take that mountain of data and organize it for you, pulling out the themes and insights you should care about. This way, you can focus on acting on the insights and making the product improvements customers actually want.
