Every business needs loyal customers who regularly purchase and recommend their products to other people. Every business owner understands that net promoter score is important. But how do you improve net promoter score?

The chances to sell to an existing customer is between 60%-70%. Happy customers will likely share their positive experiences with about 11 people. 

But how do you ensure your customers are happy? Net promoter score can help you do that. It is a measure of how satisfied your customers are and how likely they are to recommend your products to other people. 

What Is a Good NPS Score?

The net promoter score ranges from -100 to 100, where anything below 0 (zero) implies your business has lots of issues and needs improvement. An NPS between 0 and 30 is considered as good. 

If your NPS is between 30 and 70, it indicates your company is doing great in keeping up with the customers’ expectations. 

If your NPS score is above 70, it means your customers love you and will be more than happy to share your products with others. 

Net Promoter Score Benchmarks

NPS score benchmarks differ from industry to industry. Retently conducted research and released the net promoter score benchmarks for 2020. 

Here are the net promoter score benchmarks for different industries. 

• Education and training: 71
• Insurance: 70
• Ecommerce: 62 
• Digital marketing agency: 61 
• Consulting: 51
• Enterprise software: 44
• Financial Services: 34
• SaaS: 30
• Logistics and transportation: 29
• Healthcare: 27

As you can see, education and insurance lead the pack with 71 and 70 NPS, respectively. Although logistics and transportation have good NPS, they need lots of improvement. 

Net Promoter System

The net promoter system is a business philosophy that helps businesses earn the passionate loyalty of customers and employees. 

Net promoter system has three essential components:

Committing to Improving Customer Experience

While most c-suite executives commit to building strategies to improve customer experience, many don’t follow up with what’s going on at the ground level. While this is not intentional, c-suites are buried with tons of responsibilities. 

However, to improve your NPS, leadership and executive teams must create strategies to increase customer engagement and loyalty. It also includes personally looking into the units responsible for it. 

Using NPS as a Reliable Metric

Successful businesses around the globe use NPS not only to measure customer satisfaction levels or loyalty but also to make data-driven decisions. 

NPS can also be used to determine changes in consumer behavior and observe the impact of changes you make in your products. 

Improve Net Promoter Score Based on the Learnings From Your NPS Report

NPS is a never-ending process, and so is knowledge. Create a system for improvement where you apply the learnings from the NPS. 

NPS system usually has three phases:

• Inner loop: It involves training employees based on NPS feedback to help them better serve customers. It also includes providing teams with real-time customer feedback, allowing them to become self-directing (where they can make their own decisions). 
• Huddle: It refers to short, interactive meetings where teams can brainstorm solutions to address customer issues and create more promoters. 
• Outer loop: It involves root-cause analysis and structural problem-solving (often suggested in huddles) that employees can’t decide on their own. It’s also where the company measures the overall effectiveness of the changes made.  

How to Turn Passives Into Promoters?

Customers are divided into three categories depending on their likelihood of recommending your products to their friends (on a scale of 0-10). 

• Detractors: The ones who give a score of 0-6
• Passives: The ones who give a score of 7 or 8
• Promoters: The ones who give a score of 9 or 10

Passives are low hanging opportunities. With a little boost, you can turn them into promoters. Here’s how:

1- Send Surveys With Direct Questions

The first step to turn passives into promoters is determining what exactly they think about your company and products. Surveys with direct questions can help you do that. 

Here are some questions you should be asking to passives:

• What’s the primary reason you bought our product? 
• Were you able to solve your problems with our product?
• Have you had issues using our product? If yes, what?
• Did you reach out to our customer support team ever? How was your experience? 
• How do you think we can improve our product or services?
• Is there any additional feature you would love to see in the product? If yes, what?

In the end, add a section to allow passives to give additional feedback (that was not covered in the questions). 

2- Understand Where You Failed to Delight Them

The next step is to analyze their response to understand where you failed to wow them. 

More often, passives have similar suggestions. For example, if you are a smartphone manufacturer, you may have a high percentage of passives who want a bigger battery. 

Look for similarities in the responses. But don’t ignore individual feedback altogether. For instance, there might be only a few passives with a specific feature request that might improve your product as a whole. 

Treat each request as equal and determine if you can address all the issues over time. If not, consider communicating the reason with the respondent. Even though you didn’t make changes according to them, they would be glad that you listened to their feedback and took the time to let them know why it’s not feasible to work on it currently. 

3- Improvize Your Services to Exceed Expectations

Now that you have collected a list of actionable responses, it’s time to work on them. Remember, passives don’t have any problems with your product, but if they find something providing better services than you, they will most likely churn. 

Therefore, work on your customers’ feedback proactively to make them keep coming back. The more you improvise your services (as per customers’ suggestions), the more passives will turn into promoters. 

How to Improve NPS in Telecom?

Telecom has the lowest NPS benchmark compared to other industries. A 2018 report indicates that the average NPS in the telecom industry is 24. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a score higher than that. 

Here are some tips for telecom companies to improve their NPS:

1- Set Clear Expectations

Nothing is more disheartening than not knowing what exactly you signed up for. Confusion is one of the most common complaints in the telecom industry. 

Make sure to set clear expectations in everything, including billing (with and without taxes) and usage. Avoid using technical jargon like bandwidth, frequencies, ISDN, etc. If the messaging requires you to write difficult terms, add a small definition (or a link) to help customers understand them. 

2- Engage With Customers

Do you talk to your customers regularly? If not, you are blowing a huge opportunity to improve the net promoter score. 

For example, my internet service provider calls me at least once every two months to know if I faced any issue, even when I have not raised any complaints. 

Little efforts like this can prove beneficial in the long run, especially when it comes to customer satisfaction. I know I’m with a company that is dedicated to providing the best possible experience. As a result, I will be more likely to recommend it to my friends and colleagues. 

3- Resolve Customer Issues at the Earliest

Telecommunication has become an important part of everyone’s daily lives. Any disruption in it affects people directly, both personally and professionally. 

For example, consider you have a virtual meeting, and you discover your internet is not working or there’s no network on your phone. The first thing you will want is your network provider to restore the services immediately. 

Make sure to resolve customers’ issues immediately, and that it doesn’t happen again. The faster you fix customers’ problems, the more likely they are to stick to your brand. 

How to Improve Your Company Net Promoter Score?

Improving NPS is essential for businesses as it helps enhance your brand credibility and increases customer lifetime value. No matter how good or bad your net promoter score is, there’s always room for improvement. 

Here are the best strategies to improve your NPS. 

1- Build a Customer-Centric Culture

Successful companies put their customers first. In fact, that’s how it should be because businesses survive because of their customers. 

Being a customer-centric company means putting efforts to understand your consumer journey to identify their needs and expectations. 

Here are some tips for building a customer-centric culture in your company:

• Instill customer empathy in your company. It helps you understand the emotional reasons behind customers’ needs, enabling you to respond to them more effectively. 
• Anticipate what your customers might demand in the future and prepare your product for that. 
• Collect and share customer feedback across departments so that every employee has a better understanding of your customers and their needs.
• Create a CRM where you log all the interaction with a customer. This provides you insights into all the conversations they had with your company across channels. This, in turn, enables you to better meet their expectations. 

2- Create Different Strategies for Detractors, Passives, and Promoters

Each segment of customers (detractors, passives, and promoters) have different needs and expectations. 

For example, let’s say you sell coffee makers. You might have detractors who were expecting a variety of options, passives who are satisfied with your product but think it could have been better, and promoters who love the coffee maker. 

In this case, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. Therefore, make sure to divide the segments and create strategies to improve the overall customer satisfaction rate.  

3- Deliver What Your Customers Expect From You

What have you promised to your customers? The best product in the market in a specific price range? 24/7 customer support? Or reliability?

Make sure to continue to deliver them to your customers. Also, consider doubling down on them. For example, if you promise 24/7 customer support, try to respond to customer queries within an hour. 

When you go the extra mile than promised, customers will be more than happy and share their experiences with their friends and family. 

Net Promoter Score Contest

Net promoter score contest refers to running competitions within your organization to improve your overall NPS. This is great because games encourage employees to work harder. 

To run a net promoter score contest, collect NPS for each department. For example, send customers the same questions for each function, such as how satisfied you are with our customer support (marketing and product)?

Forward the responses of customers to the concerned team to encourage them to do better. Announce prizes for departments with the highest NPS. 

When all the departments in your organization thrive to achieve the best possible NPS, you will see an improvement in customer loyalty. 

NPS Quality Improvement

The quality of the NPS has to do a lot with who you are sending the surveys to. Ask the right questions to the right customer at the right time. 

For example, if a customer had contacted your customer support, send them a survey asking questions. It should include: 

• Was the agent able to solve their query? 
• Were they satisfied with the solution?

Create different NPS surveys that trigger based on the customer’s interaction with your brand. 

How to Improve NPS Response Rate?

The only problem with NPS surveys is that not everyone will respond to it. Fortunately, there are ways to improve the NPS response rate. 

Here are some of the tactics to get more customers to fill the NPS survey:

• Personalize open-ended questions depending on the way customers use your product.
• Recognize the customer’s preferred channel of communication and send questionnaires through it. 
• Send surveys, depending on the customer’s lifecycle stage. For example, if you ask a newly signed up user what they think about your product, they will most likely ignore it. Instead, how was the onboarding process would be a better question for them. 
• Consider offering an incentive to respondents to encourage them to fill the NPS survey. It could be anything like a discount, free shipping on their next purchase, or freebies. 

Conclusion

Net promoter score is one of the essential things every company must focus on. It helps determine how satisfied customers are and if they will recommend your product to anyone. 

Aim for a higher NPS score than the industry benchmark. Follow the tips mentioned in the guide to improve your company’s net promoter score, quality, and response rate.