Best Practices for Implementing an Effective NPS Program

Hi Wendi! I’m a huge Fred Riechheld fan (original creator of NPS). First stop I’d recommend in your journey is this NPS 3.0 article: https://hbr.org/2021/11/net-promoter-3-0 which breaks down the flaws in the original model which enabled companies to game the metric which diluted its perceived value to shareholders and board members. They talk about the new and improved model and outline the “earned growth” formula- which is remarkably aligned with tracking the revenue influence of advocacy! We did a webinar with Fred a while back, I’ll find that link and send it your way. I also highly recommend his book to anyone in a customer-facing role which is called “Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers”. You’ll find that Fred is the real deal when it comes to thought leadership in this area, one reason we love gathering his insights on our space! We plan to host another webinar with him this year. Secondly, when you say an NPS program- can you be more specific? What is it that you’re looking to measure or report on? Customers’ willingness to refer others? Willingness to bring you into a new company if they change jobs? Willingness to advocate for upsell and cross-sell within their org? Given the fluctuating definition of NPS, this will help me provide a more specific recommendation/examples of what I’ve seen!

Aaaah - so I completely rebuilt our VoC program when I got promoted in my last role, and we our NPS surveys alongside CS leadership. We made it as an always-on program, and following a specific cadence. We used Gainsight's Journey Orchestrator to manage the segmentation and outreach, and built specific playbooks to help them serve it. The team really benefitted from our team's marketing skill set to get that going. However, we would then push all the data in Qualtrics which made the data easier to manipulate, and was our central repository for all things surveys and feedback analysis, the dashboards were also easier to customise for our execs and leaders, as well as the text analysis. I would suggest that NPS is just one data point, and would also report on Customer Effort Scores across our digital platforms and various transactions, and again we aggregated all of the feedback and data into Qualtrics, so that we had a full picture of everything. Happy to connect on it further if helpful :)

Thank you! All fantastic information. Unfortunately, we don’t have al of the tools, Gainsight, Orchestrator, etc. I’m afraid a lot of this for us would be manual. Think early startup. 🙃

Haha - well before we used Gainsight, we built an email flow in our email marketing system, and would manually batch-upload the target emails on a monthly basis. We were still able to make it seem like it came from the CSM 😉 One thing to consider, is that surveys often have a completion rate of between 7.5/10% (based on # of people you send it to), so anything you can do to optimise the way that NPS survey is served will really help you; think like a marketer. I'd also really recommend sticking with JUST the NPS question, and having a free text box; it's great to see what is top of mind for people to understand what influences their scores

Absolutely, agree!