A simple way to survey your customers

Customer surveys have traditionally involved a lot of work. There’s the setting up, the actioning and then the analysis of the data. If you’re one of those organisations who would love to know what your customers think, but don’t feel you have the time to ask, let alone do something with the data… read on.

Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a proven metric that measures customer loyalty. It’s very simple to action, and can involve very little work post-survey. Many believe that the score closely correlates with business growth.

The score is simple to calculate, and involves asking just one question on a scale of 0-10 to customers:
How likely is it that you would recommend *your brand* to a friend or colleague?
Respondents are clustered as follows:
- Promoters (score 9-10) love you, and are loyal advocates for your brand
- Passives (score 7-8) quite like you, but would go elsewhere for a better deal or experience
- Detractors (score 0-6) don't like you so much, and may share their displeasure
The score is calculated by: % promoters - % detractors = your NPS

Scoring can range from a low of -100, to a high of +100. Anything above 0 is reasonable, anything over 50 and you’re doing very well, indeed. The objective should be continuous improvement where the focus is on turning detractors into passives and passives into promoters. The scoring is tough, huh?

It does appear that way, as many would see a score of 7/8 as OK, when in reality it just about equates to satisfactory, which is not great for customer retention and referrals. Some businesses might also consider a 5 or 6 as average but these customers are telling you there is a problem and so they are very unlikely to come back for more. However, you are only benchmarking against yourself. If your score is rather low, you obviously need to improve your customer experience.

Are you allowed more than one question?
It is up to you. Some companies include further questions on the 0-10 scale, or follow up with open ended questions. Clearly this involves more work and may reduce response rates so our advice is ideally limit the survey to one question but provide a text box where respondents can add more detail if they want to. NPS is an effective and efficient way to determine if you are seeing year-on-year improvements on how customers’ view your brand. If you want to know more about NPS, then download our free guide.