NPS Is Broken. Here's How To Fix It

If you’ve ever paid attention to company emails, you’ve noticed a small section at the end asking for a score of 1-10. That is a company’s way of gauging their NPS (Net Promoter Score) and how satisfied users are with them – plus the likelihood that you’ll become an advocate. A score of 1-6 identifies a detractor, 7-8 neutral, and 9 or 10, possibility that you will become a promoter of the product.

Taking your score, we look at (% of promoters) – (% of detractors) to get your NPS.

Notice the issue? NPS works as a high-level indicator. You can see why this is a problem, right?

NPS tells you how your customer feels at the moment and will vary throughout their lifecycle. You need a better way to measure loyalty and NPS is not the answer.

Understand The “Why” Behind Customer Behavior

Actions speak louder than words. What your customers tell you is never the complete truth. The same goes for scoring their experience with your product.

Imagine one of your customers buys from your website. At that moment, their dopamine levels will be surging. They hunted a new product and made the conscious decision to buy. If you were to send them an NPS survey right then, you would more than likely receive a high score.

Before they receive their item, there may be delays in delivery. Then once it arrives, it may end up not being what your customer expected. Know what happens next?

If you follow up with another survey, your customer may feel you deserve a 5; you now have a detractor.

If you want to understand your customers, you need to look at the “Why” behind their actions.

How To Streamline Product Engagement

To understand the “Why” behind customer actions, measure everything then slice your data to make sense of your customers’ journeys. Do this with custom events in Facebook App Events or Google Analytics event tracking. Then create custom funnels that will help you understand your customer experience.

For example, if you own an e-commerce site, track the most common purchases that lead to repeat buyers. A repeat buy is an excellent sign of satisfaction. By tracking this, you’ll be able to build and test hypotheses that will lead you to develop the same experience for other products on your site.

But there is a downside to using event-based tracking. Whenever you redesign your UX, you will have to create more custom events to track the new features. Then, you’ll need to revise your funnels that use the deprecated events. Replacing or adding additional events can be cumbersome, and if your development team is busy, it will be a significant bottleneck. You do not want development resources to be the bottleneck in your growth.

Fortunately, you can streamline engagement and tracking using automatic analytics tools.

Automatic analytics lets you slice your data and backtest funnels. This helps identify insights about your CX (customer experience) beyond an NPS score.

What’s exciting is that you can understand the actions a promoter took to become engaged. Then see where your detractors fell off and re-engage them to uncover new insights.

The Role of Live Chat

Product analytics gives us a quantitative view of our customer satisfaction and behavior. But, there’s also a way to get a more in-depth qualitative view, live chat. While NPS tools allow customers to score their experience, having an actual conversation via live chat goes much further into answering the ‘why’.

Imagine you notice an issue in your customer lifecycle, but your quantitative data doesn’t help you understand the reason behind it. Using live chat, engage your customers experiencing the problem to get qualitative data. A conversation may be all you need to understand what your team may have overlooked.

You can even engage cohorts of customers who made it past the issue to understand why their experience was different. Chatting with these customers can uncover a trove of insights that only a combination of NPS, analytics, and user research would identify.

One approach is to use your analytics funnels to discover bottlenecks, then insert live chat pop-ups in those areas to engage your customers. That way, you can find and resolve the issue for everyone and convert the visitor into a promoter.

In fact, one of the worlds largest cookware retailers did that. By looking at their data, Sur La Table discovered that “driving people to category pages led to a 12% increase in total views of product pages as well as a 6% increase in conversion rates.”

That was not possible with Sur La Table’s old system; Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics. Their old system did an excellent job of delivering high-level metrics but didn’t allow them to answer behavioral questions.

Once they switched over to Heap, they were able to answer behavioral questions leading them to discover that the more products customers viewed, the more likely they were to convert.

If you’d like to learn more, we’ve outlined Sur La Tables customer journey into a customer story. Click here to read our Sur La Table customer story at Heap.