"On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our <product name> to your friends/colleagues?" This is the first question of a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey that is used by businesses to track customer satisfaction periodically. Once you understand the purpose behind this question and realize how easy it is to create a similar survey for your own business, you’ll likely want to implement it as well. However, the key question addressed in this blog post is: "How can a customer service platform like Zoho Desk help you track and manage your NPS survey responses?"
What is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey?
A Net Promoter Score survey helps measure how loyal and happy your customers are and if they'd be willing to recommend your product or service to their friends or colleagues.
NPS survey responders can be categorized into the following three categories based on the rating they give to your product or service.
Promoters: Users who are satisfied with the product or service and give a rating of 9 or 10.
Passives: Passives usually give a rating of 7 or 8. The users who are uncertain whether they are happy or unhappy with the product. They may also be neutral about the experience as they did not have any distinguishing experience with the company and have not come across any issues with using the product or service.
Detractors: The users who are not happy with your service or product. They typically give a low rating between 0 and 6.
Through identifying and categorizing your customers, you will know how satisfied or unsatisfied your customers are with your service. This will also help you make informed decisions and form effective strategies to increase the number of promoters. To learn more about NPS surveys, please read 35 questions on implementing an actionable NPS survey.
Challenges with NPS survey implementation
In this blog post, rather than discussing general topics, the focus will be on how Zoho—specifically the Zoho Desk team—made the NPS process effective. We researched the common challenges faced by the industry and their impact on customers. We found that, for many, NPS surveys had become just another vanity metric, providing no actionable insights.
Here are the reasons why surveys do not give actionable insights:
Too many surveys: Many companies overwhelm their customers with surveys, causing the NPS survey to be overlooked or seen as just another bothersome request. To address this challenge, customer communication should be orchestrated well. If a survey requires more than a minute of their time, it risks becoming frustrating. It's also important to limit surveys to one at a time to accurately capture customer sentiment. Position the NPS survey in optimal locations, offering customers the option to either engage with it or dismiss it.
No follow-ups: When a customer, particularly a detractor, expresses dissatisfaction through an NPS survey, it’s a crucial opportunity to engage and resolve the issue. However, if the agent steps in to address the problem but the customer remains unaware of any action being taken—or if the agent lacks the necessary information and there is no clear process for follow-up—the entire effort collapses. This leads to the customer feeling that there is no value in completing the survey.
Vanity metric: Treating NPS as a success score without a clear plan of action is not a wise strategy. Taking action based on the feedback, or creating reports by region or industry to identify who is happy or unhappy, helps management develop targeted strategies to address those concerns and convert detractors and passives to promoters.
How did Zoho overcome these challenges?
Once we identified the challenges, we outlined solutions to avoid the common pitfalls in conducting NPS surveys. We focused on strategies that would not only improve the quality of feedback but also make it valuable for both our team and our customers.
Reduced the number of surveys: We, at Zoho, reduced the number of surveys sent to customers. We decided where we wanted to know the customers' experiences and placed the surveys accordingly. Similarly, we never do Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) surveys and NPS surveys together via email; the time between both is crucial to avoid overwhelming respondents. Our support emails carry the support experience (happiness ratings) survey. We placed the NPS survey within the product and on the logout page to learn how they feel about the product once every six months.
Structured follow-up process: We also make it a point to follow up with all respondents, including promoters. Detractors tend to be very responsive, seeing the NPS survey as an excellent opportunity to connect directly with product experts without facing many disruptive processes. Identifying passives, those who are neither happy nor unhappy with the service, is vital. By building a connection with them, these customers are more likely to become loyal advocates over time. Therefore, the detractors and passives are assigned to a support person, who will be responding to them from within Zoho Desk.
For promoters, the product marketing team follows up to express gratitude for their feedback and let them know we value their input, often using it to highlight the strengths of our product.
Actionable metrics: The NPS and feedback help us evaluate our product's position in the market. We use the score to identify strengths and areas for improvement and follow up with customers to gain more information. Additionally, we provide a text box for feedback, allowing customers to share their experiences, which helps us understand their needs before reaching out.
This feedback process also guides our decisions on which feature releases and product enhancements should be prioritized. Additionally, we create reports region-wise and industry-related to organize relevant webinars based on the inputs.
How to build and roll out an impactful NPS survey
Our next focus was on building an effective survey to accurately capture the sentiments of our customers. To achieve this, we proceeded with the following steps:
Deciding the goals
Drafting the survey
Publishing the NPS survey
Deciding the goals: First, we decided what we wanted to achieve through this survey. We wanted to identify promoters and use their feedback as testimonials, enhance the experience of the detractors, and convert passives into promoters.
Drafting the survey: At Zoho, we use Zoho Survey to set up NPS surveys, drafting a list of follow-up questions for promoters, passives, and detractors tailored to our needs. Zoho Survey allows us the flexibility to design workflows where questions appear based on specific criteria. It is also capable of integrating with emails.
Publishing the NPS survey: Based on our goals, we initially published the NPS survey form on the logout page. Later, we also added it within the product.
Pro tip: The NPS survey shouldn’t be limited to these specific locations; you can place it in emails or any other areas you find appropriate.
For example, if you want to assess the efficiency of your customer support team, the best place to embed the survey would be in customer support emails. If you're interested in gauging customer satisfaction with your product or service, consider placing the survey in-app, on the logout page, or in the final email of your customer support interactions.
This does not mean that you place the NPS survey at every touchpoint. It is important to be careful not to disrupt their user experience.
Using a customer service platform like Zoho Desk to track NPS responses
Once we had the survey ready, all we had to do was set up the workflow to track responses in Zoho CRM and follow up on them using Zoho Desk.
Tracking records using Zoho CRM
The survey was configured to trigger emails and create a new record under the NPS module within Zoho CRM.
The CRM records help sales people identify promoters from the records for cross-sell and upsell opportunities. The reports and analytics from the records are highly beneficial in making informed customer-centric decisions, too.
Zoho Desk in enhancing the customer experience:
This is a very important step. We should always have an organized way to respond to the customers when they have taken efforts to communicate their feedback.
At Zoho, we created an email trigger within the CRM. These emails ensure that support agents don't miss a single response. Whenever an NPS record is created, it is configured in such a way that an email is triggered to our email address, for instance, customerfeedback@zohodesk.com (could be any business email ID), from where the email is forwarded to the support email address created within Zoho Desk.
Instantly, a ticket is created within Zoho Desk with the details of the respondent. The support agents can respond from within Desk. The "from address" can be configured with the email address from which we would like to send an email (refer to the screenshot below).
The significant aspect is that the same team does not handle all promoters, passives, and detractors. This is where automation comes into play. The criteria is set to assign the promoters to a marketer, and other unassigned categories are manually picked by the support team in order to respond. This could also be automated by creating another criteria for assignment through the automation feature.
The conversations are taken forward by the respective ticket owners when the customers respond with more details when asked by the ticket owners.
Final thoughts
The entire NPS survey process can be easily automated using Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk. Zoho Desk is essential for taking action on NPS responses and is straightforward to set up. If you need assistance or have questions about using Zoho Desk to streamline the NPS process, don’t hesitate to reach out at support@zohodesk.com.
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