Welcome to the Relationship Economy — whether you like it or not.
Some of you may be excited to start engaging with your customers/clients more. Some of you may not be. Some of you may see it as a necessary chore. Some of you may be worried about what feedback you could receive. Despite your personal feelings as you begin to monitor your customer/client experience, it’s important remember how crucial it is. In today’s ‘Relationship Economy,’ Customer Experience Monitoring is indispensable. Commit to it. Make NPS part of your corporate discussion. Report monthly. Share insights between departments. “See something? Say something.” Route responses to the people and departments who can implement and effectuate change. Encourage this type of sharing and engage your employees.

Emailing Best Practices

Subject lines are important. Certain language can trigger spam filters and deceptive subject lines can anger your audience. It’s best to be honest and direct in asking for feedback. Popular choices are “(Company Name) Client Survey” or “(Company Name) would like your feedback”. If you’re in an industry where there is generally limited engagement with your customer, it’s often helpful to send an email in advance letting them know that you’ll be sending a survey and that the feedback is important to you.

Maximizing Response Rates

Keep your email survey short, simple and unobtrusive. Short surveys for low effort customer impact. An NPS question that is answerable from within the email itself is the best way to go. Make surveys as personal as possible. This means making sure surveys are being sent by the most appropriate contact for that customer. Use an NPS platform which allows you create sender profiles and map survey blasts from specific account managers. Always include a personalized signature at the bottom of the email. Some of our clients even choose to include photos of themselves in the signature. Another important best practice in increasing response rates is a personalized domain. Make sure your platform allows you to deploy these surveys from a personalized domain so your audience knows this is coming from you.

Cast a Wide Net

You want to hear from as many of your clients/customers/members as you can. Depending on your industry and business model this might mean setting up different campaigns for different product types, events, or mediums of engagement. To this end, it’s helpful if your NPS platform has the flexibility to not only send surveys via email, but also to deploy a pop-up NPS box on your website and post web links to surveys from your social media page. You want to collect as much feedback as possible from as many people who interact with your brand as you can.

Respond to Every Survey you Receive

Satisfaction monitoring isn’t just about gaining intelligence in the form of quantitative data, and verbatim feedback. You are also trying encourage and foster a relationship between your company and your customer. For that reason, you must always ‘close the loop’ with your respondents. Respond to every score or verbatim you receive. Thank them for their feedback. Let them know you’re listening. Make it personal.

NPS is an Ongoing Process

Make sure you’re tracking your NPS campaigns over time. Segment and Analyze your data and trends alongside your financial and operational data. Look for trending words in verbatim feedback with ‘Text Analysis’ and segment your data to see how sentiment differs among variations in the customer sample. Report quarterly (or more often) as you would financial or operational data.

Be Consistent — Keep to a Schedule

When it comes to monitoring ‘Relationship NPS’ across your entire audience/client list/customer base, scheduling matters. Your ideally want to engage your audience quarterly — 4 times a year. How you’d like to break that down as far as fielding surveys daily/weekly/monthly is up to you and dependent on your audience size. ‘Anniversary renewal’ business models and SaaS companies often schedule survey blasts based on renewal dates. Some companies stagger survey blasts in other ways. Send to 1% of your audience a day — or 7% a week. It comes out to about 4 surveys a year. Schedule and automate these blasts ahead of time. Timing of your first NPS survey to a new customer will vary based on your business, but as a general guidance, you want to engage your new customer shortly after they become your customer — but not so soon that they haven’t fully experienced your content/product/service.

For ‘Transactional NPS’ campaigns, the same general timing rule applies. A lot of e-commerce businesses like to do 2 days after the transaction (or after receiving shipment). This can be automated through integration with your CRM platform.

Customize your NPS to Suit You

Again, not all industries and business models are the same. Make sure you have the ability to customize the wording of the NPS question to suit your needs. Recommending you to a “Friend” may not apply to your office printer ink provider and a “Colleague” recommendation may not be appropriate when talking about your online dating service. If you’re measuring satisfaction with a recent interaction you can preface the question with “Based on your recent support experience”, or something along those lines. Flexibility is one of the most important factors in choosing an NPS platform — particularly for B2B service businesses.
Also incredibly important for some businesses is the ability to ask custom follow up questions. These customized questions will help you yield richer feedback on more specific areas of inquiry.

Send Reminders

Don’t underestimate the power of reminder emails. Sending a reminder email to individuals who didn’t answer the first time is extremely effective in increasing your response rates. Just don’t send more than two of them.

If you’re looking for a sophisticated, flexible, and intuitive NPS monitoring platform that can handle everything above, take a look at ours. Sibyl Surveys is all you need. And more.