Using NPS and CRM automation to track customer happiness

What's your Net Promoter Score? 

Your first thought might be to ask, what even is a Net Promoter Score? Should you even care? And what does it have to do with my CRM?

Well, if you’ve ever seen a survey question like the one below, then you’ve already experienced Net Promoter Score, or NPS for short.

NPS is, in short, a survey question. And we all love a survey - just look at Linkedin with its Polls. 

This is because polls, surveys, questionnaires – call them what you will – can be hugely valuable to your business. They help you gather rich information about your current clients and customers.

So, if you’ve got the opportunity to survey people, surely you want to glean as much information from them as possible. And that means asking as many questions as possible.

But how many questions should you ask? You've probably experienced a survey that you started but then gave up on because it just went on and on! It's evident that the more questions you ask, the greater the chance you have of putting people off and losing them part way through. you must be cognisant of that fact that when you're conducting a survey, you’re asking people to give their time and effort. This is normally for zero return, or perhaps the chance of being randomly selected to receive an equally random gift!

If you put people off by asking too many questions, you'll obviously get fewer responses. With a reduced number of responses, how can you be sure that the data insights you gather are sufficiently representative? Will the subsequent decisions you make be robust or will they be flawed?

The flip side to this is, of course, to consider whether there’s a risk in asking too many questions? And, if you’re limited in the questions that you do ask, which ones should they be?

The Ultimate Question

NPS is a way to help us resolve this quandary. The basis of NPS is to ask the ‘ultimate question’. A single question that produces deep insight once the answers are analysed. You can ask more questions to delve deeper, but only once you ask the ‘ultimate question’ .

What is the ultimate question? It's this:

“How likely is it that you would recommend this product/service/company to a colleague or friend?”

The concept of NPS is that you ‘ultimately’ want to know whether your existing clients and customers are happy. Happy enough, that is, to promote you. Other questions, for example detailed questions to improve your products, are incidental. And, in fact, generally a waste of time if your customer is not likely to be a promotor.

The ultimate question is answered on a scale of 0-10. The responses then fall into one of three categories, as shown in the diagram below.

Your NPS is determined by a simple equation to provide a score out of 100.

Net Promoter Score and your CRM

Now that you know the ultimate question to ask, what do you do with the results?

This was a dilemma one of our clients faced - how could they leverage their CRM system to support a customer survey to help them determine their NPS score?

Integrating NPS with your CRM

There are many easily available tools that include the ability to capture NPS. For example, dedicated survey tools like SurveyMonkey, and CRM’s with in-built NPS abilities, such as Hubspot.

Our client wanted an NPS score for each of their clients. And they wanted those results to feed directly into the CRM to enable early identification of whether a client’s score was improving or deteriorating.

To support this, the client wanted to send out an NPS survey immediately once an invoice was sent. Ultimately, they wanted to determine: “Are you still happy to spend money with us?”. 

NPS survey business process

Setting up a survey is not especially difficult. As stated, you can use existing online tools for little to no cost. You could even just use Microsoft Excel and manually enter data, using formulae to determine your NPS score.

Here’s what that might look like as a business process:

However, manually sending a survey to one customer or client at a time in this way is both laborious and error prone. A solution neither CRM Insights nor our client saw as viable in the long-term.

Automating NPS in the CRM

To provide a better solution, at CRM Insights we developed for our client an automation in Workbooks CRM. You can follow-on below to see how we did it as you may decide to do something in your CRM.

It starts with the creation of an email template (2) that can be called from a drop-down menu (1) - see the image below.

The email template includes the ultimate question, as you can see in the image below.

This template is essentially a series of images within an email. To ensure that we capture data from an image file, each of the numbers (images) is selectable. Using tracking code, the number selected opens up a webpage with the chosen score pre-selected (see image below). A free text box is included on the form submission webpage to provide any further information.

Upon submission, this information is automatically updated against the contact record in the CRM (second image below).

This automation significantly streamlines the process, as you can see in the diagram below.

Or, if there is a need to send out the survey to more than one client or people within a client, the process can be extended as follows:

Using NPS and CRM automation to proactively respond to customer dissatisfaction

Through the automation described above, our client can now monitor client satisfaction on a continual basis. They can proactively respond if things are deteriorating. This is far better than responding once the horse has bolted and the client informs you that they're taking their business elsewhere!

Hopefully this article has provided you with food for thought as to how you can leverage the NPS concept; how you might integrate NPS (or other client and customer surveys) with your CRM; and how you can proactively manage client satisfaction.

Want the above results without the hassle of doing it for yourself? Or if you simply don't know where to start with CRM automations, then click the button below to schedule a call with one of our CRM experts. We'll be happy to discuss ho you can better leverage your CRM to improve your business performance.