How to Improve your SaaS NPS Score

Your NPS score is much more than another analytics stat to occasionally check and hope you see some improvement. Your NPS score tells the story of customer success and the success of your product itself. A good, value-driven product is a strong basis for improving your NPS score. Effort to improve your NPS should be product-centric. It requires a focus on improving your product, listening to your customers, and providing and excellent customer support. When you can guarantee that your product helps users be more successful, your NPS will improve.

Here are some actionable ways that your team can work to improve your product, customer success, and your NPS:

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1. Start with a strong product
2. Update and improve your product
3. Leverage feedback effectively
4. Focus on customer success
5. Leverage promoters for their influence and knowledge of your product
6. Learn from conversations and feedback from detractors

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[anchor id="start_with_a_strong_product"]1. Start with a strong product.

As mentioned before, your product is the basis for customer success. For your customers to be successful,  your product should help them solve a problem with little friction. It should be easy for anyone to learn and use on a regular basis, even as you improve and change it. Your UX should be intuitive and informative. Your product shouldn’t have bugs and if they are found, your team should work to get them resolved quickly. Customers won’t settle for consistent issues. Your product should be value driven, meaning that all parts of it should support users in their goals. A good rule of thumb for a strong product: your product should be everything your user needs and nothing they don’t!

[anchor id="update_and_improve_your_product"]2. Update and improve your product.

Users want to be a part of a growing, changing product. Their needs are going to always be shifting and if your product keeps up, they will stay happy.

To keep users happy and your NPS high:

• consistently release new features
• Listen to your customers about what features they want  
• Release regular updates with bug fixes

It’s not enough to just improve and build, your customers have to know about it! You also want them to notice all the work your team is putting in and actually engage with new features. Make sure you communicate changes effectively. With Beamer, you can announce new features and updates in context within your product or on your site. Beamer is a changelog that opens as an interactive sidebar when users click “What’s New” in your navigation. You can post engaging updates here to show users how your team is working to improve your product and prompt them to engage with new features and updates right away.

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With Beamer, you can add to updates:

• Photos and GIFs
• Videos and tutorials on new features
• CTAs to features

Beamer can help to improve your communication with users as well as boost engagement with features. The more users know and understand your product and its changes, the more value they are likely to find in it. As you’re adding new features and making updates, it’s important to see how users react so your team can continue to stay on the right path of building a product that supports their needs. A better and improved product will consistently lead to better NPS scores.

[anchor id="leverage_feedback_effectively"]3. Leverage feedback effectively.

Feedback can be powerful in determining if your product is in a good place and valuable to your users. There is a lot to learn about how to improve from speaking with customers or watching their behavior. Through user feedback, you can learn where you can improve your UX and what features your users are looking for next to improve your NPS.

You can collect feedback and track changes in user behavior a few ways:

• Heatmaps to track users movements and engagement  
• Beamer reactions and comments
• Ask them: send surveys or ask for a quick call
• Watch your NPS score as your product changes

On Beamer, when you announce new features and updates, users can leave reactions and comments. You can review this data on the backend as well as open and click through rates on announcements to get a better understanding of what customers are excited about.

It’s also important to watch how your NPS score changes with announcements and product changes. With Beamer NPS, it’s easy to track this and get an overall look at the data. You want new features and updates to improve NPS and meet customers' needs to where they are happy enough to tell you so. It’s a powerful metric in gauging how to move forward with your product from a customer success perspective. For an easy way to track NPS and engage with customers to improve NPS, try out Beamer.

[anchor id="focus_on_customer_success"]4. Focus on customer success.

Customer success starts at the top. When your team’s culture is focused on customer success and your entire team understands that customers doing their jobs better is the sole focus of your product, you will innately get better results. Your team, from sales, marketing, customer support, and product development will be able to make better decisions collectively to support customer success. Happier customers means a better NPS.

Provide excellent, personalized customer service:

It’s so simple but can be so hard to execute: great customer service. Especially if your team is small, this can seem like a large feat but there are ways you can show customers you're there that can have a big impact on solving their problems as well as their perception of your team and product.

How can you provide great customer service?

• Use support chat within your product and on your site where customers can get replies right away. For a small team to gain 24/7 coverage, a chatbot may be a better option.
• A strong and complete FAQ (regularly updated)
• A help center with search capabilities and guides on how to use your product
• Respond to customers  - make it a team effort

When your customers feel supported and you can work with them to improve how they use your product, they are more likely to be happy with your product overall.

[anchor id="leverage_promoters"]5. Leverage promoters for their influence and knowledge of your product.

Your promoters are your biggest advocates. They see the value of your product and they are happy. They are successful customers. You want to understand their perspective as much as possible because it can help your team better serve other customers, make educated improvements, and market and sell your product better. Beamer can help you get your NPS and discover your promoters. With Beamer NPS, you can ask your users for a score in the context of your product. On the backend, you can see the results and see which users rated what score. This helps you to identify your promoters and you can reach out to them with a longer survey, a few personal questions, or get them on the phone. A good way to get them promoters sharing your product is by setting Beamer up to where when someone scores your product a 9-10, they automatically receive a note asking them to share your product on social media or leave a public review.

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When engaging with promoters, you’ll want to better understand:

• What features they love
• What improvements they’d like to see
• What kind of language they use around your product
• How they use your product in their process

Your product marketing team can take this and apply it not only to marketing and sales, but customer support, and work with dev to improve your product and lay out an effective new features roadmap.

[anchor id="learn_from_conversations_and_feedback"]6. Learn from conversations and feedback from detractors.

Your detractors are also a place where you can learn a lot - if not the most. Detractors are customers who are not finding value in your product. They are a wealth of information in the sense that they can tell you:

• What features they don’t like
• What your product lacks
• Where your team is not helpful
• How your product is not helping them achieve their end goals

Some of the issues they face can easily be fixed by your team, improving your product and user experience, and improving customer success. Your team also will know where to focus efforts in terms of updates and new features to help customers. To find and engage detractors, it’s easy. You can use the same process as finding promoters on Beamer. Beamer allows you to easily ask your score within your product or via email and you can then find the users who scored you the lowest on the backend.

Here are ways you can engage and learn from detractors:

• send an easy survey
• personally reach out to these users to start a conversation
• offer a phone call to better understand their experience

Engaging personally with detractors can help your team better understand what improvements your product needs and possibly stop users from churning out when you show personal support. Learn more about understanding NPS detractors and what to do with them!Increasing your SaaS NPS score is an ongoing effort involving not only product, but also customer success. Delivering a good product, improving it consistently and providing an outstanding support are key elements for happy and loyal customers. For an easy way to measure NPS and engage customers, try Beamer today.