NPS Best Practices for SaaS

Can you recall how you found out about the last app you downloaded or service you signed up for? Despite an abundance of information and plenty of solutions and options a simple search away, we still listen to each other most when discovering our next favorite product. Especially for SaaS, we want what helps others succeed!For your SaaS product, the most powerful form of marketing is word of mouth. Your promoters can be one of the most important marketing tools you can leverage for reaching and quickly selling to new customers and growing your business. NPS is the best way to track and use this information as well as better understand how to improve your product for long term success. NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is a simple survey that shows you how your users are receiving your product. It lets you know how many of your users are very happy and which are not and likely to turn. The better your NPS score, the more satisfied your users are with your product. The worse it is, the more you need to meet their needs. It’s a very useful rolling indicator as your product evolves.

Here are best practices for tracking and leveraging NPS for SaaS:

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1. Send the NPS survey with a reasonable time span
2. Send NPS surveys via different channels
3. Have a branded look and feel to your NPS surveys
4. Segment your NPS audience and analytics
5. Take different actions after different NPS results
6. Track NPS over time to identify which actions were effective to improve it
7. Compare your NPS with your SaaS peers
8. Analyze replies and identify patterns or keywords for your best features and those which need to be improved
9. Use NPS internally for decision-making and sales

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[anchor id=NPS_time_span]Send the NPS survey with a reasonable time span:

When reaching out to your user base and asking them to take actions that benefit you and not necessarily them, it’s important to have good timing. You don’t want to ask too soon after customers have signed up. They wouldn’t even have really known much about your product yet and it’s not relevant.

You also don’t want to ask too often. Especially if you’re going to be sending out emails, you don’t want to bother users too much to where they ignore messages from your team. Every week is definitely too much and once a month may be too much as well. Every 8-12 weeks is more reasonable and will give users time to experience your product and the changes your team is releasing. You will always have new users coming on at different times, so it’s important to send NPS surveys in relation to their time signed up. An automated survey after a certain number of weeks after sign up followed by a reasonable schedule throughout their user lifetime is the best way to make this personalized and effective.

[anchor id=channels]Send NPS surveys via different channels:

You can always send NPS surveys via email. But email engagement, even for highly engaged users, is typically low. You might get a 20% open rate and hopefully a 2-5% response rate. This isn’t very high and won’t give you the overall look at how your product is performing for your customers. It’s best to ask your users for a score in different places that might be more “in-context”. This can be as a pop up when they open your app on their phone or desktop or you can ask within the app with Beamer NPS.

Beamer NPS displays a simple rating for users right within your app so that they can answer while they’re actually using your app. It’s in context, it takes literally a few seconds and users don’t have to go out of their way to give you an answer. You’re much more likely to get responses when users are already within your app and there are no additional steps. Either way, having broader coverage is important. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to include additional questions that users can give individual answers to via a survey link as well. With Beamer NPS, you can send via email as a general link as well. It’s important to have different channels so you get a broader result base.

[anchor id=branded]Have a branded look and feel to your NPS surveys:

Ensure that your NPS surrey does not look like it’s an out of the box, third party survey thrown into your product or website. This can look unprofessional and likely decrease your response rate. Change the look of your survey pop up or sidebar with CSS that matches your fonts, colors, etc. Also make sure the language makes sense for your product and is in context. Maybe “How likely are you to recommend this to a friend?” isn’t as relevant for your product as something as simple as “How would you rate our product?”

[anchor id=segment]Segment your NPS audience and analytics:

It’s easier to understand NPS results when you can segment where they come from within your user base. With Beamer, NPS, you can segment results who get your NPS survey. You can segment by demographic, language, location, and past behavior to interact with users. Language and location segmentation can help you understand cultural differences and their effect on customer satisfaction. With this, you can identify which users are more demanding, more or less satisfied, etc. and make better decisions. For example, you can see NPS differences between admins or just general users.

[anchor id=actions_after_NPS_result]Take different actions after different NPS results:

You can also include different follow up actions depending on the score they give you to improve their experience with your product.  For example, for users that give your product a good score and are promoters, you want to encourage them and suggest ways to share your product. You can also reward users who are promoters by offering a perk for sharing your product. For example, Dropbox encouraged satisfied early users to share their product in exchange for additional free storage space. It made their customers like them even more.

If users rate your product poorly, you should send a follow up message and ask for additional feedback. You can also set a task for your team to reach out personally and give them excellent customer service to solve any problems and prevent them from churning out. Your team may learn a lot about problems with your product and where to improve with personal outreach like this. Read more about understanding and working with SaaS detractors.

[anchor id=track_NPS_over_time]Track NPS over time to identify which actions were effective to improve it

NPS is an incredibly strong indicator of what your team is doing right and wrong as you grow and evolve your product. It can serve as a tool for rating your decisions like new features, updates, etc. as well as understanding what about your product is most important for users. You should continue to ask users over time and in relation to big changes you’re making to get an idea of how the changes you make affect overall user sentiment and satisfaction with your product. On the Beamer NPS backend, you can see scores and analytics on their changes over time to give your team an easy overview of how your NPS has changed over time with changes you’ve made. There are other ways to track user sentiment as you announce changes. By announcing new features, updates, bug fixes, etc. on your Beamer feed, users can leave direct and indirect feedback through opens, clicks, comments, and reactions. Your Beamer feed sits within your product and can be opened with a simple icon in your interface or a “What’s New” tab in your navigation. It’s a direct way to see what is exciting and interesting to your users.

[anchor id=compare_NPS_peers]Compare your NPS with your SaaS peers:

NPS at first glance can feel like a generic number with little meaning. You need benchmarks to better understand if your score is good or not and where you should aim for in terms of customer satisfaction. Some industries are tougher than others! There are plenty of reports available on industry and niche market NPS scores that you can compare to your own. Learn what a good NPS score for SaaS is here.

[anchor id=identify_patterns]Analyze replies and identify patterns or keywords for your best features and those which need to be improved

With NPS responses, you can also get more direct feedback around what is working with users and what needs to be improved. You can identify patterns in answers and comments from surveys through keyword searches to better understand what features are a hit with your users and what areas are not receiving positive attention and need to be improved on. It’s also good practice to keep track of keywords and phrases that are repeatedly used in comments as they give insight as to what is most important to users.

[anchor id=use_NPS_internally]Use NPS internally for decision-making and sales:

NPS shouldn't just be a “vanity metric” that you share on your website or social media. It’s important to put it into action and extract the valuable information it provides. It’s a source of high quality feedback from your users directly. NPS reports should be shared internally with your product, development, and sales and marketing teams for decision making. It’s great for determining what on your roadmap has worked to satisfy customers and what has not so far. It’s also a great sales pitching tool and a solid “recommendation” or qualification from your users to your leads. NPS can be an incredibly useful tool not only for getting to know your customers and their feelings towards your product, but also of one for decision making and relationship building. Keeping in touch with users and ensuring that you’re concerned about their success helps keep them loyal to your company. Analyzing their feedback helps your team make decisions that deliver. NPS is a guide to all of this. Try Beamer NPS for an easy way to manage NPS and analyze results as your team engages with your users.