How Customer Service Teams Can Use NPS

As a good indicator of your customers’ satisfaction, the NPS score is a great survey for your customer service teams’ toolkit. Even though it does not assess the quality of customer service as an individual factor, it can provide insights into how happy your customers are with the support they receive.

In this blog post, you’ll find some practical tips on how your customer service team can leverage the power of NPS to gather customer feedback, analyze it, and apply the findings. 

Why does NPS matter for customer service teams?

NPS is a reflection of your customers’ general satisfaction with your product or service, and there are many factors that contribute to your score.

Although customer service teams do play a significant role in helping improve your NPS, you should always strive to collect data from across different touchpoints to have a full picture of your customers’ experience. 

Even though NPS can change depending on factors that are outside of the control of your customer service team representatives, their performance can indeed impact the score.

Answers to the follow-up question in the NPS survey are where you can find out why a customer gave you a particular score. They could offer you insights into:

• average resolution time
• average reply time
• average first response time
• average handle time
• ticket backlog
• first contact resolution rate

All of these are related to the performance of your customer service team so look out for any mention of issues in these areas.

Bear in mind that enhancing your NPS score isn't only about focusing on this particular measure. Rather, it involves optimizing the capabilities of your representatives to help them to provide positive experiences that will ultimately lead more of your customers to promote your brand through word of mouth as opposed to focusing on a numerical score. 

Run your NPS survey for free with this template:

Transactional and relational NPS: what’s the difference?

Transactional NPS (tNPS) and relational NPS (rNPS) both use the same basic concept—asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service on a scale of 0 to 10. However, they differ in terms of their focus and application.

Transactional NPS focuses on measuring your customer’s satisfaction immediately following a specific interaction with your company. It's often used to gauge the effectiveness of individual touchpoints within the customer journey, such as purchasing, customer support, or product delivery. It can help you identify specific pain points and address them quickly.

You can measure tNPS using this survey template:

Relational NPS, on the other hand, focuses on measuring overall customer satisfaction and loyalty, taking a broader view of your customers’ relationship with your business. You should measure rNPS at regular intervals (e.g., quarterly or annually) and independently of individual interactions or transactions. 

You can and should use a combination of both approaches to gain a comprehensive understanding of your customer experience and drive continuous improvement.

How to use NPS in customer service

Although NPS reflects overall satisfaction with your brand, there are ways customer service teams can help improve it. 

If you find out that customers who were helped by a particular agent consistently give you better scores, perhaps that’s an indication that you should train the rest of your team to provide an equally satisfying level of service. 

Also, if you notice that your score fluctuates one way or another in surveys filled in right after an interaction with the support team, that could mean you need to pay more attention to it.

Run your NPS survey

The first step to improving your customer service experience is to select an NPS tool that will allow you to quickly send out your NPS surveys and integrate with any software you’re already using. There are numerous survey tools available on the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Look for tools that specifically offer NPS survey features or templates.

The ideal tool should be user-friendly and easy to navigate. This is especially important if you are not tech-savvy or if multiple team members will be using the tool. Check for drag-and-drop interfaces, ready-made templates, and a smooth learning curve.

Survicate allows you to launch contextual NPS surveys on any channel you want, including email, websites, in-product, or in mobile apps. You can also send the responses to third-party tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, and Intercom with native, no-code integrations. What’s more, with Survicate you can optimize the NPS survey experience with follow-up questions, survey logic, and automatic translations.

Calculate your score

Once you’ve collected your responses, it’s time to calculate your NPS score. It’s super easy to work it out, but if you’re using a good survey tool, you’ll get an automatic calculation. 

We wrote about the NPS formula in our recent blog post:

⮕ Net Promoter Score: What Is It and How to Calculate It

Segment and analyze NPS responses

Look beyond the NPS score when segmenting your responses. For your customer service team to make the most of the NPS survey, you can segment your respondents based on:

• demographics, including factors such as age, gender, location, income, and others that are relevant to your business;
• touchpoints, by looking at how customer experience changes in different parts of the customer journey;
• common themes, by reviewing the open-ended comments to identify patterns, sentiments, or specific issues. You can use text analytics, sentiment analysis, or natural language processing (NLP) tools to help with this process. 

To get a more holistic view of customer experience, combine your NPS data with any other customer feedback channels you use (e.g., customer support tickets, social media, etc.) 

Train your customer service team

Ensure that your customer service team understands the importance of NPS and is engaged in the process of analyzing and acting on the feedback. Provide training and resources to help them effectively address customer concerns and improve satisfaction.

Make NPS a Customer Service KPI

You can make NPS one of your customer service team’s KPIs, alongside other relevant metrics such as average speed to answer and resolution rate. 

However, since customer service is not the only department responsible for keeping the NPS high, set clear and reasonable objectives by defining the role of NPS in your organization's customer service strategy. 

You can even use previous NPS feedback to identify areas for improvement and track them in the future. Prioritize actions based on their potential impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Respond to each participant

Acknowledging and thanking customers for taking the time to provide feedback demonstrates that you value their opinions and care about their experience. This can help strengthen customer relationships, and improve your NPS score in the long term.

By following up with each participant and letting them know what action you took, you to will also build trust and close the feedback loop.

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Re-run the survey 

To get a picture of how your customer service team contributes to your NPS score, you need to measure the metric regularly. 

Choose a frequency that works for you, taking into account your capability to measure the impact of the changes you implemented.

If you run your NPS surveys regularly, it will make it much easier to compare your score with industry benchmarks and competitors to understand your relative performance and set realistic improvement goals.

Conclusion

Customer satisfaction is a combination of numerous factors, with the quality of customer service being one of them.

NPS is a handy metric that can help you gather insights into the reasons behind your customers’ experience with your brand, including how happy they are with the support they get.

To get started, simply run an NPS survey and zoom in on the responses you receive. Sign up today and start measuring your customers’ satisfaction.