Feeling the love: Net Promoter Score
Some of you might have noticed this question pop up while using Timely. Some of you might have x'ed out of it. Some of you might even have answered it (thank you)!
And yes, it can be a little annoying, right? The good news is that we are tweaking when (and how) this pop-up appears to make it less intrusive for you.
First up, though…
What is it?
It’s called the Net Promoter Score (or more commonly the NPS). It’s a simple, quick survey useful for any service-oriented business that wants to know how happy or satisfied their customers are.
The NPS is based around a standardised question: “How likely are you to recommend Timely to a friend or colleague?”. Customers answer by matching their feelings on a simple 0 to 10 scale – with 10 being the most likely and 0 being the least likely.
The nice thing is that because it’s standardised, we can compare ourselves against other businesses like Timely. In fact, any business who asks this simple question can measure themselves against benchmarks for similar types of businesses!
In the following illustration from netpromoter.com you can see what each response means, and how the NPS is ultimately calculated:
Over time, the NPS for a company sits somewhere on a fairly broad -100 to +100 range. To see how this might look, check out the chart (shown below) from Satmetrix. It shows the average NPS for 200 major brands across 22 industries:
Our score has hovered pretty consistently around a +60 for the last few years. Most SaaS businesses similar to Timely have a score of around +19.
What’s the NPS benchmark for your type of business?
Why it’s important
In addition to picking a score, an optional follow up question is asked to see why that score was picked. This is even more useful because it provides context for the score and more importantly, handy information for us to act on to make the Timely experience even better.
In fact, we read every piece of feedback that comes through this channel. We follow up a lot of them by email. We usually follow up if we need further clarification, or if we see a chance to provide advice on how to use Timely.
It’s also helpful for us to identify people who are looking for a specific feature, because then we can let them know when it will become available.
What our customers say
To give you an idea of what our customers are saying (maybe it was you!), here’s some lovely examples of 10/10 feedback:
- Everything. No, seriously, everything! I know a lot of hair salon owners through my business program and I’ve recommended Timely to all of them. I know a few who have looked into its and one who has taken it on and she loves it too. Theres definitely no other system I would recommend or use. I have not been paid to say the above mentioned
- Its professional, easy to use and offers me lots of info about my business
- My information is always ready and available for my staff anywhere anytime
- Easy to use, great support, continually getting better
- um everything, its simple, clean looking, works with EVERYTHING i have, syncs with everything and it doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg, oooh and if I have any questions they are answered immediately by a REAL person big fan.
- Everything it’s just perfect for my little business, save my time, very helpful with online booking I am very happy
Super nice, right?!
We never take this kind of feedback for granted and we’re truly appreciative of the thoughtful feedback we receive. In fact, it inspires us to do even better! Getting those 10s is a huge validation that we’re on the right track.
Wrapping it up
We use a fellow New Zealand business called AskNice.ly to collect and analyse our Net Promoter Score. This service is very simple to set up and use. You can also choose between collecting NPS by email or through the pop up (shown at the top of this post).
As mentioned, we’re looking at making this pop up survey less intrusive – particularly during busy times. Having said that, we would love you to take a moment or two to respond to this survey so that you can directly contribute to making Timely better.
The cool thing is that once you’ve responded then you won’t see the pop up again – well, at least not for a long time!
If you’re too busy to answer then that’s not a problem either. Just click the [x] at the top right of the page and it’ll disappear immediately.
Finally, when you say nice things about us, we share it around the company. In addition to making us feel good, it further reinforces our mission to make life-changing software for businesses just like yours.
Hey, great post on NPS. We've started using AskNicely recently for our travel software business and I was wondering if you could point me to the source of that SatMetrix chart? I'd love to see what the benchmark is for our specific comp set. Thanks! (ps - say hi to Ryan and Scoff for me)
Hi Daniel, thanks so much for the kind feedback. Glad you liked the post! Great to hear that you are using AskNicely too as it's a great app. I recommend passing in as much segment data as possible too as the leaderboards make for fascinating analysis.
Here's the page to the SatMatrix benchmarks. If you want more detail, I think you have to pay for it.
I'll pass on your greeting to Ryan and Scoff too :)
Great move to have an NPS system integrated. Any info on using other NPS system, we've been using Delighted for a while now and not planning on moving away from it as it meets our needs in the business.
Thanks Renny! We've collected NPS for a few years now but the previous tool was inadequate. AskNicely is a massive improvement and they've been wonderful to deal with.