Tracking your NPS®: why it matters and how it’s done

3 ways tracking NPS can help grow your business

When Fred Reichheld and his team at Bain & Company developed the Net Promoter System, they tested out all sorts of questions related to customer loyalty and engagement and found that Net Promoter Score had a greater correlation to growth than any other metric they studied. In other words, if some other question showed a stronger correlation to growth, they would have used that question as the foundation for their system.

With this in mind, here are three ways that tracking NPS regularly can help your business thrive.

1. NPS is a benchmark for improvement

You can’t work to improve what you don’t track, and tracking your NPS benchmarks over time can show whether the changes you implement in your business are working. Plus, you can track NPS to see how customer feedback varies across different segments, such as:

• Major customer demographics or psychographics

• Cohorts of customers who responded to specific messaging

• Customers who deal with different divisions within your company

• All customers who dealt with individual Sales or Customer Support reps

• Customers who use certain product lines exclusively

Armed with this data, you can identify where the customer experience needs improvement, make changes, and measure what works and doesn’t.

2. NPS unites everyone around a single metric

When leaders focus solely on revenue and profit, employees tend to follow their lead. If jobs are tied to revenue or profit, people can naturally tend to prioritize earnings over customer experience. Needless to say, this is not a recipe for long-term growth.

NPS unites everyone around a common goal—customer-centricity—and this leads to less customer churn and greater, more sustainable growth year over year.

3. Tracking demonstrates the relationship between NPS and success

Even if you’re already sold on the value of NPS, you might get pushback from colleagues who are more focused on immediate return. Fortunately, you can win over skeptics (especially CFOs) by calculating the economic return on your NPS projects.

The following example is taken from Reichheld’s The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World.

Tracking NPS: how Apple boosted revenue by $25 MM (USD) in one year

Apple retail stores tracked NPS on a 0-10 scale, and unhappy customers who rated their experience 0-6 (detractors) received a follow-up call from the store manager. In some cases, managers weren’t able to get ahold of the customer, so Apple also tracked the difference between the customers who spoke with the manager and those who didn’t.

Over the next two years of detractor-tracking, it turned out that people who had spoken with a manager spent substantially more than those who didn’t. In fact, every hour the store manager spent on the phone translated to $1,000 in extra revenue—which came to $25 MM (USD) after one year.

How to track your NPS

Remember: NPS consists of more than one single question:

• “How likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague on a scale from 0 to 10?” (the standard NPS question)

• “What’s the main reason for your score?"

• “What could we do better?”

You’ll notice that the first question is closed-ended, while the others are open-ended. Here’s how to track both the closed-ended and open-ended data.

Tracking survey answers for a closed-ended NPS question

Tracking the closed-ended survey question is relatively simple and is usually done automatically by the NPS tool you choose to set up your surveys. As the tool collects the NPS data, it offers you a visualization like the one above, which helps you look at trends over the course of a set period of time.

In the case of Hotjar’s NPS tool, you can filter by the last 7, 15, 30, 90, or 180 days or even take a 12-month visualization to get a wider look at how your Net Promoter Score is trending over time. Similarly, you can zoom in and get a closer look at how scores are distributed by charting weekly or even daily data points on the graph.

Tracking survey answers for open-ended NPS questions

Tracking customer responses from the other NPS questions is a bit more challenging since it comes from open-ended questions, but this data is key to your improvement efforts—if you don’t know what went wrong, you’ll never be able to fix it.

The good news is that we’ve created a guide to help you analyze open-ended data in 5 simple steps, and we promise it’s easier than it sounds! All it takes is a Hotjar account and a working knowledge of Excel or Google Sheets.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.