Wootric

Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, interviewed Wootric CEO and cofounder Deepa Subramanian at Dreamforce 2016, getting her thoughts on best practices for Net Promoter Score for startups and learning how – in two short years – she grew the NPS platform she built herself into a runaway success with users in 75 countries around the world. Here are highlights from the interview!

How Deepa built Wootric from code to customers

Jason: Deepa, tell us about what Wootric does, how big you are, and any other core metrics.

Deepa: Well, to give you some context, I was a very early engineer at Salesforce, starting in 2003, and it’s been kind of a wild ride since. I went to law school. I practiced law for a bit. I ran Schmendricks bagels, my first foray into entrepreneurship.

But my true passion is technology so this is where we are. Wootric is a Net Promoter Score tracking platform that helps companies boost customer happiness. This is what we are today. But what we really want to bring to businesses is intelligent turn-key customer feedback management that helps them align the entire company around the customer and customer experience metrics. Like NPS.

Jason: Let’s talk a lot about that. But first, just because of your background, let’s go back in time. How is building software today different than it was when you were at Salesforce? And what surprised you about building software today?

Deepa: That I could do it. I mean, I built Wootric, just me.

Jason: Just you?

Deepa: In this universe, with AWS and Heroku, my first six months of MVP cost me nothing. I was able to manage the entire stack — whereas when I joined Salesforce, I think we were over a 100-person company. You needed 11 developers and a whole infrastructure team.

Jason: So you built the prototype, or even version one, all by yourself in six months?

Deepa: It had actually been about 10 years since I coded, so what I did was work for two weeks with a consulting company called Thoughtbot, where we peer programmed the MVP, and then I took it on.

Jason: So that de-rustified you. And then you brought on the rest of the founding team?

Deepa: Jessica Pfeifer is actually a very old friend of mine. She is a brand marketer, most recently at Clorox. But I knew that before Harvard Business School she had been a marketing consultant in China running what were basically customer experience survey programs.

I did a user interview with Jess at her kitchen table, and it was so productive and so exciting that I said, “Jess — you need to come work with me. How do I convince you?” She’s one of those people who goes by her gut, and she said, “I’m going to do this with you.”

Jason: When did you decide to expand the team? Was it when you got your first paying customers?

Deepa: I think it was after we raised our first round of financing.

Jason: Well that certainly helps, to pay their salaries. And how much did you raise?

Deepa: Jessica and I raised $2.5M from Cloud Apps Capital and others.

Jason:  Just the two of  you? That’s pretty badass. It’s certainly a testament to you. Did you have paying customers yet?

Deepa: We had in the range of 10 or 15 customers at the time who could be referenced. This was in April, 2015.

Jason: What did they say they loved about Wootric that helped convince your investors?

Deepa: Two things. First, the end-user survey experience. I think they thought this was so unique, since NPS products tended to focus on the experience of the person giving the survey.  The other thing was that it took them just a few minutes to install. Which for the enterprises we were talking to – they had never seen anything like that.

Jason: This makes me curious, and I’d like to back up for just a moment. How did you get the first 10 customers? Where did they come from?

Deepa: Hustle. The very first few important customers were basically my network, talking to CMOs, customer success. 

Jason:  If the first 10 customers were hustle, where did customers 11-100 come from?

Deepa: All inbound.  We have this viral component–people saw the survey. They loved it, and they were, like, “Who is this?” And they clicked on the “powered by Wootric” in the survey. So, the next big five customers came in virally. Today, we have over 100 paying customers. It’s been a third virality, a third content marketing, and a third partnerships.

Basically, what I’ve learned is if you want a repeatable, scalable outbound sales model you need to have sales professionals come in. We’ve now brought on two AE’s and these are very unique individuals. They’re good at what they do, but they’re very creative. They know that this is not something that’s been figured out already and they’re ready to listen, give me feedback, work on this model. One of them has a strong B2C Rolodex, and he understands brands really well. The other is much more experienced selling to SaaS companies, B2B organizations.

Net Promoter Score from vanity metric to KPI

Jason: Okay, let’s shift the conversation to talk a little bit about NPS. Let me start with the transformation in my thinking. I used to hate NPS, and here’s why. My experience working with NPS at a Fortune 500 company was that it was an excuse for mediocrity. You could have a stale product that was no longer competitive in the market, but your existing customers loved it because they were used to it. Thus, you could see very high scores in very mediocre products. That turned me off.

Then I started to work with a few dozen SaaS companies and they all tracked NPS early. At that point, I saw the magic, and now I am a big proponent. So, what’s changed NPS? Maybe I’m viewing it wrongly, but I think there’s almost been a revolution how people think about it.

Deepa: NPS used to be looked at a vanity metric, but now people have realized the power of using this as a period-to-period key performance indicator (KPI). That’s when it becomes really powerful. Companies have also come to realize that NPS is not a program that you run once a year, or once every six months. You want to incorporate it into your ongoing reporting. Also, people have realized that the data is applicable across the organization, beyond just Insights or Marketing. 

Jason: Should NPS be one of the top 5 or 6 metrics for the whole company?

Deepa: Absolutely. It should be a board metric. 

Jason: Everyone in the company should be responsible for NPS.

Don’t be spammy about NPS surveys

Jason: Some folks get worried, especially if they haven’t done NPS before, that they’ll annoy their customers if they ask them for too much too often. And I know if you use something like Wootric, the bar is very low. It only takes 60 seconds or 30 seconds. But should I be worried about asking for too much feedback from customers?

Deepa: Absolutely, you can’t be spammy about surveys. Wootric’s so end-user focused–very careful about right question, right time, right customer, right device. And all of this needs to be coordinated. If you have the resources to do it yourself by all means do it. But Wootric can do all that for you.

Jason: How often can I survey my customers, at least for NPS, without asking too often? What’s the right cadence?

Deepa: It really depends on the business. Let’s take a SaaS company for example. If your customers are engaging pretty frequently in your products, I would say once every three months. But what you want to do with that is get a statistical sample. You want to smooth out the collection so that you’re talking to everyone over the course of that three-six month period.

What about segmenting NPS by user group?

Jason: How much should I segment my NPS by customer base?

Deepa: It kind of depends on the size of your user base. That said, segmentation is really useful. If we’re talking about SaaS companies, you want to know how your enterprise base is doing, versus your plus level customers, and so on.

Jason: If you segment between small, medium and large you’re often going to see very different data in those segments, right?

Deepa: Absolutely. But if you don’t have statistical numbers in each of those groups, then your score is just going to be noise [focus instead on the qualitative feedback you are getting.] So you need to think about how big is each user base and whether the numbers are actually significant.

What if I have a low Net Promoter Score?

Jason: Here’s another high level NPS question. What if my NPS is low, say ten or worse?

Deepa: Do not fixate on a low score number. Just worry about moving it and worry about the trend. Your customers are giving you feedback. Take that input, and do everything you can to drive up your score.

Jason: Do you think there are certain industries or verticals that inherently have lower NPS than others?

Deepa: Providing a good user experience is definitely more challenging in some industries. Airlines come to mind. But I don’t want to demotivate any company at the outset. You have to start somewhere. If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Jason: If my NPS is lower than I like, how much can I change it in one period of time? What’s a reasonable expectation? Let’s say I’m at 20, and I want to be at 40. What’s the right goal, and how quickly can I expect results?

Deepa: I think the right goal is a couple of percentage points every period. You know, maybe one period is one quarter, maybe a period is six months.

But what you actually want to see more is different signifiers, not just the score moving up. For instance, how many passives, which are basically low hanging fruit, have I moved over to promoters. Or how many detractors have I gotten to be passives? How many have I rescued from churning? You do want to move the score a couple of points up, but you really want to dig in a little bit more and have tangible shifts that will lead to score increases.

Jason: Let me ask you one more tough question. What should my NPS goal be for the end of next year? For example, if I’m 20, should I aim for 50 percent improvement next year? If I’m already high – if I’m 60 or 70 – should I aim to maintain it, or go even higher?

Deepa: The goal is the same regardless of the number, to get those promoters to give you the referrals. Get those passives to love you. Get those detractors not to churn. That said, if you trust your program, a concrete goal to strive for would be to get it up every single period by a couple percentage points.

How can startups implement Net Promoter Score early?

Jason: Okay, here’s my last question. I want to implement NPS today. I’m busy, I’m tired, I have a lot going on, but I’m excited, and I want to get started. How do I do this with Wootric?

Deepa: If you’re a web application, you need to install one piece of Java Script, just like Google Analytics. If you have a mobile app, it’s a SDK. If you want to use email, you can do that with us as well.

Jason: Okay, so one line of code or some email addresses, and I can get started…Wootric helps me select the right cadence and the right amount of times to hit everybody?

Deepa: We come out with defaults and you can just go with that. But if you want, our customer success team will step in and advise you.

This interview was edited for space and clarity.  Special thanks to the team at Salesforce for Startups.

I’m biased – I like the Net Promoter Score system, and I’m going to tell you why (in a minute). But, I also think we need an unbiased perspective on NPS, one that airs the dirty laundry, so to speak. Net Promoter Score is both a customer loyalty metric and a system for improving loyalty over time. NPS isn’t a perfect metric. It’s also not a complete system. But, most of the people talking about NPS are the ones touting it, which means you’ll rarely find a genuine report of its pros and cons.

Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing here.

In the interests of transparency, I have to say that Wootric, an NPS SaaS platform, suggested I write this piece and requested that I don’t pull any punches. No punches have been pulled.  This is my take.

Net Promoter Score: Pros 

It’s fiercely honest feedback, identifies promoters, and boards love it

As I said, I like Net Promoter Score. In a world of marketing gray areas, biased Yelp reviews, and silent customers reticent to criticize, the NPS question itself is phrased to get the most honest possible response:

“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this product?”

Or, as I like to think of it “On a scale of 0-10, would you tell your best friend they should get this product?”

Because that’s what it’s really asking – are you willing to stake your name and reputation by recommending this product?

You’re not asking whether they like the product. That’s subjective, and they’ll just say “yes” to be nice anyway. You are asking whether they would subject their nearest and dearest to this product. And that brings out a whole other side of human character: Selflessness.

I might use a chipped teacup without thinking twice about it, but if I have a friend over, they get the teacup that’s in pristine condition. When it comes to our friends, we want nothing but the best.

Which is why, when you need a completely honest, unbiased report on how your audience perceives your company, an NPS survey is the single best way to get those answers.

Of course, the obvious reason to use NPS is to identify your promoters so you can encourage and amplify their loud, enthusiastic voices that are the real ambassadors of your brand. The less obvious reason is that it’s one of those board-level metrics everyone can easily understand and rally around.

It’s easy on your customers

But here’s the thing about NPS: It’s one question and an open-ended follow-up. The follow-up “Care to tell us why?” question lets customers elaborate on their score.

They get to cut to the chase and tell you what is important to them in their own words.  As surveys go, this is a great user experience. That’s why response rates are so much higher than the old school “This will only take 5 minutes of your time…” multi-question surveys. And, you get rich qualitative feedback out of it. So, really, the beauty of NPS is in its simplicity. Both for your customers and for you.  It does one thing, and does it very well.

The trouble starts when you expect it to do too much…

The Cons: What are disadvantages of Net Promoter Score?

It’s not a miracle solution

“Anytime anyone presents NPS as the “be all and end all,” they’re wrong.” – Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer, Wootric

Thanks to being ubiquitous — after all, Net Promoter Score is a metric measured by most of the Fortune 100 — many people expect NPS to do more than is realistic. This is often why “Net Promoter Score doesn’t work.” 

NPS works best within the context of a robust customer feedback & listening program.

For example, Melinda Gonzalez implemented salesforce.com’s first ever NPS program, and her process included:

• Using the entire customer journey as a framework against which to measure customer experience.
• Designing a feedback collection strategy with audience segmentation, market segmentation, and customer maturity.
• Taking action on feedback  – because feedback is only as useful as its follow-through.
• Responding to customers, so they know their feedback is valued.
• Measuring improvement targets and adjusting as needed.

I might also add incorporating a brand advocacy program to encourage and leverage promoters, as well as tracking other established metrics like the CSAT that lets customers give feedback on their interaction with your support representatives.

But whatever your recipe for creating and counting happy customers, you’ll need to do more than just send out a single survey.

When companies start paying bonuses on NPS

At Sprint, 20% of employee bonuses are tied to Net Promoter Score. On the surface, that doesn’t seem like the worst idea ever. But think of it this way: Is your goal to improve a score, or to improve your customers’ experiences? They are not one and the same. Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, also uses NPS, but has focused its call centers to give customers more efficient, more helpful service (and follow-up calls and personalized emails). After implementing these efforts, Telstra saw a 3 point rise in their NPS score, and reduced customer churn.

Harvard Business Review’s Rob Markey puts the issue succinctly: “With incentive compensation, you get exactly – and only – what you pay for. Once compensation depends on improving a particular score, people tend to focus on the metric rather than on what it tells you about what customers want or need.”

Another, related pitfall is that employees who receive compensation based on NPS scores tend to coach customers on how to respond, asking for top scores.

In short, use NPS as a compass to guide you to creating better customer service. Don’t treat the number as the end goal, or you’ll find people gaming the system.

When customers answer The Question, but don’t see follow-through

Aside from the best practice of acknowledging any survey response, whether they be good or bad, what customers really need to see is the company acting on their feedback. With NPS, you’re learning what customers struggle with – but without a process in place to use that feedback to inform your product roadmap, customer success efforts, customer service, etc., that feedback too often comes to nothing.

And your customers can tell.

It’s precisely because NPS is so “easy” that it gets abused in this way. But when you don’t take action based on results, NPS won’t magically move the needle for you. The key is to listen, and then proactively deliver what customers need to achieve their desired outcomes. This requires a Net Promoter cycle.

When you put Baby in a corner (ie. NPS isn’t just a one-department thing)

Don’t put Baby in the corner – if it’s one thing we learned from Patrick Swayze, it’s this. And, like Baby, NPS can’t do what it does best when confined. For example, it’s very useful for customer success, especially with identifying promoters and alerting customer service to potential problems, but it’s not just a customer success thing. NPS does its best work as a company-wide metric that has implications and value for just about every customer-facing department.

• Product Development uses NPS feedback to prioritize dev resources.
• Marketing uses NPS to find and ask happy clients to join their advocacy programs (or get valuable metrics to use for case studies).
• Customer Service/Support uses NPS as a signal for when clients need outreach and support.
• Sales uses NPS to identify accounts primed for upsells and referrals (NPS is a strong business intelligence tool).

Contending with a firehose of feedback

We’ve all gotten the survey that gives us one box to check, and offers no way for us to explain what has gone horribly wrong with the product, service or company. It’s so frustrating. If you could only explain it, maybe they could fix it, but the fact that they don’t give you a way to communicate just shows they clearly don’t care.

The beauty of an NPS survey is that it does include an open-ended response section, however, another problem can occur.

The open-ended response section of the NPS survey can become a repository for everything from venting, to how-to questions. This can create chaos for the poor chap trying to analyze NPS feedback, and even if the queries are passed on to appropriate customer service representatives, it’s not a system that scales easily. And if you fail to close the loop with these customers, they’ll be even more frustrated.

The beauty of NPS is that it has one job – don’t make it pull triple-duty as the primary communication outlet.

If people are asking questions via NPS survey, it might indicate that they don’t feel able to elsewhere. Do you have a strong FAQ or Knowledge Base available? Is it easy to contact Support?

Hearing from more customers is a good problem to have, but it can be a challenge. But even if you have multiple channels for communication, you’ll still need a good way to categorize the qualitative data you do get via the survey.  In fact, that is why NPS companies like Wootric offer sentiment and keyword analysis of the qualitative data that their customers receive.  Start by creating categories and tagging responses so you can see where most of the issues are.

So, let’s sum it up…

What are Net Promoter Score Pros and Cons?

Pros:

• Quantifies customer loyalty
• Rich qualitative feedback
• Identifies brand advocates
• Higher response rates than multi-question surveys

Cons:

• Not comprehensive. Complement NPS with other metrics, like CSAT
• Tying compensation to NPS may skew results
• Requires analysis of qualitative feedback

What limitations have you experienced with NPS?  How have you used NPS to create real positive change? Tell me in the comments below or share your thoughts @NikkiElizDemere on Twitter.

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré is a SaaS consultant & Customer Success evangelist. She is the founder of Authentic Curation, and serves as a moderator at @ProductHunt & @GrowthHackers.

We all have that friend in our network crushing it at that hot startup. The comp plan is amazing, 8 of 10 reps are already at quota, the incentive triggers are kicking in. The product rocks, marketing delivers leads from everywhere and the VP of Sales can be overheard bragging about his reps commission checks.  If you have that story in your network there is one thing for sure; that company’s net promoter score (NPS) is way above average, and the trend line probably looks similar to Amazon’s stock price.

How do I know this? When product, marketing, sales and customer success are aligned it is the foundation for a company to sustain high growth.  This model for success often results in a high NPS.

So why should you care about your company’s NPS?  Most reps probably don’t know much about this metric. It’s probably as foreign as the rate you pay the 401k service provider to invest your money, but in the same way it can control your fate more than you know.

What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score is the customer loyalty metric used by over 70% of Fortune 500 companies for its ability to predict retention and growth. It starts by asking customers a single question…

 ……followed by an opportunity for open-ended feedback:

Customers are classified into three groups based on their answers:

• Promoters (9-10)are loyal customers and a great source of referrals
• Passive (7-8)  customers are satisfied with the service but are susceptible to competitors.
• Detractors (0-6) are unhappy customers and may churn.

The score is calculated this way:

NPS = % Promoters – % Detractors

4 Ways NPS impacts Sales

1. Retention/Renewal  

If you are in a farmer/hunter role you rely on some level of renewal to hit quota.  With NPS, both the score and qualitative (customer comments) can provide you the ultimate looking glass self.  Ask Geoffrey James from Inc. Magazine about self-awareness being a top 5 trait in a great sales rep. In other words, how you perceive your capabilities, and how you get along with your peers.  Ultimately, you need to be aware of how your clients perceive your brand and products.  NPS data allows you to peek into the customer’s mind about their experience & journey with your company. You can integrate these perceptions & insights into your own narrative within the sales pitch.

2. Comp Plan

Your CRO is a lot more concerned when customer churn is high.  Which in turns means his VP and your sales manager are breathing down your neck and asking for the forecast every 5 minutes.  I’ve been in sales orgs where previous success inflates the upcoming comp plan and sets unrealistic expectations.  There could be a feature or product that is over-promising & under-delivering which creates a lagging effect as sales and customer success deal with the fall out, yet bookings are still strong on paper and have not yet caught up.

A misaligned comp plan that doesn’t represent current customer sentiment and propensity to buy is kind of like a watching a bad movie sequel.  At the time it seems like a good idea, the first movie was amazing- but as you see the upcoming trailer you know something is different. You call up your friends and see the movie anyway to try and recapture the original experience. Afterwards you feel short-changed and wonder why you didn’t speak up & suggest a different movie or activity all together.

Once a comp plan is in motion, it’s hard to stop. If customers are not buying or renewing because the price is too high or the feature that was promised is not delivering, this is your chance to speak up.  Speaking with the voice of the customer by leveraging NPS data and citing real customer concerns will give you credibility.  You only have a few times a year during the all hands or sales kick-off when the comp plan is rolled out to speak up, why not use your own customer data to present any concerns? 

3. Upsell

A score of 9 or 10 means your clients would recommend you to a friend or colleague.  At the very least that means they will do a review for you on G2 Crowd or the app store.  If they really like you they might actually recommend you within their network. Make a list of the promoters and set up an action plan. It could be an executive call back program; where you work with your manager to reach out to all the Enterprise Client promoters and ask for 15 minutes meetings with each over the next quarter. Design a plan to give them something in return for asking for the referral. This could be access to the product roadmap, discounts etc. For large enterprise clients have your CRO or CEO call them.  What client doesn’t want to feel valued by an executive?

4. Career Path

As mentioned in the open, a rising NPS score can lift your sales career. Knowing what your score is today and historically over the last 12 months is invaluable to your success. If your company’s score dropped 12 points, try to determine why.   If the score is declining or already low, something is misaligned. If you are looking at negative employee reviews on GlassDoor and wondering what happened to your company, it’s already too late. NPS can be the leading indicator of what may happen in the future to your company and role.

Be the Hero: Find your NPS Data  

Set up time with your VP of Customer Success or Customer Insights person. If you work for a larger organization ask your manager to help coordinate a meeting. This person is probably running an email campaign for NPS and will have a file of the data.  They can walk you through the current score, historical data and help you find the customer comments. Finally, ask them what the reporting cadence is.  If they are running it quarterly or bi-annually, it’s not enough. NPS data should be gathered as close to real-time as possible so you have a constant pulse of customer perceptions.  You really might be amazed at what you can learn from your own customers feedback. 

Get IN(credible) with NPS

Another use of NPS is to strengthen your pitch deck. Add a page to the deck that touts your score or your upward trend. Be sure to include some customer verbatims from the qualitative feedback– that kind of authenticity is persuasive. 

Every company says “we put customers first. ” When you include some aspect of your NPS story in your pitch, you prove it.

Start measuring Net Promoter Score for free with InMoment

You are probably using Slack, the wildly successful communication app that’s replaced email in just about every company from AirBnB to AutoDesk. The Slack boom is part of the trend of replacing email with in-app communication, whenever possible. It is the business equivalent of texting, and–let’s face it–even your parents prefer texting to email these days.

That in-app trend has extended to how companies gather customer feedback, including Net Promoter Score.  (What company doesn’t need a high level, data-focused view of how the customer base rates their offering, plus detailed comments on why those numbers were given? That’s exactly what NPS provides.) Platforms like Wootric that deliver the Net Promoter Score survey inside web and mobile apps garner high survey response rates (25% – 60%) — another reflection of the customer’s preference for in-app interactions over email.

Now, with Wootric’s integration, gathering Net Promoter Score data and sending it into Slack channel couldn’t be easier — and the benefits are compelling.

NPS and Slack are both natural unifiers

There’s so much more to Net Promoter Score then receiving data about customer sentiment. The real value comes from routing valuable feedback about your product or service to the right teams and individual contributors at your company. Or as Wootric co-founder Jessica Pfeifer puts it, “helping to knit the broader team together around a common goal: customer happiness. As a single benchmark metric that everyone can rally around, NPS is such a natural unifier.”

In this post we will show you how and why to integrate Wootric with Slack, an application that naturally unifies teams. The two together make a powerful combo to convert your NPS data into real-time conversations, and take actions that can rescue customer relationships, and turn others into brand advocates.

Ways to build customer centricity with Wootric NPS & Slack

• Sharing all NPS data company-wide  

This is best for a small company or team, and it is how we use our own integration. At Wootric, we are extremely customer-focused. Every response is meaningful to our entire team which is still small, relatively speaking.

Responses give everyone a sense of how our work is valued by our customers.  Here is a real example of something directly from our #nps results Slack channel where marketing, sales, design and engineering all shared in the excitement of one customer’s feedback:

The result in this case was twofold. Our team was once again “knit together” around customer happiness, and I got a great quote to share with potential customers.

Of course, our customers raise issues via NPS too, and having that in Slack is just as valuable. Rather than customer success going to engineering and explaining a situation, the entire team can glance at the Slack channel and see the comment straight from the customer’s mouth. The relevant stakeholders then pull together and figure out a solution asap.  General feedback and feature requests directly influence our product roadmap.

• Filtering NPS data for action by team

For a company with a small team, it’s manageable for everyone to see and respond to all NPS survey feedback. For big companies using Slack, that can be harder to scale. Your NPS champion may still be digesting it all, but you can divide up large streams of feedback to respond efficiently in other ways. Here are some ideas:

• Send promoter responses to Sales so they can follow-up for referrals and upsells, and to Marketing since they can make the most of comments from promoters by turning them into testimonials.  
• Send detractor comments to Customer Support/Success so they can close the loop with customers that are disgruntled.

Your particular needs may vary depending on who is responsible for what in your company. The Slack integration can be customized with a few clicks in the Wootric dashboard.

Why Slack Loves NPS

Not only does our team use and love Slack, but we discovered that the Slack team can’t live without NPS. According to Slack CMO Bill Macaitis, NPS helps “every single person at the company influence the perception and experience the brand delivers.” Bill believes that it’s not enough to satisfy customers. Your goal should be to identify the people that really love the product and turn them into evangelists.

Let’s be honest, information from the front lines does not always travel clearly up the ladder. People at the top need to know details about the customer experience, and NPS helps with that. Bill says that every CEO should be able to answer this question: “What are the top 3 reasons why people recommend and do not recommend your brand?” When NPS feedback is shared in real-time via Slack, company leaders will not be the last to know and can keep a pulse on the most important customer issues.  

The Many Benefits of Slacking NPS

Converting information into action is vital for any company’s growth. There are many advantages to using the NPS/Slack funnel to accomplish this:

• NPS data in Slack keeps you honest.  Saastr’s Jason Lemkin says this is the top reason why he loves NPS.  Sharing NPS data via Slack in real-time demonstrates transparency. It means more team members are staying close to the customer– and keeping it real.
• Collaboration happens organically. There is an interesting psychological component to communication that makes Slack uniquely suited to facilitate action. When we receive a detailed email, we may not respond right away. (How many of us star it for follow up later?) When we are @mentioned in slack, there is a natural conversational flow. Stakeholders can be brought in and agreement reached for next steps.
• Close the loop with customers in real-time–and eliminate redundancies. At one of our customer companies, team members tag responses they will personally follow-up with by adding an emoji to the response. This company is surveying logged-in customers (as opposed to website visitors), so the customer’s email address appears in the Slack channel along with the survey result.  With one click, that team member that indicates “I got this one!” can reach out to the customer to thank them for their response and follow-up for more info.

Dialing It Up To 11

The better you understand the capabilities of a tool, the more facility you have to use if effectively and efficiently. Here are a handful of tips to optimize your team’s use of Net Promoter data in Slack (and read this article for more tips on using Slack):

• Add stars to anything you need to reply to or take action on. Slack is helping to replace email, which is designed to create a record of all communication. But when you communicate in chat rooms, things can sometimes get lost. Action items and mere information can also easily become co-mingled. Click the star button in the top right corner of your Slack window to view all of your starred messages ordered by time. Although it’s easy to star messages to save them for later, it’s not particularly obvious that specific direct message and channel streams can be starred. With this handy tool, you can place them in a favorites-style list at the top of the sidebar.

• Create new channels. The more organized you are in Slack, the more efficiently you can use it. Break initiatives down by specific need or by customer. For example, direct promoter feedback to an Advocacy Marketing channel. You can then discuss ideas for software and content to optimize your customer referral campaigns.

• Integrate with Trello to collaborate on tasks. Why stop at just one integration? Slack integrates with Trello so you can easily shift from agreeing on how to move forward with an issue, to taking the steps to get it done.
• Create meeting invites & share documents. The most common action items following a customer discussion in Slack are setting meeting and creating assets. So is it any surprise that Slack integrates with Google Calendar and Drive?
  
  Did you just receive feedback from several detractors about a specific feature? Schedule a meeting to discuss updates to the product roadmap. Did you just receive stellar feedback from a promoter?  Drop those NPS comments into a shared “Testimonials” document.
  

Technically Speaking

According to Venture Capitalist and co-founder of Point Nine Capital, Christoph Janz, the future of SaaS lies in the hands of API integrations between complementary best-in-class applications.

The Wootric/Slack integration was designed with this in mind – to empower companies that measure NPS to quickly, easily, and transparently spread what they hear from customers. We have made it simple and customizable to bring customer feedback directly to whichever Slack channels you choose:

• Set up rules to send feedback to specific channels, like all feedback to your #product channel, or testimonials from promoters to your #marketing channel.
• Filter the types of responses that you want to send and from whom. For example, you can share only responses with qualitative feedback.
• Filter whether that information comes from promoters, passives, detractors or from everyone.

A customer-focused culture always begins with awareness around how your customers feel about you. How you obtain that information, broadcast it, and convert it to action, now necessarily depends on software. Integrate your NPS feedback and data with Slack. It could mean the difference between a failing company that sporadically responds to its customers, or a successful one that is passionate about customer happiness.  

Revenue growth and profitability – are the two metrics the C-Suite cares about the most. They tell you exactly how you did this month or quarter. But do strong sales predict next quarter’s results? Hardly.  

What if the C-Suite had a crystal ball that could not only predict their growth and profitability, but give  glimpses into the minds of their customers in time to save accounts that might otherwise go under?

We haven’t really had that capability, until now.

Traditionally, Net Promoter Score has been a “lagging indicator.” NPS surveys were typically sent out once a year, or once a quarter at most. There would be a big push to get the survey out, another push to respond, and then a mad dash of trying to piece together what happened during that time to result in the scores received.

But modern NPS programs are different. They can be that crystal ball.

Customer Experience Predicts Growth & Profit

More studies and reports are coming out by the day proving that Customer Experience is a key predictor of growth and revenue – for every type of company, business, product and service. It’s not just a “SaaS thing.” Brick-and-mortar businesses are optimizing for it too, and seeing results.

One of these reports, The Economist Intelligence Unit’s, The Value of Experience: How the C-suite values customer experience in the digital age, found that companies that prioritize investment in customer experience (CX) have better revenue growth (59% vs. 40%) and higher profits (64% vs. 47%) than companies that don’t prioritize customer experience.

McKinsey & Co. found that  “Optimizing the Customer Experience typically achieve[s] revenue growth of 5-10% … in just two to three years.”

And, there’s no better way to optimize for customer experience than by using the NPS metric.

NPS = Customer Experience

There are so many ways to ask about customer experience. You can send lengthy surveys and open-ended questions; you can ask customers in person or over the phone. But there is no question – or list of questions – that reveals the unvarnished truth like the NPS question:

How likely are you, on a scale of 1-10, to recommend this product?

Customers don’t have to worry about hurting your feelings or protecting the job of the “very nice customer service rep” who didn’t help them at all. They just have to choose a number. And, by framing the question as whether they would recommend the product, you tap into a very honest desire to help other people (help them by sharing great products, or help them by warning them away from bad ones).

With one question, NPS gets to the core of whether customer experience efforts are working, or not. This is what makes it the ideal tool to help teams optimize for customer experience. Budge this one, simple number, and you’ve got real progress.

In Fred Reichheld’s The Ultimate Question 2.0, he includes a revealing, real-world example of NPS in action:

Phillips electronics tracked NPS for a sample of accounts over time and found that where NPS increased, revenue grew by 69%. Where it remained steady, revenue grew only by six percent. And where NPS declined, revenues actually decreased by 24%.

Modern NPS = Crystal Ball

What is the difference between NPS and a modern NPS program? Part of the difference is in how the surveys and tracking are managed. A modern NPS program has an easily navigable dashboard that shows you your current scores and compares them to previous ones, lets you see trends clearly, displays qualitative feedback with the quantitative score, and records all of these results in one, central location.

But convenience isn’t the most important difference between the old ways of conducting NPS surveys and cutting edge NPS.

The most important difference is the ability to get NPS results in real-time.

This capability is what gives modern NPS programs the ability to act as leading indicators of customer experience, and by extension, growth and profit.

By polling different customers every day, your customers don’t get over-surveyed (so their response rates improve), and you can see the results of your customer experience efforts immediately, and pivot accordingly.

No more wasting time on customer experience strategies that don’t work. No more wasting resources on measures that don’t actually delight your customer base. If something works, you’ll know it. And, if something doesn’t work, you’ll know that too.

But the crystal ball of modern NPS can do one more thing: Let you catch a glimpse into the minds and hearts of your customers. Along with the basic NPS question, the survey offers a qualitative response screen that lets survey respondents tell you why they scored the way they did. Then, it lets you read those responses, tag them by theme (like “Feature Request“), and send them on to the appropriate department, like “Product Team” or “Marketing.”

The customer receives an appropriate response, improving their experience as a result of taking the customer experience survey.

Not even crystal balls can do that.

A modern NPS program is an incredibly powerful tool that lets you track customer experience in real-time and easily identify actionable insights.

Fred Reichheld invented the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey 14 years ago to better gauge customer desires and loyalty, and the practice quickly caught on. But when Fred himself announces that he’s sick of customer feedback surveys, you know we have a problem.

There’s no question there is a tsunami of surveys that’s just overwhelming. I think of it as a little bit of a pollution effect that we have to find a way to overcome. – Fred Reichheld

Customer surveys are everywhere. After you hang up from a customer support call, you are almost guaranteed to receive a request to complete one. There are probably at least a handful in your inbox right now.

Surveys are critical to any voice of customer (VOC) program, but they require thoughtfulness, and intentionality.  Don’t just send another email with the subject line, Your feedback is important to us, with content like this:

Please take 3-4 minutes to complete a short survey about your phone call to us on Jun 15 2016 10:23AM. Your feedback will be used to make future improvements to the customer experience. To take the survey, please click on the link below.

Or even worse, a survey email we received that actually ended with this:

Nothing makes a customer feel more valuable than a request to write a letter (what is this the 80s?), or a caveat that their feedback will not receive a response. There are much better ways to solicit customer feedback  — ways that avoid the “pollution effect” and get more customers engaged. Below are tips for getting a higher level of response when reaching out to your valued customers. 

The Key is to Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes

A solid place to start is to ask if your survey process is adding or detracting from your customer’s experience of your brand. You may be surveying customers in order to gather feedback that you can use to make them happier, but is your survey strategy part of the problem? To answer that, think through these five aspects:

1) Resist the dreaded “3-4 minute survey”
Unless absolutely necessary, only ask one question. The NPS question:

How likely are you to recommend this product (or service) to a friend or colleague?

Why? NPS let’s you metricize customer loyalty, and the open-ended feedback question allows customers to get specific about what’s important to them. Instead of surprising your customers with more than they bargained for, consider NPS as a method for receiving actionable feedback in a way that is low impact on customers.

In stark contrast, the “3-4 minute survey” referenced above was actually comprised of 30(!) questions mainly in the following format: “How satisfied are you with _______________ on a scale from 1 to 10?”

 How tedious is that? And by extension, how accurate? Nobody is going to fill this out unless maybe they want to share about a negative experience or have plenty of time on their hands. That means that the “randomly selected” cohort is not going to be that random.

Excessive questions contribute heavily to survey fatigue. According to SurveyMonkey, data suggests that if a respondent begins answering a survey, there is a sharp increase in drop-off rate that occurs with each additional question up to 15 questions.

2) Reduce friction

Our inboxes are ground-zero for survey fatigue. For example, the last time you returned from vacation, how long did it take to return to inbox zero? Did you even bother to read half of the mountain of emails you faced?

The trend is for communication apps to replace email whenever possible, and NPS is no exception. Consider an in-app solution for an experience that doesn’t require the user to remember every specific detail of their encounter, and can give you real-time contextual feedback from customers.  It isn’t unusual for in-app response rates to exceed 40%. At the same time, in-app is less intrusive because customers can easily dismiss or ignore the survey if they are busy.

And for businesses who still choose to interact via email, embed survey questions for higher response rates and less friction. A great example of this (and one you have likely seen) is gathering feedback on your support. Here is a way to integrate feedback without asking the customer to open yet another email.

3) Don’t pester

How often should you survey? Well, how often is your product changing? Are you introducing a new feature set all at once? Making significant UI tweaks every week? If you aren’t changing that rapidly, then maybe asking for feedback quarterly is ok. If not much has changed, then check-in less frequently.

If you want to gain insight into your customer journey, ask for feedback from customers at each milestone along the way. Just don’t ask the same customer at every point in her journey.

If you are asking customers to fill out a survey after every transaction, know that can be a major contributor to fatigue. An example of this is when dining at a restaurant, and the waiter appears constantly to check if “everything is ok.” It won’t be long before what is intended to be great service has the outcome of you being pestered. (Not to mention that the word “ok” is off-putting, because it suggests a mediocre experience.) 

A skilled waiter, like anyone who services customers, will be invisible and will only interrupt the experience to guide it along. They may offer only one specific question at a natural time in order to rate your main experience – “How are you enjoying your salmon (or other main course)?”

No matter what service you provide, you never want to overwhelm your customers. Instead you want to be sparingly curious. If your intention is to provide a vehicle for feedback after each transaction, consider framing it as “is there something we should know?” Sending a “Please complete this survey” is akin to over-serving a table.

By simply shifting the language, people no longer feel pestered. They know that they have a conduit for feedback, framed as a subtle request in case they ever feel inspired to share. They know that representatives of your company are always standing by to listen.

4) Don’t over sample

Many app users switch between desktop and mobile, so you don’t want to double-dip with your requests. Make sure your survey mechanism can see your user’s activity across platforms and take this into account.  

Over-sampling can also happen when multiple departments are surveying customers. Product or Marketing may ask a customer for feedback on your SaaS product or service, and then the customer initiates an unrelated interaction with support, only to get asked again by Customer Support.

The net impact for the customer is, “Hey the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing at this company. I just answered a survey!”  Being clear about the purpose of each survey can help. The best way to handle this is to have one Voice of the Customer (VOC) champion that has the big picture of what customers are being asked and can coordinate NPS (and all survey) efforts, and avoid the faux pas.

5) Be sure to close the loop

If a customer takes precious time to fill out your survey, be sure to thank them.  Better yet, get back to them about the results of the survey and what you are planning to do as a result.  

That kind of transparency is refreshing and demonstrates that you take feedback seriously.   And guess what? That customer will be more likely to open and respond to a future survey.

Always Consider the Customer Experience

The basic principles of customer experience are the same whether you are offering SaaS or grass-fed steak. When it comes to gathering feedback, empathize with your customer’s survey fatigue and err on the side of less is more.  Your customers will be more likely to respond to your surveys.

In case you haven’t heard, Zapier is the application that lets you easily “zap” data from one workflow application to another and trigger actions. This is a boon to companies that use multiple platforms to support different functions, and need their data to move seamlessly between those silos.  Best of all, zaps require no coding skills.

CHECK OUT SAMPLE WOOTRIC ZAPS NOW

Zapier can help you make your Wootric CX data more actionable by automatically triggering actions in systems your company already uses. Here are three ways to use Zapier + Wootric:

Close the loop with customers

If someone scores you 6 or below (a Detractor), let Zapier immediately create a ticket in your customer support system, like Zendesk. When someone scores you a 9 or 10 (a Promoter, yay!), it is a great time to say thank you or to ask for a review or referral. You could automatically notify an associate via email but what if the team uses a platform like Trello to manage tasks? You can use a zap to create a Trello card to prompt an associate to do a personal reach-out to say thank you.

Send feedback to a Google Spreadsheet

When you want to parse feedback in a spreadsheet, a zap is an easy way to get it there in real-time.

Better customer intelligence

Is Customer A happy or unhappy right now? Make sure Sales and Customer Success are in the know by zapping survey responses into your CRM.

Of course, with over 500 apps in Zapier’s directory, you can get very creative  — and very productive.

Happy zapping!

The Wootric team is excited to announce a new feature: Tagging.

A tag is a label you may create and optionally apply to individual NPS survey responses for the purpose of filtering, sharing and performing trend analysis. Our users can now create an unlimited number of custom tags and associate them with NPS responses.

Why Tag?

Tagging allows you to  implement structure around qualitative feedback to make it both measurable and actionable. One of the most valuable aspects of using the Net Promoter System is getting a constant pulse of qualitative feedback from your customers. When your customers give you an NPS score — whether that is a  “3” or a “10” —  it is their response to the open-ended follow-up question that gives you the “why” behind their score. This rich, detailed feedback brings the voice of the customer right to the table.   However, it also presents a challenge. Qualitative feedback is unstructured, therefore it can be difficult to manage.

Thinking about Your Goals for Tagging: Routing and Insight

We designed tagging to be very flexible within Wootric, because different businesses will use the feature in different ways. You can create an unlimited number of tags, and can customize them for your needs. There are generally two purposes for tagging, and many of our customers will have sets of tags for both use cases:

1. Routing

Use tags to assign follow-up responsibility to one or more people or departments within your company.  By tagging specific stakeholders, you determine who should be owning next steps on feedback. For example, you might tag an enthusiastic endorsement with “Marketing” so that function can follow-up with the customer about referrals, or using the comment on your website.

2. Insight: Identifying and Tracking Feedback Themes

Use tags to track comments related to your product, website or your customer’s experience. You may have a good idea of what comments themes already are. Or, you can begin to create tags based on what comes in and, overtime, you may see themes emerge.  For example, you may learn that among detractor comments, a high number are focused on, for example, support, shipping, or a particular feature.  This will help you understand what issues are most pressing and address them. You can also track how feedback themes are changing over time, and whether you are making an impact with your follow-up actions.

How to Tag Qualitative Feedback in Wootric

Start in the Feedback Tab

Under every NPS response that comes in to your Wootric dashboard, there’s a prompt to add a tag. You can manually go in and type in the name of the tag that you want to associate with a piece of feedback. To help avoid duplicate tags,  the tagging function in Wootric will auto-suggest previously created tags that start with the same letter. This way it is easy for you to select a tag you’ve used before and then add it to new comments as they come in.

For example, you may receive a positive comment and you want marketing to know what’s working. Tag them by role by creating a “marketing” tag. As another example, you may receive negative feedback about a new product feature. Tag the team for that product so that they can measure all of the open-ended feedback around that feature, take action, and then measure customer feedback again when changes have been implemented.

See Analytics in the Tags Tab

Once you have implemented tags, you can roll everything up to see the mile-high view within the new Tags tab in your dashboard. Here you can see which tags are associated with the most responses as a result of categorizing this feedback.

In this tab you can now see the following:

• Each tag that you’ve created
• All of the analytics around every tag
• The number of responses that you’ve tagged with that word
• The percentage of comments that are associated with a given tag and how that has changed versus the prior period.
• Filter tags by specific segment of your business

And of course you can see the Net Promoter Score for that tag based on the responses connected to it.

Now you can quickly see which tags are driving the most impact, which tags have the highest sentiment score. Over time, you can start to see how qualitative feedback themes are changing, and what aspects of your product and service are driving positive or negative feedback from customers.

Bottom Line: Open-ended feedback is incredibly valuable for your business but it’s hard to efficiently track that feedback over time or to effectively implement actions. The new tagging feature and tagging dashboard allows you to track feedback and take action in any way that you can imagine, to meet the needs of your customers and continue to achieve your business goals.

In my last piece I shared my thoughts on the why Net Promoter Score is so popular. I’ll now share the NPS program model I recommend. It’s intended for the novice NPS program owner, as well as the veteran NPS program owner who isn’t getting the expected traction or results. This model has evolved since the four years when I implemented salesforce.com’s first ever NPS program across 15,000 employees. I’ve since modified it to make it more agile to fit the needs of small and mid-size clients. Read More…

Given the popularity of Net Promoter Score (NPS), maybe you are wondering if you should too adopt it too. As you consider whether NPS is right for your business, it might help to understand some of the reasons why it has become so popular in the first place.  

In this guest post, Melinda Gonzalez outlines the reasons and her philosophy for success with NPS. Melinda is CEO of Melinda Gonzalez Advisors,  a customer experience consultant, and a contributing author in SaaS Startup Founder’s Guide.

NPS was introduced nearly 15 years ago by Fred Reicheld and the global management consulting firm Bain & Company as a C-suite metric that is intended to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking a single “what is the likelihood you would recommend…” question. At the outset, enterprise companies and major brands like Costco, USAA, Apple, and Amazon.com used it, and they have long held leadership rankings in the industry. NPS has since grown tremendously in popularity, and it is often used by small and mid-size businesses as a tool to drive profitability and growth.

So much has been written about NPS. Yet I still come across businesses that are struggling to make it work. Until the time comes when that no longer happens, I’ll continue to share my experiences and advice to help others.

Increased Popularity of NPS

First, companies are becoming more customer-centric out of necessity. The traditional sales and marketing funnel is dead, particularly with the “as a service” revolution. Whether you view it as flipped funnel, an hourglass, or something else, most companies realize they’re missing the boat if they’re not working towards creating an army of customer marketers and cultivating increased profitability through follow on deals and word of mouth within their customer base.

Second, there is an ever increasing and intensified need for companies to make more data driven decisions. Companies now have exponentially more data at their fingertips, particularly with the explosion of the cloud industry. This has completely revolutionized the ability for companies to be more informed and targeted in how they evolve business strategy. NPS indulges this appetite handily.

Third, NPS enables companies to “metricize” the customer experience. Companies are making significant investments to collect customer feedback in real time. NPS and other types of experiential data are often used to measure customer loyalty-related sentiment and behaviors. Connecting this data with operational and CRM data can enable more powerful and predictive insights. This can be a game changer for companies trying to create personalized interactions to differentiate their brand and increase customer engagement.

Last, the perceived simplicity of having a single metric is very attractive. This has been both the blessing and the curse of NPS. Executive leaders are constantly barraged with highly complex data and information. So, I get it. Here comes a single number that is supposed to provide an immediate gauge of how loyal customers really are. Only, it doesn’t actually do that on its own. The score informs little about how to drive improvements or where to double down on things that are working well. This level of insight only comes from digging deeply into the respondent segments, reviewing qualitative feedback, understanding root cause issues and key themes, and ideally analyzing the data in conjunction with operational data such as (re)purchase behavior.

Focusing on the System over the Score

Is it a “score” or a “system?” Focusing on the score by itself short-changes the investment of implementing NPS in the first place. Understanding and taking action on the insights is equally if not more important and impactful. Fred Reichheld and Bain & Company did a great thing for the industry by renaming it to Net Promoter System^SM. There are many who seek to entirely debunk NPS as a metric. That’s not my goal. If you’ve implemented NPS that shows some desire to improve services for your customers, which is a great start. I prefer to treat NPS more as a change agent to collectively focus the business on improving the customer experience. I advocate against myopically focusing on the score and recommend using NPS as a “north star” metric, much like Airbnb views it.

Two Aspects of Net Promoter Success

That being said, I do have two basic philosophies about NPS.

First, if you’re going to focus on the NPS score, know that it is a relationship level metric. Not everything can or should be measured by the “likelihood to recommend.” Do not NPS your customers to death. Consider implementing the NPS question as part of a broader voice of the customer ecosystem. This could include measuring transactional interactions, product adoption indicators, behavioral or purchasing patterns, etc. This allows you to build a comprehensive picture of overall customer health, position the business to take action as needed, and inform changes that increase customer engagement. Sorry, there’s no single, magical metric. That said, measuring NPS is a great place to start.

Second, it’s critical to be transparent with customers about the steps you’ve taken to improve products and services based on their feedback. This presumes feedback is actually being used to do so. The easiest and fastest way to lose customer trust and damage the relationship is to spend an enormous amount of effort collecting the feedback then doing nothing with it. NPS can be an impactful change agent to drive innovation, but it does not happen organically. It must be indoctrinated as a core value at all levels of the business. An understanding of root cause issues is also required to drive necessary changes. While one person often owns NPS as a program, it is not one person’s job to drive change from NPS – nor is that in his/her power.

Next week, Melinda will share Eight Principles for Driving Change with NPS.