In the previous blog (Read here) we discussed -

• what is NPS, 

• types of NPS, 

• calculation methods,

• examples of Netflix & Nokia’s NPS score. 

In this blog we will be discussing how to take an NPS survey along with my own personal experience of using it.

Let me share my experience of using this method.

I was a product management intern for a social media platform meant for doctors. They had one of the products of a job portal where medical jobs for doctors were posted & my job was to identify the reasons due to which it lost traction even after being in the market for 6 years.

Just like other PM interns, I also started to apply different metrics to evaluate the problem. The answers of all those metrics seemed to bring pieces of the puzzle together! And then something unexpected happened.

I took feedback from 20 doctors who recently applied & received job offers from our portal. All of them were happy with -

• our service, 

• quality of jobs 

• The entire process was very smooth for them! 

The NPS score stood at 72!

So the question was if the net promoter score was good then why was the product losing the traction? 

The final conclusion which management found after many months was that they did not have jobs in those hospitals which doctors wanted and many young doctors were getting jobs through referrals and did not find a reason to come to our platform.

This reflects that getting a good NPS score is immaterial, if the following four action points are not done correctly - 

1. Target Audience

2. Right sample size

3. Continuous Analysis

4. Targeting KPI’s through questions.

• In the above mentioned instance  , doctors who did not find any job opportunities should have been contacted & those detractors should have been optimized. 

• Well there is no right sample size in NPS,  since sampling often comes with error it is important to have both sets of customers, organic and inorganic in equal manner. 

• They say “ Change is the only constant”. It holds true for NPS as well, continuously measuring the NPS helps to indicate the change in preference of users which also in turn indicates how the product should evolve. 

• So how can one do it?

• What does the timeline look like?

    

                                                   Source: Survicate

• Dashboards,such as these, not only help us to understand the split of promoters, passives & detractors but also how consumers' preference for your product changes with time.

• Such dashboards also help to identify the change in KPI’s. In the above instance of doctors' response,  one could only confirm the existing good KPI’s. Hence selection of targeting right KPI’s also becomes important!

All said and done, all of these methods & data only have importance if at the right time, right feedback process is done to take decisive actions.

One has to make this method a core business metric & should be used as a growth signal and motivator for teams to enhance the use case of this metric for the product & its performance. 

Even after following all the criteria, can this method fail to predict the low performance of the product?

The answer is “ It depends”.

The idea is to stick objectively to the essence of this method & analyze the data to bring actionable insights for the performance of the product.