Combat Survey Fatigue By Implementing The NPS® Survey System

Too often, brands rely on customers to speak out and voice their opinion as the primary method of learning about your existing brand perception. Voice of customer surveys can serve as an effective tool to gather these customer insights, but actually getting a significant percentage of customers to complete the survey from start-to-finish is a challenging task. Customer Thermometer completed their own survey of 1,000 people, and 67% of this group admitted to abandoning a survey before completion. Consumers are more sparing with their time online, and if your survey begins to feel taxing or too long, people will quickly exit out and move on to the next tab open on their internet browser. Combat this fatigue by converting your survey philosophy closer towards the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) system.

NPS® surveys are a tool that can help encourage more survey completions by simplifying the questions and reducing the necessary effort to finish the survey. This approach is essentially looking to segment your consumer population into three categories, brand ambassadors, neutral patrons and brand detractors. It does so by asking the evaluator a simple yet telling question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand to your friends or family.” In practice, the numerical values provided by the respondent allows brands to categorize customers into the previously mentioned verticals, allowing the organization to craft different journeys depending on individual responses.

This question provides the first step in capturing the right customer data, because it can be followed up with more detailed questions focused around why a customer chose their NPS® score. For example, brand ambassadors, or those that rated your brand a 9 or 10, can serve as a useful source of information to help break down specific aspects where you are succeeding.  Almost half of the people Customer Thermometer surveyed claimed that they would be willing to provide feedback when asked, but only if it does not take too much time. Rather than asking customers to complete an immersive and overly-complicated assessment, NPS® surveys grant brands the information they desire in a much easier-to-digest package for the customer.

One of the best Customer Experience optimization practices used in tandem with NPS® survey initiatives is closing the loop on negative feedback. This is when brands will have specific teams dedicated to reaching out to customers that have had a poor experience in an effort to fully understand what happened and how to improve it. By quickly categorizing customers as ambassadors, neutral or detractors, your brand can more efficiently and effectively provide the proper service to each individual customer based on their feedback, resulting in more knowledge regarding the status of your Customer Experience, and a higher percentage of satisfied customers.

Typically, people will not be willing to spend more than five or ten minutes to provide feedback to a brand. However, this information provided by customers can be essential to maintaining competitive customer retention rates. Too often, organizations will create overly complicated surveys in an effort to capture as much data as possible. As a result, consumers are less willing to start a survey, and those that do have a much lower chance of actually completing them. Instead, adopting an NPS® philosophy will improve your organization’s survey completion rates by simplifying the process and reducing the effort that customers need to exert. Simply acquiring information via NPS® surveys is not a guaranteed solution for creating a successful Customer Experience program, but when implemented, analyzed and responded to correctly, it can serve as an extremely useful tool.

NPS Frequently Asked Questions

How can businesses combat survey fatigue when implementing an NPS survey system?

To combat survey fatigue, businesses should keep surveys short and targeted, personalize survey requests, and ensure the timing of surveys is appropriate to avoid overwhelming customers.

Why is it important to address survey fatigue in NPS systems?

Addressing survey fatigue is important to maintain high response rates and ensure the feedback collected is representative and actionable.

What strategies can help improve NPS survey response rates?

Strategies include offering incentives, simplifying the survey process, and ensuring questions are relevant and concise.

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.

1,2 https://www.customerthermometer.com/how-bad-is-survey-fatigue/

Second To None empowers customer-centric brands to deliver consistent, intentional and authentic consumer experiences.

We adeptly design and manage mystery shopping, compliance, engagement and voice of customer solutions grounded in strategic relevance, program integrity and actionable insights. Our solutions are developed on the basis of solid research and statistical science. We achieve success through a relentless focus on quality and innovation, consultative relationships and a talented team of professional associates.