NPS Follow-Up Question

Brooke Carrie

We just launched our first NPS program and are having some internal debates about how many times we should follow-up with those that don't initially response. Additionally, how many outreaches should we do to those who did respond and we want to gather more information from. 

I feel like there should be no more than two outreaches in either situation - anymore and you run the risk of annoying your customer. But, I would love to hear varying opinions and the 'why' behind them. 

Thanks!

Steve Bernstein

Hi Brooke -- It depends on how you've positioned your NPS with the customer and what your company is trying to get out of it:

• If you've positioned this as a "Help me to be able to help you" type of program, where the CSM is asking for feedback (even if via automation) in order to help that specific customer then it's totally ok to have additional communications. That is, in this sort of program the CSM would initially commit to following-up to address what they heard in the response (and hopefully you're not just using the 2-question Consumer-NPS process -- you should be using the B2B process so you can get additional information to drive the right follow-up process). The "ask" is positioned as value-add to the customer and backed by a personal commitment so the customer won't feel like it's spam because it won't be spam.
• On the other end of the spectrum is a survey invitation lobbed over at customers as a 1:Many campaign that doesn't consider the customer's own lifecycle status (timing), persona, and segment and merely says something akin to, "Your feedback is important to us.... please complete this 2-question survey."  In this scenario, which is more of an internal measurement exercise without clear benefit to the customer, the customer will usually feel like they can't be bothered no matter how many emails you send about it.

Your positioning of this NPS effort might fall somewhere in between these 2 examples, in which case 1 invitation and 1 reminder is going to be sufficient because adding a 3rd reminder isn't going to add many new responses. How did the response rate improve between the initial invitation and the first reminder?  Unless you asked the customer up-front to opt in to participate in the process, you'll see declining returns and higher unsubscribe rates if you keep reminding. And this is similar for the follow-up when they respond.

Helpful indicators would be to look at your unsubscribe rates, bounce-rates, and response rates: How accurate is the customer list and to what extent are they participating? Did the initial reminder work?  If your results are strong, then adding a 2nd reminder (so 3 automated comms in total for invitations, and then no more than 2 for follow-up) could be valuable if you can show that most cusomters "like them" are participating. 

That said, the most significant way to improve customer participation is to engage the customer ahead of the invitation being sent to (1) ensure the customer will get something good out of it, and (2) that CSMs are engaged in the program such that they will also get something good out of it (like improved retention from stronger individual customer relationships).  I'll avoid rambling about all that here and always happy to provide more info and assistance.

/Steve