Alternative NPS and CSAT questions

I like to alter the standard CSAT question of "How satisfied are you with our product" and NPS of "How likely are you to recommend our brand".

For example, I have used "How satisfied have you been with the value from our product in the last 6 months?" for NPS - "How likely are you to see value in our product in the next 6 months".

What are other ways you have altered these standardized questions to be more effective?

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Ed Powers

At least eight different studies show NPS doesn't live up to its claims for predicting growth or customer loyalty. Obtaining qualitative, verbatim information (the "Why?" question in NPS) is actually more useful, especially when it is followed by a more in-depth quantitative CSAT to diagnose the issues immediately after the point where they occur. Asking more specific questions helps teams improve products and services. This in turn increases customer satisfaction, which has proven an antecedent to customer loyalty.

Nandkishor Tripathi

Hi Effie, Thank you for a great question.

NPS and CSAT are used for multi-purpose and I have seen this is been used differently based on business need and cx maturity.

If you are using this for Benchmarking then David has said it rightly this needs to be standard else your benchmark results can be varied and may not accurate.

If we are using this for your own customer base and you are tracking feedback over period of time, then again the variation in question text can have significant impact on the trend.

If we are starting this as a fresh or we are using to gauze for a new product / service then we can certainly use and be creative to get the full value.

What I have seen and worked on re-framing NPS and CSAT or designing my questionnaire for success, I keep few things in mind:

#1 Who are my customer (persona) to understand their likes/dislikes and use their language. (understand do they prefer to keep things as standard or like to see variability from standard questions, this will impact your response rate.)

#2 Keep it Short and Simple (Who likes long questions? and Yes, short and crisp questions - increases your response rate)

#3 Keep it very specific (In case your company provides more than one product/service and you want to capture recommendation for specific product/service offering. This is great to use in transactional NPS.)

#4 Keep it consistent

Examples of NPS:

#1 How likely are you to recommend our Product A to your friends or colleagues?

#2 Based on your recent [transaction experience / branch visit], how likely would you be to recommend [Company] to a friend or colleague.

Here notice that we haven't said "On a scale of 0 to 10 ..." as scales are visible on screen and can be removed to shorten. Shortening questions have its own pros and cons

Make your follow-up questions specific to ratings for better engagement, and to understand Why behind the score.

Promoter:

What did you like most about our product/service?

Passive:

What we could do get better to get your appreciation?

Detractors:

We’re sorry to hear that, What could we be doing better?

I recommend to design CSAT questions based on at what journey stage we are asking this and make it relevant based on your customers interaction with your brand.

Examples of CSAT:

#1 Did our product do what you wanted it to do?

[can ask in 5 star rating scale, this gives the sentiment behavior based on the experience] - Using STAR vs Scale has its own pros and cons

#2 How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the services you received?

#3 Overall, How happy are you with our product / services?

[1-5 scale from Very Happy, Somewhat Happy, Neither Happy or Sad, Sad, Very Sad]

#4 How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [product feature / service] you received?

[1-5 scale from Very dissatisfied to Very Satisfied]

Hope this is helpful

Best,

David Ellin

I, too, like where @Mahesh Motiramani went with his comments. NPS is really a standard question that means the same thing across all businesses - likelihood to recommend. Other questions, as substitutions, are great if they're more relevant to your business but shouldn't be called NPS. If you were to do so and try to benchmark your scores against competitors, the comparison wouldn't be valid.

I love the questions, 'why did you rate us this way' and 'how can we earn a higher score'. The answer to the first question allows for implementation of repeatable process/behaviors.

April Hannah Olsen

Hi Ellie - great discussion, I think it’s fine to modify these questions to suit your needs. The key is to stay consistent QoQ (or how ever often you’re conducting the survey) so you can measure trends. Most importantly though is you’re taking action from the results! What key insights were gained by modifying and what was the outcome?

Will Pagden

I’m with @Mahesh Motiramani on this one.
Many people argue NPS isn’t a great measure and whilst I’m also a believer of that I do still do it, as a loyalty question. Customers know it’s an NPS question and having conducted interviews with customers they know why we do it and respect that.
I also have confidence and product market fit questions in other surveys, which is similar to what you mention above to understand the value our customers are getting.

Effie Mansdorf

Great points @Mahesh Motiramani !

Mahesh Motiramani

@Effie Mansdorf As far as NPS is concerned, the spirit is to always focus on "loyalty" to the brand or the product. So, here "would you recommend us?" is the main focus area. If you have to measure the customer's satisfaction from the value they are receiving or their perception of the future value, IMO, those questions belong to a different survey (may be in a CSAT).

We've gotten a terrific response rate to our NPS where we ask something like "How likely are you to recommend <ProductX> to <target>? You could change <target> to "friends, colleagues or others". We also add questions seeking clarification on "why you rated us this way?" and "how could we earn a higher score?" This has allowed us to get some great inputs on Loyalty drivers, expectations, and opportunities for improvement.

The CSAT can focus on current level of satisfaction with the product, experience with the product and services, current perception of value achieved and belief in future value (which may tie in to how they see you innovating in products, service and process areas).

Kathryn Moore

We've tried an alternative to the classic NPS question as well. We found it helped our customer base understand the intent of the question a bit better. It's similar to yours!

"How confident are you that the product will help you reach your goals over the next two years?"