Free NPS survey: why you should stop paying for NPS

Nearly every software company measure its NPS. It's almost mandatory to track it to understand how your users feel about your product and have some insights about their intention to continue to use it. It's one of the first metric followed by startups, sometimes even before generating revenues and most investors ask for a regular NPS score in their updates. In a lot of companies, teams are even incentivised on the NPS and a part of their bonus is based on its result.

In other words, NPS is now a commodity. Everyone tracks it, every NPS survey tool has the same features, benchmarks per industry are well known...

But, still, we continue to pay for something that is that mandatory, that basic for a business. And we think it has to change!

What is NPS

The NPS is often seen as the metric to measure the level of satisfaction and loyalty of your customer. It’s been developed in 2003 by Bain and Company and it quickly became a standard in an industry always looking for new, precise and relevant ways of evaluating their customer experience.

The NPS is a score going from -100 to +100. The bigger being the better.

How to measure NPS?

One of the main advantage of the NPS is that it’s pretty easy to measure. It’s made of a single question asking

On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us/our product/our service to a friend or a colleague.

O meaning not at all likely, 10 meaning extremely likely.

Every person responding with a score between 0 and 6 will be considered as a Detractor. Every person responding with a score between 7 and 8 will be considered as Passive. And every 9 and 10 will be Promoters.

To know your NPS, you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

In Screeb, you use our NPS template to ask the question to your users. In this template, we even added additional questions to understand why people gave you a score or another.

You should track your NPS every month, or at least every quarter.

A common score for companies

One of the main advantage of NPS is that it's so widely used, it's easy to compare your score to scores of other companies. Using the same method as your competitors or as other companies is a great way to see if you're doing well or not. That's why we've added a benchmark metric in our NPS report, for you to have this information right where you need it.

It also means that your users are familiar with the NPS questions, as they see it in other tools too. Asking a question people are used to answer is a great way to streamline the responses collection.

The NPS limitations

But even if NPS can be a great and simple way to track your users' satisfaction, it also has limitations. The first limitation is that, in average, a small percentage of people respond. By email, the industry standard is 8%. In-app, the average response rate is only 12%. It means that at least 88% of your users don't respond to your question and so that the score you get is only a partial view of what some of your users think. The risk of it not being representative of all users is high.

The second limitation is that, in itself, if NPS gives you a score about your performance, it doesn't help you to choose what you should do next to improve it. You can't really know why people chose that score and what part of your product you must change to increase their satisfaction.

It means that you need to add extra information to NPS to really be able to use it: a follow up question, informations about who answered, etc. Without that, you may try some changes in your product, but you'll never be sure it was the right thing to do.

Stop paying for NPS

So if NPS is nearly mandatory, if it's such a commodity but with strong limitations, why should you be paying to tracking it? NPS must be free, for you to tick the box and then be able to focus on more valuable and actionable feedback.

That's why we made our NPS plan 100% free at Screeb! Without any limit on the number of people who will answer (even with our 60% response rate in average!) or any limit on the number of responses.

It means you can start tracking your NPS from day one, ask follow up questions to really understand the scores given by your users and - if you want - move to other use cases in the future, using the same tool.

It works for you web and mobile apps, with our Javascript, iOS and Android SDKs.