We’ve designed this guide as your go-to resource for launching and managing effective NPS® (Net Promoter Score) surveys. It is here to simplify the process and empower you so that you can maximize customer satisfaction while, at the same time, growing your business.

Here’s what you can expect to get out of this guide:

So, whether you’re new to NPS, or simply looking to refine your existing strategy, this guide is here for you. Everything you need in one place to create, launch, and analyze NPS with confidence and, most of all, ease. You’ll save time, avoid common mistakes, and, most of all, be equipped to turn customer feedback into actionable insights that drive customer retention, loyalty, and all that good stuff.

NPS was introduced by Bain & Company, in collaboration with Fred Reichheld, in 2003. The score measures customer loyalty on a 0 to 10 scale and it’s a scored between -100 to 100.

Here’s the thing. Conducting NPS surveys on a regular basis can help drive business growth because it encourages your business to constantly focus on enhancing this key metric. As an added bonus, the constant customer feedback will reveal strengths and highlight areas for improvement. Putting all this together, you can leverage this to make far more informed business decisions and scale your product effectively going forward. What’s not to like?

Putting out an NPS survey is quick and easy. With Survicate, you can get it done in more or less 5 minutes. The best part is that once you start gathering your feedback, the analysis is also straightforward. Since the score is presented as a percentage, understanding the outcome is immediate and clear.

Simply put, retaining existing customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. The more loyal your customers are, the more likely they are to remain with your brand rather than seeking alternatives. And when you’re conducting NPS surveys, and find out they are dissatisfied, you have the opportunity to reach out, value their feedback, and convert them back into being Promoters. And that’s a plan worth investing in.

When we talk about survey channels, we’re referring to the platform or medium you’ll use to send your NPS survey. This could be email, your website, web app, mobile app, SMS—you name it. But the golden question is: which one’s best for your audience?

The best channel depends on several factors, like your target audience, the stage of the customer journey you're measuring, and the type of interaction you're focusing on.

Simply put, there’s no "one-size-fits-all" answer. But here’s what you should be looking for when choosing the channels you want to push your NPS surveys:

There is no secret formula - but don’t worry, we’ll give you some best practices to get you started.

At Survicate, for example, we send NPS surveys every three months, starting from the day our customers begin their subscription. This ensures that we survey each customer at the same point in their journey. Why? Because it gives us consistent insights into their experience over time, helping us evaluate our business decisions and plan our roadmap with real customer insights. But your ideal NPS cadence might look a little different.

Here’s what to consider:

💡Worth considering
​

Seasonality - You may notice that the NPS score you receive is seasonal: there are times of the year when customers are more likely to give you a high or a low score. If you notice such a pattern, you may consider a year-to-year analysis of NPS scores. Instead of comparing the results to the previous quarter, compare them to the ones you got a year before.

Year-over-year comparisons may be more accurate than quarter-over-quarter analysis in such cases. If you run an NPS survey in June, make sure to run it in June the following year. That way, you get corresponding data for that time period.

When deciding who should receive your NPS surveys, it’s all about focusing on the customers who can offer the most valuable insights. The goal is to gather feedback that actually drives decisions, which is why segmenting your audience makes sense.

Instead of sending your survey to everyone, target the customers whose feedback will be the most useful. By segmenting based on things like engagement level, subscription tier, or purchase history, you’ll reach the people who have the most experience with your product or service.

Here are a few examples:

By segmenting your customers thoughtfully, you can ensure your NPS surveys reach the people who will give you the most relevant and actionable feedback, ultimately helping you improve customer satisfaction and grow your business.

Creating your first NPS survey is easy, but first, you have to decide which channel you’ll be using. We’ve covered that on the previous section: What is the best channel to ask for NPS?

So whether you want to send NPS through email, or place it on your website or mobile app, we’ve got you covered.

Once you decide on which channel you’re going with, feel free to jump to that section:

In the main dashboard, click on the Create new survey button.

From there, pick how you would like to start. We recommend starting with an AI-assisted creation or template library for a swift creation. These will get you up to starting your survey in no time!

If you started with the template library or AI survey creator, you’ll get your survey questions already set for you. You can later edit them to your liking, or add new questions by clicking on “Add new question”. Here you can find a complete list of question and action types.

The NPS question is typically formulated as “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague?”. But we recommend changing the way you formulate your question to fit your business and the way you communicate with your customers. Below, we’ve selected a few of our favorite ways our customers have formulated their NPS question to fit their business. Each version simply focuses on slightly different aspects of customer perception, while still holding the core idea of NPS. We hope these will get you inspired to make your own:

Just as the wording of your NPS question is important, it's also worth considering how you phrase your NPS follow-up questions. Below you can find a few examples of our favorite ways NPS follow-up questions were asked:

Customers in this range are less likely to recommend your product, that’s why your follow-up should focus on identifying the issues and biggest pain points:

Promoters are likely to recommend your product but you don’t ever want to leave it at that. This is a great opportunity to ask what they’re loving, and what your customers want more of.

Going into the Configure tab, you can modify settings responsible for identifying the respondents and survey status.

If you want your respondents to be recognized, you have to have a tool selected in the field. There are plenty of tools to choose from including favorites like:

⚠️Important - if you need your responses to be anonymous, go ahead and skip this step.

In the Connect tab, you can also integrate your survey with other apps that you use on a daily basis. This is, of course, optional, but we highly recommend that you take advantage of this feature.

Essentially, integrations will help you automate processes and workflows. For example, you can create triggers based on survey responses to automate support tickets, task assignments, and personalized follow-up actions. The idea here is to have everything in one place, saving you time, improving efficiency, and ensuring that you act on customer feedback right away.

To give you a better idea of what you can do, here are some popular integrations that our customers use:

The Survicate and HubSpot integration allows you to:

⚠️Bonus - with the new HubSpot App Cards feature, you can also:

Find out more about the HubSpot integration here.

The Surivcate and Slack integration allows you to:

Find out more about the Slack integration here.

The Surivcate and Klaviyo integration allows you to:

Find out more about the Klaviyo integration here.

Survicate natively integrates with 80+ tools. If you didn’t see your favorite integration listed in these examples, don’t worry, here’s a full list.

And the most important step to get your survey out there is to share it. In the Share tab, you can adjust the preview, description, and the name the respondents will see when the survey is opened in your browser.

⚠️Important - To share your survey, you will need to create that email in your email service provider and set up the audience there. From there, you can simply follow one of the options below to finish sending your survey:

All you need to do is copy the code generated once you click on the ‘Get your code’ button and paste it into an HTML editor of your software. It’s as easy as 1-2-3. No coding or technical skills required.

⚠️Important - Don’t forget to choose your email software in ‘Responses identification’ (under Settings tab) to see the names and emails of your respondents.

Once you’ve collected some feedback, you’re ready to analyze it.

Here’s how you can act on the feedback depending on each segment:

Promoters (Score 9-10):

They’re your most loyal customers; they love your product. Here are some ways you can actively engage with them.

Passives (Score 7-8):

These customers are on the fence, which means they’re satisfied but not super thrilled. Here’s how you can engage this segment.

Detractors (Score 0-6):

Not only are they dissatisfied, but they are more likely to churn. It’s crucial to address their concerns as soon as possible because sometimes it could turn them into your biggest advocates.

And if you’re not a fan of the manual work…as luck would have it, we’ve got some new AI-powered tools to sort of…do the dirty work for you when it comes to taking your data and turning it into actionable insights.

Here you can make great use of our topics feature. Provided you have connected your survey to Insights Hub, it will take all of the feedback and automatically categorize it into different topics. Within every topic, you’ll find the direct feedback that it relates to, making it easier for you to act on it immediately.

Topics you’ll most often find:

Insights Hub is mainly used to:

For a full guide on how to use it, check this out. But not to leave you empty-handed, here are some ways you can apply it for your NPS surveys:

Of course, on top of that, you get our research assistant. It…assists you with your…research 😀. Find answers to all your questions quickly and effectively just by asking.

The research assistant takes your feedback and can answer your questions based on:

For a full guide on how to use it, check this out. For now, here are the top reasons why you should try it out for your NPS surveys:

To get you on your way, try asking your research assistant some of these questions:

Use the momentum and ask your Promoters for a positive review. Using the ‘Thank you’ question type, you can redirect your Promoters straight to your favorite review site.

A very popular way of building NPS surveys is asking different follow-up questions to your respondent based on their previous response.

For example, to your Promoters, you can ask what is their favorite thing about your business, and to your Detractors you can ask what do you need to improve. You can achive that using survey logic feature. This feature allows you to ask different follow-up questions based on the selected NPS score.

Survey logic simplifies the creation of different paths for respondents by skipping certain questions based on their previous answers. This allows you to customize the survey experience with tailored question flows and segment users according to their feedback.

As mentioned previously, your NPS survey comes ‘pre-packaged’ with logic. You can check how each question uses this feature, by simply clicking on the desired question and clicking the ‘Logic’ tab:

If you’d like to use this feature for your newly added questions, it’s quite easy to set up.

Step 1.

Once you’ve added your question and added a Single answer selection or a Dropdown list, as well as the other survey questions, head over to the Logic tab of the question and click on + Add new logic.

Step 2.

Here, you'll see the If answer condition, letting you decide when to apply logic.

You can choose to apply logic if the response is or is not equal to one of the answer choices or when it has any value.

This means you’ve got a lot of possibilities to work with. Here’s a breakdown:

If you select Answer 1 or Answer 2, this logic will work for the respondents who select Answer 1 or Answer 2.

If you select Answer 1 or Answer 2, this logic will work for the respondents who select anything other than Answer 1 and Answer 2, such as Answer 3.

In the main dashboard, click on the Create new survey button.

And from there you are met with a new screen. There are four options to choose from:

For the purpose of this guide, we’ll be focusing on ‘Use a template’.

If you started with the template library or AI survey creator, you’ll get your survey questions already set for you. You can later edit them to your liking, or add new questions by clicking on “Add new question”. Here you can find a complete list of question and action types.

The NPS question is typically formulated as “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend or collegue?”. But we recommend changing the way you formulate your question to fit your business and the way you communicate with your customers. Below, we’ve selected a few of our favorite ways our customers have formulated their NPS question to fit their business. Each version simply focuses on slightly different aspects of customer perception, while still holding the core idea of NPS. We hope these will get you inspired to make your own:

As much as the way you formulate your NPS question, you can also reconsider the way you ask your NPS follow-ups. Below you can find a few examples of our favorite ways NPS follow-up questions were asked:

Customers in this range are less likely to recommend your product, that’s why your follow-up should focus on identifying the issues and biggest pain points:

Promoters are likely to recommend your product but you don’t ever want to leave it at that. This is a great opportunity to ask what they’re loving, and what your customers want more of.

Going into the Target tab, this will give you a chance to target your website surveys to specific times, a certain group of visitors, and beyond.

It’s important that you target each survey to the visitors who are more likely to contribute meaningfully. Targeting has a lot of benefits, these include:

In the connect tab, you can also integrate your survey with other apps that you use on a daily basis. This is, of course, optional, but we highly recommend that you take advantage of this feature. To learn more about this, jump to this section.

And the most important step to get your survey out there is to launch it. In the Launch tab, if you haven’t done so already, you’ll need to install the Survicate code on your site. You’ve got a couple of options to choose from:

Great, you’re to go now. Start your survey and gather customer insights right from your website or in-product. You can start it right awa or set a custom date to start your survey.

Once you’ve collected some feedback, you’re ready to analyze it. Jump to the section dedicated to analyzing your data.

In the main dashboard, click on the Create new survey button.

And from there you are met with a new screen. There are four options to choose from:

For the purpose of this guide, we’ll be focusing on ‘Use a template’.

If you started with the template library or AI survey creator, you’ll get your survey questions already set for you. You can later edit them to your liking, or add new questions by clicking on “Add new question”. Here you can find a complete list of question and action types.

The NPS question is typically formulated as “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend or collegue?”. But we recommend changing the way you formulate your question to fit your business and the way you communicate with your customers. Below, we’ve selected a few of our favorite ways our customers have formulated their NPS question to fit their business. Each version simply focuses on slightly different aspects of customer perception, while still holding the core idea of NPS. We hope these will get you inspired to make your own:

As much as the way you formulate your NPS question, you can also reconsider the way you ask your NPS follow-ups. Below you can find a few examples of our favorite ways NPS follow-up questions were asked:

Customers in this range are less likely to recommend your product, that’s why your follow-up should focus on identifying the issues and biggest pain points:

Promoters are likely to recommend your product but you don’t ever want to leave it at that. This is a great opportunity to ask what they’re loving, and what your customers want more of.

Going into the Target tab, this will give you a chance to target your website surveys to specific times, a certain group of visitors, and beyond.

It’s important that you target each survey to the visitors who are more likely to contribute meaningfully. Targeting has a lot of benefits, these include:

In the Connect tab, you can also integrate your survey with other apps that you use on a daily basis. This is, of course, optional, but we highly recommend that you take advantage of this feature. To learn more about this, jump to this section.

And the most important step to get your survey out there is to launch it. In the Launch tab, if you haven’t done so already, you’ll need to install and configure our SDK. Here are the options you can choose from:

Great, you’re to go now. Start your survey and gather customer insights right from your website or in-product. You can start it right awa or set a custom date to start your survey.

There are various ways you can do this in your surveys. If you are running an email NPS for instance, you can automatically capture respondents' email addresses using software-aware links.

Once you’ve collected some feedback, you’re ready to analyze it. Jump to the section dedicated to analyzing your data

So how is everybody else using their NPS surveys? I’ve gone ahead and gathered some of our awesome customer stories just to give you some ideas and inspiration..

Let’s start with TaxFix and their NPS survey use for customer retention and trust building.

They use in-app NPS surveys as a central tool in their strategy to build trust and drive customer retention. With a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 68 and an 88% completion rate, Taxfix leverages these surveys to stay relevant by understanding customer needs and preferences.

Here’s the good stuff…

By focusing on personalized messaging through the app and other channels like push notifications and emails, Taxfix effectively enhances user experience and retention, showcasing how understanding customer feedback is crucial for long-term relationship building.

Read the full story here.

CarWale uses NPS surveys to gain insights into customer satisfaction, loyalty drivers, and areas of dissatisfaction. They run these surveys periodically through their app to avoid overwhelming feedback and enable timely customer follow-ups. This strategy helps them track NPS scores over time, validate assumptions, and refine their product development based on real-time feedback. They also take advantage of different channels on our platform to deepen their understanding of user-profiles and pain points.

Key highlights with NPS:

Read the full story here.

Hitta's Use of NPS Surveys for Customer-Centric Growth

Hitta, a prominent Swedish search engine and directory, leverages NPS surveys to gain valuable customer insights and drive improvements in its services. Founded in 2004, Hitta.se helps users find people, businesses, and services, fostering community connectivity.

NPS Surveys:

Results and key improvements:

The insights gained from these surveys have led to meaningful changes in the customer journey, such as introducing a welcome call 30 days after an order to ensure smooth onboarding and proactively identifying potential issues before the first NPS survey is sent. By focusing on customer feedback and making NPS a core company metric, Hitta have improved their NPS by 35% and continue to foster a more positive customer experience.

Read the full story here.

Agendor, a CRM platform for sales professionals, leverages Survicate’s in-app NPS surveys to collect valuable feedback and guide product development. Faced with low response rates from email surveys, Agendor shifted to in-product surveys, boosting engagement and the quality of responses.

Takaways:

Agendor effectively prioritizes new features based on user input, engaging customers in beta testing, thus enhancing product development. The switch to in-product surveys resulted in better feedback and stronger customer relationships, improving overall user satisfaction.

Read the full story here.

Preply's Use of NPS Surveys for Continuous Improvement and Customer-Centric Growth

Here’s how Preply, a global online marketplace for language learning, placed customer feedback at the center of its strategy. They used NPS as a key metric to fuel customer-centric growth. With "learner obsession" as a core value, Preply leveraged our NPS surveys to track satisfaction and loyalty across the organization.

Here’s some cool things they did:

Here’s the full story: https://survicate.com/customer-stories/agendor

Technical questions

Yes. You can schedule recurring NPS surveys using website and mobile surveys. For more information, just click here.

You can start by analzying the feedback provided by your Detractors (0-6 scores) and Passives (7-8). Use research assistant to help you identify the most common pain points allowing you to act on it accordingly.

2.How can I ensure my NPS surveys are unbiased and reliable?

There are many factors that could contribute to this. Here are a few to help you ensure you’re getting unbiased and reliable feedback.

NPS score is widely used metric that also helps you measure customer loyalty and predict business growth. With that, a high NPS can also help you increase your customer lifetime value.

First thing you can do is send a follow-up email reminding them about your survey, it’s a great way to politely nudge them to complete the survey. Make sure to personalize the outreach, increasing the chances that they actually take the survey. And if the email didn’t work, you can try a different channel to reach out on if you have that available to you, like on chat, or in-app.

2.How can I send a follow-up survey or communication just to Detractors who answered the NPS question but didn’t leave open-text feedback (but I want to ask them to explain their score)?

A great way to do this, is to use segmentation feature to identify customers who gave a low score but didn’t leave any feedback. Send a tailored follow-up asking for more details on why they rated your product or service negatively.

Survicate analysis feature allows you to see how response rate changes over time, see all information you’ve collected about a specific respondent along with their response, filter results using advanced analysis, and more, you can also integrate with other tools for more analysis. Here are some examples:

Google Analytics - you can track survey performance and response behavior

HubSpot and Salesforce - sync survey data with customer records

Slack - for real-time feedback notifications (received a low score? Get notified right away to act on it)

And more. Here’s a list a full list of our integrations.

You can configure the survey mapping in the Connect tab > Edit mapping section. Here, select the option to ‘Send scores as 0-10 values’ rather than grouping respondents into Detractors, Passives, or Promoters. This ensures that individual scores are sent to your CRM for more granular analysis, allowing you to track each customer’s exact response rather than a broad category.

🎥 NPS Masterclass

🎥 NPS Surveys: Harness Promoter, Detractor, and Passive Feedback

How to improve NPS? 7 steps to success

What is Net Promoter Score? 2024 Guide to Top NPS surveys

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Email: Everything You Need to Know

NPS Benefits: Why Use Net Promoter Score? [Pros and Cons]

NPS Analysis: Comprehensive Walkthrough of NPS…

NPS for SaaS: Why Your Company Should Track It, Too

Transactional NPS vs Relationship NPS: Which is the Right One for You?