Have you ever responded to a one-question survey pop-up asking to rate your experience after an ecommerce purchase? If so, chances are you’ve participated in a company’s NPS survey.

As companies continue to make investments in customer experience, net promoter score software, or NPS software, is becoming increasingly popular to help measure customer satisfaction. Looking at net promoter score is a way for you to gauge how customers feel about your company overall. You can use software to make it easier to administer and collect survey results.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• What is NPS software?

• Common features of NPS software

• What type of buyer are you?

• Benefits and potential issues

• Market trends to understand

NPS score in SoGoSurvey Software dashboard

What is NPS software?

NPS software, or net promoter score software, helps organizations implement campaigns to measure net promoter scores (NPS). A net promoter score is the likelihood a customer will recommend the company to a friend or family member. It’s typically a ranking from 0 to 10. The way a customer answers then helps you divide them into three groups:

• Promoters (score of 9-10): These are your loyal followers who may spread the news about your company through positive word-of-mouth.

• Detractors (score of 0-6): These customers may actively discourage friends or family members from purchasing from your company.

• Passives (score of 7-8): These customers were marginally satisfied by your company but don’t feel any particular loyalty, and may easily choose a competitor brand in the future.

You would then calculate your overall NPS by subtracting the detractors from promoters for an overall result between -100 to 100. You don’t factor passives into your NPS. To make this process easier, you can use software for survey administration, collecting results, and calculating your score.

While NPS has been primarily used by B2C companies and has been mostly consumer-focused, it’s now becoming more popular for use with B2B companies. It’s also increasingly being used internally to look at employee satisfaction rates.

Common features of NPS software

Here are some common features of NPS software:

What type of buyer are you?

• B2C companies: NPS was originally adopted by B2C companies to get a quick pulse on customer satisfaction, so the software is most commonly used by consumer-facing companies.

• B2B companies: As the net promoter score metric has increased in popularity since its introduction in 2003, NPS is now also used by B2B companies. While it’s more complex to use NPS in a B2B context rather than a consumer-facing context, it can still be a helpful metric for B2Bs to judge the strength of their customer relationships.

• HR departments: HR departments may use NPS software to help them gauge employee satisfaction metrics. NPS requires only one or two simple questions, so it’s easy to take a pulse of the company’s overall employee satisfaction quickly and often. The metric is also easy to understand and doesn’t require extensive calculations.

Benefits and potential issues

• Implement surveys easily: If NPS is an important metric for your business, using NPS software can make it much easier to implement surveys. You can increase the frequency and ways you distribute the survey using NPS software, as opposed to manually sending out these surveys via email, and tracking the responses on a spreadsheet.

• Survey more frequently: One of the key strengths of NPS is the simplicity of having only one or two questions per survey. This creates less of a burden on customers and allows companies to get a pulse on their customer satisfaction rate much quicker than more extensive customer surveys.

• Integrate with third-party platforms: Integrate the software with your ecommerce site, chat, customer service, or email marketing platforms, which can make it even easier to automate surveys and include them as a seamless part of your customer experience.

• Extra cost: One of the main issues you may find with NPS software is simply that it represents an extra cost to your business, so you’ll need to decide whether or not the NPS benchmark is important enough to your company that it warrants investing in software.

• Lack of features: Choosing the right software for your business will really be a matter of understanding which vendors offer the features you need for your particular industry within your budget. For instance, drawbacks of some software platforms could be that they don’t offer multi-language options, the ability to conduct surveys on mobile, or the ability to use the software for both customer and employee satisfaction.

Market trends to understand

The number of companies using net promoter scores is projected to increase dramatically over the next few years.

NPS has received some criticism in that it’s hard to make the information actionable to improve customer service. Sometimes companies will also over-prioritize the metrics and game the system to get the NPS higher. While it’s important to remember NPS is simply one measurement to have in your toolkit, when done correctly, it can be a valuable way to gather a quick pulse on how your customers feel about your company.

NPS software can help make the process smoother and more automated so you can focus on what really matters—improving your customer experience.

Note: The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.