Every business wants to serve its customers fully and ensure that they’re having the best experience possible.
Unfortunately, when it comes to websites such as Yelp or the Better Business Bureau, feedback tends to skew to the extremes. They rarely represent the average customer. Instead, we tend to hear from those who have had either terrible or unusually excellent experiences.
That’s not particularly helpful to businesses that want to understand their performance in a broader sense. The content represented in these posts rarely highlights the sort of reasoning and measurable insights businesses need. Luckily, there’s a better way known as Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Businesses use NPS surveys to gather standardized feedback from their customers to inform future content marketing. These surveys typically emphasize how customers feel about a business and whether they would promote that business to people they know. As such, NPS scores can be correlated with business growth, but it’s not as simple as just asking questions.
Rather, businesses need to act on the results of their NPS surveys, especially when developing content marketing. They also need to customize those surveys wisely to gain higher-quality insights. This is where NPS-informed content marketing practices can help.
One of the best ways to ensure you’re getting the most information from your NPS survey is by customizing your NPS questions. There are a number of ways to do this. At the heart of the matter is something that every content marketer knows. How you say something is often more important than what you say.
In other words, the particular word choices or phrasing carry more weight than the message. As such, you will need to borrow from your other communication skills. Use the ones you use in content marketing to ensure you’re really hearing what your customers think.
So, what does it look like to rethink your NPS questions? Consider, for example, the common question, “Would you recommend this business to a friend?”
Businesses use this question as a proxy for factors like loyalty and word-of-mouth promotion. The problem is that, with a handful of exceptions, people don’t just walk around recommending businesses to their friends. This is true even if they like that business. There are plenty of survey takers who find that question ludicrous for this precise reason. As a result, businesses should consider that when phrasing their questions. Choosing different language could yield clearer and more valuable results.
There is a benefit to focusing on your content marketing and writing skills when developing your NPS survey. Just like standard content writing tasks, such an approach allows businesses to deliver value at the same time that they’re seeking customer insights. Ask questions that will help you solve major e-commerce problems; one of the hallmarks of the NPS approach is that it typically asks users why they chose a particular response.
Businesses also have the option to ask their customers about particular services, rather than about the company as a whole. The NPS survey can help businesses reorient a product or service and hone in on what is and isn’t working.
Sometimes, when a business is getting negative feedback from customers on their NPS survey, the issue is less with the product or service than the supporting information. Product education is, after all, an integral part of any business model, so ensure that your NPS results are part of a feedback loop that circles back to your content marketing team and customer representatives.
These are the people who need to know what’s on your clients’ minds. After all, they are empowered to use those insights productively. When customers realize that their question is not addressed in a blog, they see that their survey responses weren’t a waste of time and they feel heard — a valuable component for building loyalty.
Everyone knows that content marketing is part of customer experience (CX), as are elements such as average handling time (AHT), or the amount of time representatives spend working with customers. Unfortunately, most brands overlook the fact that NPS surveys also need to contribute to positive CX. This tends to become obvious in the final results. NPS surveys tend to be clunky and unattractive and, like a lot of other tasks of this nature, customers don’t find them compelling.
As such, we return to our earlier point. While Yelp and Better Business Bureau insights don’t necessarily reflect the fuller audience, NPS results may not either. That means you need to account for the issue of CX when developing these surveys, and that means selling your survey the way you sell your products. But how?
If you’re trying to encourage greater participation in your NPS survey, you shouldn’t send the survey out as a freestanding piece of content, because it isn’t. Your NPS survey can be well-designed but, lacking context, your customers don’t have a strong reason to invest their time. Other aspects of your sales process, including using a direct ask by the sales representative supporting the account, can increase engagement, especially if it’s paired with carefully calibrated AHT.
The ultimate goal of measuring your company’s NPS is that it helps your brand see whether your customers are on your side. Every customer should be a promoter and, in the era of social media, when customers are the promoters, your content marketing team can do a lot less.
When a “promoter” shares your Instagram post to their story, you don’t just reach your existing audience. You also reach all of your promoter-level customers’ friends. Remember, these aren’t formal influencers, just people who actually use and like your brand, and that’s even more powerful.
NPS surveys are just one tool among many for businesses that want to take their services to the next level. However, when you view this tool in isolation, outside of the other tools at your company’s disposal, you don’t do it justice. By combining the best of the NPS survey format with everything you’ve learned about content marketing over the years, though, you make that survey a place where information is exchanged and relationships are built.
These surveys are more than a measurement — they’re part of a continuous value loop. It’s time for more businesses to treat them that way and reap the rewards.
