So, you decided to start measuring customers’ satisfaction with your brand in the most straightforward way possible: through Net Promoter Score surveys that collect customer feedback.
Congratulations!
NPS is the number you want to grow – but we all know you can’t improve what you don’t measure, so your decision is spot-on.
To inspire, help, and get you going, we’ve put together a collection of NPS questions and Survey examples that can maximize your open and response rates.
We also prepared some tips and tricks from CVO Strategists to help you get more valuable insights from your customer base.
Without further ado – let’s dive into it!
What Is a Net Promoter Score Survey?
If your shop is bigger than a convenience store, or a small boutique (where you can talk directly to customers), then you need to use surveys to capture customer feedback.
The Net Promoter Score represents a valuable tool that reveals the level of satisfaction your customers have with your company and the likelihood of them recommending your business to their peers.
With a great NPS Survey, you can identify:
- Your happiest customers that you can turn into ambassadors;
- Your unhappy customers and the situations that lead to their dissatisfaction;
- The overall level of satisfaction with your business.
Before we dive into the practical part of the surveys, we need a quick recap of the NPS metric on a general level.
The Net Promoter Score NPS is a straightforward metric that is deeply concerned with one thing: gauging customer loyalty.
The crucial question of the NPS survey is: “On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it that you recommend our business to a friend?”.
Of course, you can (and should) include more questions to get a more nuanced analysis of customer satisfaction and get deeper insights about the experiences you’re providing – but all in their due time.
According to their grades, each customer gets sorted into one of the following categories: Promoters, Neutrals, and Detractors.
To calculate your overall net promoter score, you must subtract the detractors from the Promoters.
Suppose you want to calculate NPS when you have 30% Detractors, 20% Passives, and 40% Promoters. So, you would subtract 30 from 50 and get an NPS score of 30.
Not bad, but there’s definitely room for improvement!
This is just a brief recap – read more about NPS and how to use it from our Ultimate NPS Guide – available here.
What Makes an NPS Survey Great?
Suppose you’re unsure of your NPS surveys and want to ensure they’re great. What should you keep in mind for this endeavor?
Well, it all depends on who you ask.
Customer experience managers will tell you that an excellent NPS is the one asking the right questions. Alternatively, customers will tell you an excellent NPS survey takes little time to complete and isn’t too intricate.
The truth lies somewhere in between.
To actually understand customer satisfaction levels, your survey questions should empower respondents to give you direct and objective feedback.
So, after the initial “how likely is it that you will recommend us” question, you should follow up with open-ended questions that give the necessary space for your customers to really explain what’s wrong (or what you did well).
You might be tempted to include multi-choice questions in your surveys, to ease the work of your respondents.
While it’s a great sentiment, we advise you not to abuse multi-choice questions because they don’t really help you capture the “why” behind the score.
Besides, it’s best to have your issues explained in the way in which customers verbalize them. This way, you make sure you’re not misinterpreting the answers.
So, a great net promoter survey (from your POV) is the accuracy of the questions. Your NPS survey is excellent as long as you get clear, explanatory answers and your customers get to express themselves.
From the customer’s POV, though, things are different.
Some don’t have the time, and others don’t have the patience to explain their scores, so your NPS survey needs to be simple, convenient, and definitely NOT overwhelming.
When choosing your NPS survey questions, you need to be extremely careful with the time to complete, which means the longer the survey, the lower the survey response rate.
Unfortunately, time is super relative and subjective, so there isn’t a benchmark you can follow.
One customer might feel like “2 minutes” is a short time to give feedback, while another might feel “2 minutes” is too much time to waste answering your questions.
Fortunately, many survey tools and survey apps allow you to customize your NPS surveys as much as you need.
So, our advice – test out multiple NPS templates.
Design a two-question survey, design another one, more detailed, then compare the response rates.
The two-question survey will have a greater completion rate, but the long one will roughly show when people get bored and exit the survey – so you have an idea about the length of the final template.
NPS Survey Structure
Another way to make sure the surveys aren’t overwhelming to your customers is to use a survey template with great structure.
Don’t squeeze too many questions with a tiny font on a single page – as it will seem crowded and push people away.
Make sure you use readable, easy-to-read fonts and format your questions so that the essential info stands out.
A great idea is to include a progress bar on your survey, so your customers will know exactly how much is left of the survey.
As for the content of your net promoter score surveys, you should include the standard question (grade scoring), then follow up with context questions (justifying the initial grading).
No matter the types of survey you’re sending out, for NPS, the first question can’t be missed – because it sets the tone for the rest of the conversation.
Furthermore, the question asks customers to rate their level of satisfaction with your brand, and this level decides your retention (or churn) rates further on.
Then, after customers give the initial assessment, it’s time to follow up with open-ended questions to get the “why” behind the rating.
Question example for detractors: “Can you elaborate on what we did wrong?”
Question example for passives: “Is there anything we could do to provide an even better experience?”
Of course, you can even follow up with promoters to get a deeper understanding of why they loved you or see the precise way they verbalize their needs.
Question example for promoters: “We’re glad you’re happy with the experience we’ve prepared for you. What is it you valued most in your experience with our store?”
If you want to zero in on it, you can always ask respondents more specific questions – what disappointed them, what they would recommend, and what they would need for you.
These questions are pretty standard, but you can be creative and customize the questions as much as you need, to meet the goals of your NPS surveys.
NPS is not just another metric! Click here and read how you can avoid the trap of the average and make sure you’re really using NPS results to unlock business growth.
The Types of NPS Survey Questions
There are three types of NPS questions, and we briefly discussed some of them.
Now it’s time to look at each type – and show you both the advantages and disadvantages of using each type of question in your surveys.
Scale questions
This is the standard initial question, asking customers to rate you from 0-10. All NPS surveys include this question, setting the path for the rest of the survey.
The main advantage of this question is that it makes it easier to extract customer insights. Besides, when you look at the average and calculate your NPS score, you can pinpoint how well you’re doing on your road to customer-centricity.
However, with this type of question, it is hard to grasp the reasoning behind the score. You can’t figure out where the problem was, and you don’t get the complete picture.
Some scholars claim you can grow your business through NPS by measuring customer loyalty with only this initial question (asked at two crucial points of the customer journey).
However, we advocate following up with more complex questions. This brings us to…
Multi-Choice Questions
The multi-choice questions contain mutually exclusive responses, allowing the respondent to pick between multiple options.
They’re easy to respond to, and analyzing the results is painless.
However, respondents might find it difficult to pick between too many options. The paradox of choice rears its head here 🙂
Moreover, multiple-choice questions won’t shed light on consumers’ problems or how they verbalize them.
For this, you’re going to need…
Open-ended questions
Open-ended questions don’t provide any template or predefined answer – instead, they allow customers to write about their experiences using their own words.
These questions are amazing because they allow customers to speak about what’s important to them, but also because you get a first-hand view of the vocabulary used by your customer base.
However, open-ended questions take more time and effort to answer, so that respondents might feel intimidated by them.
Moreover, answers to open-ended questions are difficult to compile, sort, and analyze.
You’d have to either read them all manually (and it’s daunting if you have thousands of respondents monthly) or deploy an AI to read them (and not be sure of the accuracy).
Yet, open-ended questions are still the best way to collect customer feedback.
Disclaimer: Survey Questions are more varied than the ones we cover in this article. We only picked NPS questions, but if you want to look at ALL customer satisfaction surveys you can use, take a look here.
21 Example Questions to Ask in Your NPS Survey
If you’re feeling uninspired or don’t know where to start, we compiled a list of 21 GREAT NPS question examples. Feel free to copy-paste, customize, and adapt to meet your goals and needs!
- What is the main reason behind your grade?
- Is there any way we can improve your experience next time?
- Which features do you value most in [products]?
- What did you like least about your shopping experience?
- What are the main benefits of using our product?
- How does our product meet your needs?
- How would you characterize your shopping experience?
- What issue are you hoping to resolve with [product]?
- What would make you move on to our competition?
- Why would you NOT recommend our products?
- What can we do to serve you better?
- What was missing in your experience with [brand name]?
- What is something we could do to make you more content?
- What improvements did [product] bring to your life?
- How does [product] help you?
- Can you list three things we could improve about our shop?
- What convinced you to become a customer?
- What specific problems did you have with our product?
- What was your biggest challenge when purchasing for our e-store?
- What was missing or disappointing in your work experience with us?
- What would you need that would make [product] essential for you?
Mind you; these are only NPS survey question examples.
You can always adapt the examples to meet your business needs. Make sure you match the question with the initial grading so you get valuable feedback from Detractors, Promoters, and Neutrals alike.
With each survey question and response, you will gather enough feedback data to start making important decisions about your product assortment, customer experience procedures, and overall sales & marketing strategies.
Where and When You Should Ask Your NPS Survey Questions
The consensus is that NPS surveys should go out at two key moments: pre-delivery and post-delivery.
By doing so, you can accurately determine whether you’ve managed to provide the value you initially promised- or not.
Whoever gives the most value wins the game of eCommerce in this lifecycle marketing era, but you can’t fix something if you’re unaware of the problem.
The best time to send the pre-delivery NPS survey is right after the checkout process is over. You can even send it in a confirmation email.
At this point, you only want to see if the shopping experience was satisfactory so far – and grasp the shopper’s sentiment about their order.
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The best time to send the post-delivery NPS survey is after your customer interacts with the product. Depending on their location, you should send the survey a couple of days after the delivery.
But don’t wait too long either – so you can collect feedback while the customer experience is still fresh.
As for the where, we recommend integrating your NPS software with whatever email marketing software you’re deploying, then surveying customers by email.
You’re unsure sure which NPS software to use? Here’s a review of the most popular NPS tools out there. Check it out and pick what’s right for you!
Ways to Improve NPS Response Rate
So, now that you know WHAT to ask and WHEN you should ask, it’s time for the survey tips we discussed at the beginning.
Tip 1- Be Specific
We discussed following up with multi-choice or open-ended questions. Use them wisely to get very specific about what you hope to find out.
Formulate a straightforward, direct question focused on the main subject.
Chances are, if you’re dealing with a Detractor, you won’t catch them again on your website for a second purchase.
You might as well take advantage of their presence now, get as much value as possible from this interaction, and get a complete picture of the customer experience you’re providing.
Tip 2 – Avoid Double-Barrelled Questions
Double-Barrelled Questions are questions addressing two different subjects in one.
Here are some double-barreled question examples:
Did you enjoy the service and experience?
Were you satisfied with the product and the shipping?
Was it easy to find the products and the checkout page?
These questions are confusing and misleading, especially if you’re using them in yes/no type of questions.
It’s a common mistake, don’t worry. As long as you’re aware of it, you can avoid it.
Tip 3 – Be concise.
We’ve already discussed the time-to-complete of your NPS survey.
Since it’s impossible to provide a benchmark, we advise you only settle on an NPS survey template after you test multiple options.
Remember that short and simple is usually the way to go, so don’t go overboard with your questions.
Wrap-up
We’re no longer playing a game of numbers – who can get more clients monthly, but a game of customer experience.
And the winner is he who gets the value of a fantastic customer experience and over-delivers to each new customer.
NPS allows you to do just that because it shows you what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you shouldn’t be doing.
Frequently Asked Questions about NPS Questions & Surveys
The standard question with NPS surveys is “on a scale of -10, would you recommend us to a friend?”. However, great NPS surveys should follow up with open-ended questions and ask respondents to justify their answers.
Minimum 1 – asking respondents to grade recommending a business from 0-10. However, it’s good practice to follow up with 2-3 questions to uncover the reason behind the grading.
There are two crucial points when you should ask an NPS question: before and after delivery. The NPS will bring the best results of you send the survey in these points, as opposed to just one of them.
The most common ways to do a Survey are through an email campaign, or a pop-up survey on the website.
