Gauging Customer Satisfaction:
(Transactional) Net Promoter Score

01.29.2024

"The key tenet to psychology is this: everybody wants to feel special." One of my university psychology professors started our class with this sentence, and it's something I've never forgotten. I think about this when I think of The Starfish Story, and Maya Angelou ("I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel"). In the professional realm, I think about this with every customer interaction, because Customer Satisfaction strongly correlates to customer loyalty, retention, and spending. 

If you're not already running customer sat surveys, when you go to research how to write your survey, you'll see hundreds of articles and websites about different survey methodologies. I'm a strong proponent of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey method, which asks the critical question: 

On a scale of 0 - 10, how likely are you to recommend ________ to a friend or colleague? 

This 1 question strongly correlates to customer engagement, satisfaction, loyalty, and enthusiasm. NPS is measured on a 0-10 scale, with 0 being the lower/worse end of the spectrum, and 10 being the higher/better end. The scale breaks down like this: 

• 0-6 : DETRACTOR - indicates the customer is not particularly satisfied, and is in danger of cutting business with the company, or potentially spreading negativity by word of mouth (less enthusiastic/loyal)

• 7-8: PASSIVE - indicates the customer is neutral about the company; these scores are left out of the equation calculation for the NPS total.

• 9-10: PROMOTER - indicates strong customer loyalty; can fuel growth through word of mouth (more enthusiastic/loyal)

To calculate your NPS score: NPS = [(# of Promoters/Total Responses) - (# of Detractors/Total Responses)]

or, more simply: NPS = (% of Promoters) - (% of Detractors)

When determining success, here's what your NPS score says about your customer service: 

• Above 0: Good

• Above 20: Favorable

• Above 50: Excellent

• Above 80: World Class 

With Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS), this (often) multi-question survey is used to gauge customer satisfaction at the end of a specific event or event lifecycle. tNPS surveys are can be sent at the end of every ticket that gets closed with your help desk, after a project is finally implemented after months of planning, or may be added to a receipt when you pay for a purchase somewhere. tNPS is your chance to get first hand feedback from customers about their experience with your business, and is meant to get feedback from a wide array of customers - not just those your business has familiarity or relationships with.

When writing a tNPS survey, consider trying to get targeted feedback about the interaction. At a former company I worked for, every team had a variation of a tNPS survey to get feedback specific to the team the customer worked with. Our training team asked questions about the materials presented, the trainer, and the general satisfaction with the training class. Our customer service team asked questions about the interaction with the customer service agent, the timeliness of the resolution, and the resolution itself. 

All of this targeted feedback was helpful, and we used the NPS metrics to scale our answers for the other questions. The final question on every survey, however, was the pivotal NPS question, with a twist: 

Based on this transaction, on a scale of 0 - 10, how likely are you to recommend [Rachel's Former Employer] to a friend or colleague?

This 4-word qualifier, along with the timing of the survey, distinguishes it from a relational net promoter survey, as you are correlating the customer satisfaction to the individual instance specifically. When writing your customer sat survey, this question should come after the targeted feedback so the customer can reflect on the other questions more holistically when offering their final answer. 

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