How to Get Started with Net Promoter Score (NPS) in HubSpot

For a business to grow, it needs customers, and for sustainable growth, a company doesn't just need satisfied repeat customers, but also customers who are so happy with a company's offering they will refer new business. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help companies understand how much their customer base is contributing to their growth.

What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)? 

NPS is a scale that allows companies to measure their customers’ willingness to recommend their products or services to others. Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.

HubSpot allows you to send out NPS surveys straight from the HubSpot Service Hub, enabling you to utilize all the information you have stored in the HubSpot CRM to set your recipients list, in addition to enabling you to set up automation. You can automate follow-up tasks, use criteria to keep your recipient list up-to-date and schedule periodic survey sends, eliminating many tedious, time-consuming manual tasks.

Additionally, HubSpot presents your NPS results right in the survey tool, making it easy to analyze not just your overall score, but also your response rate without having to build a custom report.

How to Get Started with NPS in HubSpot

NPS surveys are located in the HubSpot Service Hub under “feedback surveys.” HubSpot allows you to create multiple types of customer feedback surveys, depending on what kind of information you’re looking for.

Here’s how to set up NPS surveys:

1. Identify recipients

Who you send your NPS survey to will impact the insight you’re able to gain from your score. 

In theory, you’d want to send the survey to all of your customers. But for B2B, your customers are companies, not people. There might be contacts at those companies who you haven’t directly worked with, in which case their NPS feedback wouldn’t be applicable. Additionally, you don’t want to send the survey to brand new customers because they haven’t had enough experience with your company yet.

Set up the survey to include criteria just like you would for any other list or workflow.

HubSpot allows you to either send the survey to every contact with a “became a customer” date of more than 30 days ago or create your own custom criteria.

If you keep your contact database well-maintained, and you know everyone marked “customer” is someone you’d want to measure the loyalty of, the default recipients might work for you. If not, you can add criteria based on company property, contact property, deal property, ticket property and email address. Those properties aren’t just limited to defaults. You can set criteria based on any of the custom properties you’ve created in the HubSpot CRM as well.

For example, if you have a custom property for a contact’s role within the account, you could ensure only customers marked “point of contact” receive the survey.

We recommend that you exclude contacts within your company, irrelevant contacts, brand-new customers and customers who are inactive or on the verge of churning.

While you don’t want to adjust your survey recipients so much that is skews your results, if you know a customer is currently unhappy with you, reaching out to ask how they’re feeling doesn’t get any useful data for you and might damage their perception of your company even further.

2. Set up your survey

NPS surveys are only one question, and you can’t change it from the industry standard. However, you can change the design of the survey, the email subject line and the text introducing the survey in the email.

You should update those settings to ensure your NPS outreach is aligned with your brand and communication style.

3. Customize feedback

Once an NPS recipient has selected a numerical response to the survey, they’ll be prompted with the opportunity to explain why they responded that way. Depending on what qualitative data you’re seeking to help you better understand your NPS score, you can customize these follow-up prompts. 

For example, you might want to ask promoters, who have responded with a 9 or 10, which of your product features they find most valuable.

4. Determine how often you send out NPS surveys

The recommended NPS cadence is every three months, but that can vary for different products, services or industries. The cycle of use of your product is what really determines the right frequency for your company. 

If your product or service is only used once a year, then you’ll want to match your NPS cadence to that. Alternatively, if your offering is a one-time purchase or installation, then a one-off NPS survey would be more appropriate for your company.

5. Set up follow-up workflow

HubSpot’s NPS tool allows you to automate follow-up actions directly in the survey tool. The follow-ups can be customized based on the feedback the customer submitted.

For example, you might want to create a ticket for any detractors or set a task that would prompt that contact owner to set up a meeting to attempt to improve client sentiment.

6. Set goals

While your NPS score should be taken into account, you might have other related goals that are a higher priority for your company. The goal of your NPS surveys should be based on what kind of feedback you’re seeking from your customers and your past responses.

For example, if you have a really low response rate, your goal might not be around the final NPS score, but rather encouraging contacts to submit a rating to begin with. 

Or, maybe you’re happy with your score but don’t get any comments around why a contact responded the way they did. In that case, you might aim to customize your follow-up questions and protocol to try to obtain more qualitative data.

The Takeaway

In order to gain valuable insight from your NPS score, you need to decide what constitutes as a customer who could be loyal to your company.

Do you want to measure the loyalty of anyone who has purchased your product or service? Do they need to have used your company’s offering for a certain time period?

Data management is also crucial. If customers aren’t labeled correctly, you might send out your NPS to too many or too few contacts and get feedback that’s not reflective of your overall customer base. People who don’t know you very well are more likely to respond with very low feedback ratings, which will drive down your NPS score.