Swipe this technique to find out what people really think about your business!

It’s 9:45pm on Thursday night. You’ve just closed your laptop after entering the numbers for the day.

Sales are up this month. Things are starting to go really well and you are excited about your goals.

You’re also a bit nervous. Every day you are grinding away, getting it done, helping customers, working on your business, making it happen. It seems like things are going great.

So why are you nervous? One reason: you aren’t sure exactly why things are going great. What happens if something changes? What is next month isn’t as good? How can you get ahead?

Are there things you should be doing now to keep this wave going? Can you capitalize on this positivity in ways you aren’t currently?

You owe it to yourself and your customers to keep this trend going. You need to find out exactly why things are going so well and find the other things that aren’t going so well to get ahead of them.

How do you figure out what’s working and what can be working a hundred times better without guessing? Data direct from your customers.

If you’ve been listening to Jaime for a while you may have heard her (or her millionaires) mention how important it is to get consistent feedback from your customers. You need to hear it all: what’s working well, what needs to be improved, and what needs to change right now.

You know how important this feedback is. Unfortunately, like with so many things in your business, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to add another task to your to-do list.

But it is important. So what do you do?

What if you could distill that feedback down to one number? And what if you could set up a system to ask for that feedback automatically, without adding steps to your sales process and without burdening your customers?

Enter the “Net Promoter Score” survey.

Even if you don’t know the name, you’ve probably seen or taken it yourself. It looks like this:

Note: Customers use the Net Promoter Score survey to rate their their likelihood to recommend your business on a 0-10 scale.

Jaime’s note: If you have heard my interview with Ryan Levesque or know about his best-selling book ASK – you are familiar with how hot survey’s are now.

Many millionaires have been using Net Promoter Score for many years to scientifically get the data from your customer and the knowledge with what to do with the data to make your marketing and sales easier. (No I’m not an affiliate but I want you to make business decisions with data!)

This is a great representation of their experience with your business and is a metric Jaime says many of her millionaire interviewees recommend.

Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are grouped into three categories:

• 10 and 9 are called “Promoters.” Promoters had a great experience and are enthusiastic supporters of your business.
• 7 and 8 are called “Passives.” Passives had an okay experience and may or may not want to work with you in the future.
• 0 to 6 are called “Detractors.” Detractors had a disappointing experience and are not likely to use your business again.

The point of the survey is to gather data so you can increase the number of people who have experiences in the Promoter range and decrease the number of people who have experiences in the Detractor range.

You do this by trying to understand what led to those scores with a followup question. Something like, “what is the primary reason for your score?” This kind of direct feedback is invaluable. From those answers you can start making adjustments in your business and moving more people into the 9 – 10 range.

The Formula

An important note on how the Net Promoter Score is calculated: it is not an average of all the results. It is the difference in the percentage of Promoter scores to the percentage of the Detractor scores.

Note: How customer insight on your survey breaks down to your Net Promoter Score.

Putting together your NPS Funnel

Sounds great, right? So how do we reliably collect this information? Through the magic of automation! I’m going to outline a system that will put this survey in front of every new customer so you can start gathering input and making changes.

An extra benefit of the system we’re going to implement is a huge boost in your online reviews. When customers give a score of 9 or 10, we are going to substitute the follow-up question (“what is the primary reason for your score?”) with a request for them to leave an online review.

You will still get the feedback with the added benefit of a very positive, public recounting of the great experience they just had.

The system consists of four major steps:

1. Getting customer’s email address
2. Sending the NPS survey
3. Gathering the responses
4. Acting on the information

Ready? Let’s get started!

1. Gathering customer’s email address

This is the trigger for the whole system; nothing works without it.

Building an email list is important to your business for a variety of reason. Here are a few articles to read from millionaire interviewee Syed Bahlki’s companies about building your email list:

• Revealed: Why Building Your Email List is so Important Today!
• Why You Need to Build an Email List Right Now – And the Exact Steps on How to Get Started

 

There are a variety of ways to gather email addresses. You could do it manually as part of an invoicing process, or if you have a brick and mortar or online store you can do it at checkout, or it might be how you send your new customer a receipt, or how you track participation in a loyalty program.

It doesn’t matter how you collect them, but it is critical that you do.

As you gather email addresses, you will input them into an email service such as AWeber or Convertkit.

Jaime and I both have used and recommend AWeber; it’s a great place to start.

2. Sending the NPS survey

One critical component of whatever email service you go with is that it has the ability to immediately and automatically send emails to new customers.

This functionality is called by a few different names: campaigns, follow-up series, drips, courses, etc. Almost all email services can do it, but some of the free plans don’t allow it.

You are going to configure your email service to send the NPS survey as the first email new customers receive. Depending on the provider you go with the process will be different but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out. If you hit any roadblocks reach out to me: [email protected]. I’ll walk you through it.

The email should be very simple. It’s key that new customers don’t have a ton of different options to click. The sole purpose of this email is to have them give you a score, so you want to make it as likely as possible that they will click on a number.

The way you achieve this is to strip the email down to the bare essentials. Don’t link to anything and don’t have an extraneous info. No links to your social media, your website, your online reviews, nothing.

You can have a very short (one or two sentence) “thanks for doing business with us? section, but don’t include a lengthy welcome message, history of the company, pictures of your staff, etc.

Immediately after the “thank you,” you should have the NPS survey.

Example:

Subject Welcome — Please Read! Body Thank you for visiting the store today! We always want to give you the best possible experience. How are we doing? Please tell us in this one-click survey: How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or family member? 0 ???1 ???2 ???3 ???4 ???5 ???6 ???7 ???8 ???9 ???10

 

Short and simple with no distractions.

The subject line should prompt action: “Please Read” or “Important – Please Open.” It’s best to experiment with this a bit. I saw open rates go up 11% by adding “Please Read” to my subject line.

3. Gathering the responses

Next, we set up the components to gather the survey responses.

In my personal system, I set up three pages on my website: one for Promoters, one for Passives, and one for Detractors.

To do this, you will need to create three new pages.

Examples:

• Promoters (score of 9 or 10): http://YourSite.com/yay
• Passives (score of 7 or 8): http://YourSite.com/meh
• Detractors (score of 0 to 6): http://YourSite.com/boo

If they click 9 or 10 they go to a page that says something like, “Yes! We’re so glad you had a great experience! Would you be willing to write a quick review to let others know? It really helps us out. Click your favorite review site:” Below that message I have four icons to the most important review sites for my business. Save your customers the hassle of typing in your business name and link directly to your page on the review site.

If they click 7 or 8 the page says something like, “Thanks for taking the survey! We’re always trying to improve. Can you let us know the main reason you gave us the score you did?” There is a comment box on this page for them to leave their feedback.

If they click 0 to 6 the page says something like, “It seems we didn’t quite live up to your expectations. We really want to know what happened so we can improve. Can you tell us what went wrong, or what we can do better? Any feedback helps. Thank you!” On this page I include the same comment box as well as a field for them to include their phone number if they would like a call.

Most of the time, when someone has a bad experience they really just want to be heard. By providing avenues for them to give feedback you not only get the info you need to improve, but you also potentially avoid the customer airing their grievances publicly, online.

I use my email service to record the scores. If you want to do the same, there is a little something extra you have to do with your links.

Special Note

If you use a normal link to the page on your website you won’t know the actual number the customer clicked on, just the range. Because the URL for 7 and 8 is the same, you won’t know which they clicked.

To get by this, you simply add a hashtag and the score to the end of the links.

For example, if the URLs of the pages you set up on your website are:

9-10: http://www.YourSite.com/yay
7-8: http://www.YourSite.com/meh
0-6: http://www.YourSite.com/boo

The links you use for each clickable score will be:

10: http://www.YourSite.com/yay#10
9: http://www.YourSite.com/yay#9
8: http://www.YourSite.com/meh#8
7: http://www.YourSite.com/meh#7
6: http://www.YourSite.com/boo#6
5: http://www.YourSite.com/boo#5

0: http://www.YourSite.com/boo#0

Note: Example of AWeber report

Using links like these will allow you to track how many people clicked on each of the specific numbers because each link is unique. I track this by looking at the click reports for the NPS email:

When someone submits a comment form it is emailed directly to me, so I have immediate insight on what is happening in the business.

Other Options

Another way to gather responses would be to use one of the online survey sites such as Typeform or Google Forms. If you want to do this, here are a few notes:

• If possible, set up the links as pre-filled answers so the customer’s score is already filled in when they click to the survey. It is a small thing, but you need to make this process as streamlined as possible. Here’s how to do it on Google Forms.
• Many survey programs don’t allow you to use links to other websites, so you’ll probably lose the ability to send Promoters to online review sites. I use this system primarily to generate positive reviews, so that was a huge drawback for me. Maybe it is fine for you.

 

4. Acting on the information

Finally the results are coming in! Hopefully you are getting lots of great scores and positive feedback. Even if you are getting negative feedback, you are in a much better place than before setting up the system. You now have insight into the problems and can work to change them.

What you do with the feedback you are getting is the most important part of this system. As Jaime says, “don’t just take information for information’s sake, take the information, use it, take action, see results.”

You can act internally (within your business) and externally (outside your business).

Internally, you should help staff understand your NPS and talk about ways to improve or maintain it.

First, celebrate the great reviews and scores by calling out individuals or departments mentioned. This is much more powerful than reprimanding the low scores.

Next, talk about the bad reviews and comments and try to troubleshoot them; what can you do differently next time to avoid a similar outcome?

You will get the occasional unreasonable or toxic customer who is impossible to please, so don’t let them knock you off your game. Acknowledge and move on.

Your current NPS is just the starting point. It may be lower than you expected, or it might be higher. Either way, take the feedback you get and look for ways to increase the number of Promoters and decrease the number of Detractors.

Externally, you should make efforts to reach out to as many people as possible who take the survey.

For positive online reviews, respond publicly with a simple thank you message. Highlight something specific from the review so it is as personal as possible.

Not only does this strengthen the relationship between the reviewer and your business, but everyone who reads the reviews will see that your business is involved and cares about it’s customers.

And don’t forget to ask them if you can use the review as a testimonial on your website. This is a great way to show social proof that you are great to do business with.

Reach out to the negative reviewers as well: thank them for taking the time to leave a review, acknowledge what happened, and let them know what I’m going to do to fix the problem.

I also include my email and phone number, asking them to please reach out if I can do anything to make it right. Again, people reading the reviews see that management is very involved and takes complaints seriously. It’s easy to shine when everything is going well. It’s much harder when there are problems, but you’ll shine that much brighter.

Each month, recalculate your NPS, review the comments, and adjust your behaviors and systems accordingly.

How to track your score?

I’ve created a dashboard specifically to track your NPS over the months. There are a few other goodies like scripts for your emails and a detailed checklist for setting up your own system. Click here to grab them.

Congratulations!

You’ve set up a system that automatically gives you metrics and insight into your business, generates positive reviews, and puts you in closer contact with your customers. No matter where you are in your business, this is a great addition to your processes. This funnel will pay dividends for years to come. Great job!

Action Items:

1. Commit to setting up this funnel!
2. Set up pages on your website to receive comments and/or ask customers for online reviews.
3. Configure Email Service Provider to send the NPS email.
4. If applicable, roll out program to your staff so they start collecting email addresses. If it’s just you, start asking new customers to sign up for your email list.
5. Daily – respond to any incoming reviews. Monthly – record and track your NPS scores. Click here to download the dashboard I created for you to make this easier: www.joebmorton.com/EM.

 

Author Bio

Joe Morton, fortunate father and husband, helps you enjoy your business by offering practical techniques and advice on system development. Grab your Eventual Millionaire freebies and reach out here: www.joebmorton.com/EM.

Categories: Business, Sales

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