10 Alternatives to Net Promoter Score: What Else Can You Run Other than NPS Surveys?

While Net Promoter Score (NPS) is easy to understand and implement, many other tools can help you with complementary context to NPS findings, or suit your business better altogether. 

This article lists out some tools that you might find beneficial if you’re looking for alternatives to NPS. But first, let’s quickly recap what NPS is.

What is NPS: A Quick Recap

An NPS or Net Promoter Score is a benchmarking tool to effectively gauge customer loyalty. 

In B2B SaaS spaces, the quantitative insight NPS provides is helpful to reduce churn and boost customer satisfaction. It is derived from the results of a two-minute survey, which is structured around the simple question:

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”

Based on their responses, customers are then segmented into three segments:

• Promoters, who would highly recommend your business to others,

• Passives, who are indifferent to your brand, and

• Detractors, who are dissatisfied with your product or service.

The Net Promoter Score for your company is then obtained by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. 

Thus, a highly positive NPS means that most customers have good things to say about your brand, while a negative NPS is something to be rectified.

Apart from collecting ratings, NPS Surveys also collect qualitative feedback through follow-up qualitative questions, which further help your product development and customer service processes.

Now that we’re all caught up on NPS, let’s examine why you might need alternatives to running NPS Surveys.

What Else Can You Run Other than NPS Surveys and Why?

Product developers and researchers might look for alternatives to NPS for several reasons. 

Another tool might

• Provide Better Context for Customer Behavior 

NPS gauges customer satisfaction without necessarily asking why a consumer would or wouldn’t recommend a product. 

Thus, the percentage of promoters only denotes the people who are satisfied with your product, and not why they like it. Another benchmarking metric like Product/Market Fit can be used as a supplement or alternative to close this knowledge gap.

• Be Less Time Consuming

If your company is pressed for time and has a lot of data to process, running NPS on a large scale might be more time-consuming than one of the alternatives listed below.

Additionally, diminishing the gap between collecting customer feedback and results analyses would be beneficial in keeping the data relevant.

• Provide In-depth Understanding of Customer Satisfaction

NPS can sometimes prove too simplistic when a comprehensive understanding of customer satisfaction level and customer happiness is involved. 

Due to the ambiguity of the reasoning behind the customer’s survey responses, very little concrete information about user experience, customer relationships, and short-term customer satisfaction is actually gleaned. 

Sometimes, product development and customer service teams opt to therefore use a customizable NPS survey template, which takes all these weaknesses into account. An intuitive AI tool is able to work around these issues and provide immediately actionable valuable insights.

However, if you think another customer survey is a better fit for your business model, we’ve put together a list of alternatives to NPS surveys below.

10 Alternatives to Net Promoter Score Surveys

1. Customer Effort Score (CES) Surveys

Customer Effort Score measures the ease of specific interactions between your customer and the company. Its purpose is to gain actionable insights about how you can improve your customer experience. 

You can use a five to seven-point rating scale with a single question as simple as: “How easy or difficult was it to interact with our company?”

The score itself is calculated by dividing the sum of all ratings by the number of responses. Based on where that score falls on your rating scale, you can determine whether you need to take swift action to make your user experience smoother.

Although there are no set benchmarks like with NPS, CES is an effective tool if you simply want to streamline your interface for higher customer engagement.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Surveys

Customer Satisfaction Score aims to identify areas where customers are unhappy with your brand. It is used specifically as a follow-up to a recent interaction, much like a transactional NPS survey.

Customers rate their satisfaction with your brand or company on a five-point scale and answer additional qualitative, open-ended questions about the nature of their experience. 

The CSAT score is obtained by dividing the number of respondents who give a rating of 4 or higher by the total number of responses. 

Like NPS, you can then use benchmarks and track your score over time at different points in the customer journey and get a holistic idea of customer satisfaction levels

3. Customer Health Score

The Customer Health Score measures and helps you determine the chances of a customer 

• remaining loyal to

• having the potential to grow in

• or simply leaving

Your business, company, or service.

The complicated formula makes the Customer Health Score time-consuming but easy to customize according to whichever actions are relevant to your business aims and needs, thus giving you a clear idea of trends in customer retention.

4. Product Engagement Score (PES)

The Product Engagement Score measures how interactive your product enables your customer base to be. PES is obtained by averaging your business’ adoption rate, stickiness ratio, and growth rate.

Thus, high PES means that your customers are very engaged with your product which bodes well for your customer retention rates and SaaS feature adoption rate.

You might prefer PES over NPS if you need a quantitative metric to understand your product’s usage among your target audience. However, it yields little to no qualitative information about satisfied customers’ needs or wants or customer dissatisfaction.

5. The “Have You Ever Recommended Us” Survey

This survey is exactly as straightforward as the name suggests! 

An effective way to measure the impact of word-of-mouth marketing, the “Have you ever recommended us” survey gives you an idea of how much traction your business gets through existing customers.

Additionally, the responders who say “no” are asked further questions to clarify their negative feedback, and this can be used to identify pain points, much like an NPS Survey.

6. Voice of Customer (VoC) Surveys

A customizable survey used to gather diverse customer feedback, Voice of Customer lets you collect information about your customers’ preferences and expectations, helping you tap into customer sentiment.

Much like NPS, its format is flexible and VoC surveys can be administered across various channels, like email, websites, and in-app. You can add different question types too!

7. Product/Market Fit (PMF) Survey

Instead of asking whether customers would recommend your product or service to others, the Product/Market Fit Survey focuses on how disappointed customers would be if they couldn’t access your product or service.

The PMF score is the percentage of users who would be very disappointed, and if over 40 percent of your customers would miss your product or service, then you have attained product-market fit!

This metric is useful since the NPS can only calculate satisfaction based on a customer’s inclination to recommend to others, which is not a very reliable correlation. 

However, it is best paired with additional questions to determine why your customers would miss your product, or what features of your service stand out to them.

8. Post-purchase survey

A post-purchase survey is integral since it utilizes recency to its advantage. You can find out important details about your customer’s experience, such as 

• how easy it was to place the order,

• how competitive they think your pricing is, and

• how seamless the delivery was.

The post-purchase survey helps you refine the process of your customer’s shopping experience and aids customer retention, much like NPS. This is desirable because most of your revenue is generated by loyal customers!

9. Customer Churn Survey

Exclusively reserved for when customers have already decided to leave, a customer churn survey aims to get at the bottom of your soon-to-be-ex-customer’s dissatisfaction. 

Quick and to the point, a churn survey asks leaving customers why they have decided to leave and what might have made them stay.

This survey yields the most direct and valuable insight into areas requiring improvement for your product or service and reducing churn rates. It should not be underestimated!

10. Help desk Survey

A help desk survey is a short set of follow-up questions sent after an interaction with your help desk or FAQ team. It can help improve customer retention, since an important customer experience is used for real-time feedback regarding

• waiting time and call duration

• first contact resolution

• call success and customer handover rates

Although not an absolute substitute for NPS, a help desk survey can definitely ensure that your customer experience improves in the long run.

How can 1Flow help you create NPS surveys and their alternatives?

1Flow is a one-of-a-kind tool that uses AI to deliver an in-product survey platform. 

You can create and customize NPS or other in-app or website administered surveys via 1Flow and get immediately actionable insights within just a few hours!

Some features that distinguish 1Flow from other customer insight tools include

•  No-code Hassle-free Interface

1Flow’s thoughtful design enables smooth follow-ups to customer interactions, providing real-time feedback within hours and setting you up for problem-solving, thus boosting customer satisfaction. 

• In-built Analytical Dashboard

You can build customized in-app surveys with 1Flow’s pre-built analytical dashboard which is made specifically with product managers and UX researchers in mind.

By using this feature to drive engagement based on event triggers, you can ensure a higher response rate for your customer feedback surveys. 1Flow surveys have an average response rate of 38 percent.

This helps you accumulate more data over a short period of time and can potentially accelerate your research timelines!
Sign up for 1Flow’s interactive demo to know more about how this insightful tool can help your business