How often to send NPS Surveys?

Sending NPS Surveys at an appropriate time draws a positive impact on the quality and quantity of the responses you get.

The response rate of your Net Promoter Score Survey depends on various factors like survey distribution channels, survey questions asked, ease of answering questions, and so on. But the most important factor that determines whether your customers will attempt the survey or not is the ‘Timings’ of sending NPS Surveys to your customers.

Your timing should be appropriate while sending the NPS Survey. If you send it too early, then customers may have less content to share. If you send a survey too late, then the perceived experience may fade away over time. In both cases, you will lose all those critical points that can help you to improve your products, services, or business.

Measure Customer Loyalty with NPS ❤️

Create NPS surveys, measure customer loyalty, and close the feedback loop with Zonka Feedback.

A Quick Recap - About Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer experience metric that measures customer loyalty and satisfaction through recommendations to others. Founded in 2003 by Bain & Company, NPS offers a new way to measure loyalty based on the experience you offer to your customers. This metric is versatile and can be effectively applied to businesses to measures employee loyalty via Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS).

You can easily deploy NPS through the ultimate NPS Question. A follow-up question about the reason for the score makes the NPS Survey even more powerful to measure customer satisfaction & loyalty. It hardly takes 30-40 seconds to fill the NPS Survey. It does not mean that you can send too many NPS Surveys whenever you feel like it. Subsequently, this causes survey fatigue, and your customers either put your surveys in the spam or leave your brand. So, Timing plays a crucial role in an NPS Survey.

Conventional Timing System of Sending NPS Surveys

Usually, companies send NPS surveys on an annual or quarterly basis. Therefore, there are two types of NPS surveys:

Relationship NPS Surveys - Relationship surveys attempt to investigate a customer’s loyalty towards a company/brand. These surveys focus on extracting the overall satisfaction of the customers with the company. They occur at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly, half-yearly).
Transactional NPS Surveys - Transactional surveys investigate a customer’s experience in a specific transaction/interaction (touchpoint). This survey is designed not to measure customer loyalty but to measure satisfaction with a specific company segment to improve it.

This conventional timing system requires long and complex surveys, and it is ineffective because:

You can ask customers for NPS feedback at random times. But they are typically less engaged with the business.
When you send long surveys post-purchase/interaction, customers are likely to forget to share the critical part of their experiences.
Consumers avoid opening or responding to random surveys that don’t match the look of your brand.

How Often to Send NPS Surveys?

The main goal of conducting NPS Surveys is to remain in touch with your customers to create a positive impact and a feedback loop for growth. It is also advisable not to send NPS survey frequently. However, the timing and frequency of your NPS surveys depend primarily on the industry and customer base.

Real-Time

Drip

Post-Purchase

Post-Transaction

You can take a Real-time NPS survey when your customers are still on-premises.

For instance, your customer just shopped a shirt from your Retail outlet, and you have captured their information at the billing desk.

You can send NPS surveys in a series of drip. It is based on the customer’s usage and journey with your company.

The drip approach of sending NPS surveys is a common scenario for the Saas industry, popularly known as NPSaaS.

By triggering NPS Surveys, you can seek feedback from customers about their recent purchase experience and identify various purchase-related issues like the payment options availability, ease of payment process, billing options, and so on.

Usually, post-purchase surveys are sent as soon as the customer crosses a touchpoint.

While measuring the whole experience - browsing/ordering to receiving the item, you must time your survey post 2-3 weeks of the product delivery and not immediately after the purchase.

NPS Survey Timing for Retail and eCommerce Brands

In an eCommerce industry, you can evaluate various customer touchpoints to measure the customer experience and satisfaction. You can start taking NPS surveys from the delivery date. You can further trigger NPS surveys after the gap of 1 week so that customers get enough time to experience the product or service carefully and provide genuine feedback.

For instance, in some consumable products like food, you can trigger a survey immediately after delivery. If you want to collect feedback about the food, you can send a survey form via Email or SMS after a few hours. The survey schedule depends on products, say mattresses, require a longer evaluation, and thus you need to send a survey a few weeks after delivery.

NPS Survey Timing for Consumer Products

Brands dealing with consumer products follow a similar approach to retail and eCommerce brands when it comes to taking customer feedback. They give customers enough time to experience the product and then send a survey two weeks or a month.

NPS Survey Timing for B2B and SaaS Brands

In B2B and SaaS businesses, the buying process is longer, so you can trigger surveys keeping the customer journey in mind. Here we’ve divided the customer journey into two phases:

Early Phase - In this phase, B2B customers can be requested to give feedback once they successfully onboarded and begun using your product or service. If you are a SaaS company, you can send feedback surveys after few weeks or a month.
On-Going Phase - In this phase, you can ask for feedback on a specific interval of time like quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis. And if you are a service-based startup, then survey your B2B customers quarterly.

NPS Survey Timing for On-Demand Products

Companies that deliver services or products on the customer demand, at that point, survey works as a medium to listen to customer’s voices. Survey timing plays a crucial role here. Sending surveys at appropriate times helps you to collect responses that drive useful information. For example, a luxury hotel provides last-minute on-demand room service to guests. The perfect time to take their feedback is during their checkout.

You can send the survey form via email or SMS. You can also hand over an iPad survey device to your guest during checkout. There is a quick self-automated kiosk device where guests can record their feedback themselves without any assistance.

Sending NPS Surveys with Zonka Feedback

With Zonka Feedback's NPS Survey Tool, you can manage when to trigger your NPS Surveys. Some ways to do this:

Send NPS Surveys manually via Email or SMS from the Zonka Feedback platform
Set reminders for Surveys that have not been answered
Integrate Zonka Feedback with tools you use, like your CRM, Help Desk, POS, and other tools to trigger NPS Surveys when an interaction or transaction happens
Embed your NPS Surveys within your Email Signature
Display your NPS Surveys on your Website post a transaction or an event

Like we discussed, Survey timings are super important. Using an NPS Survey Tool to send your surveys will enable you to easily manage and monitor which timings work best for your Response Rate and use those going forward.