Using Sentiment Analysis to Improve Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Despite offering very affordable fares, Sky High Airlines was facing turbulence in customer satisfaction. Their Net Promoter Score had dipped concerningly, with passengers expressing frustration on various channels. 

Deciphering the "why" behind the declining NPS became their need of the hour. They needed to analyze the emotional language behind the feedback to identify specific pain points impacting passenger satisfaction.

So what did they do?

Sky High Airlines decided to leverage sentiment analysis. They integrated a tool within their system that could analyze the emotional tone of the feedback data coming from in-flight and airport surveys, online reviews, and social media channels.

As the sentiment analysis tool worked its magic, a clear pattern was revealed.

Sky High realized that affordability wasn't enough for the passengers.

An in-depth analysis of the customer sentiments highlighted that passengers felt cramped and uncomfortable due to limited legroom and a lack of entertainment options during long flights. The budget-friendly fares, while attracting more flyers, could not compensate for the discomfort and boredom. 

Thus, the reason for the low customer loyalty, retention rate, and overall Net promoter Score. 

Sky High Airlines straightaway took cognizance of the issues, increased seat pitch, offered in-flight entertainment options, and directly addressed negative reviews. 

The results were a significant improvement.

Over the next few quarters, the airline's NPS score witnessed a steady climb. Passengers appreciated the increased comfort and entertainment options, demonstrating a willingness to pay slightly higher fares for a more enjoyable flying experience. Transparent communication fostered trust and a sense of being heard.

The story of this airline exemplifies how sentiment analysis can be a game-changer for improving Net Promoter Score. 

By analyzing the emotional nuances of customer feedback, companies can identify specific areas for improvement, take targeted actions that address passenger needs, and ultimately create a more satisfying travel experience. This not only translates to a higher NPS score but also potentially leads to increased customer loyalty and brand advocacy. 

Let's begin by understanding what NPS and sentiment analysis are and the connection between the two. 

This article provides a concise roadmap for using sentiment analysis to improve NPS by highlighting the critical role of customer feedback in revealing the motives behind your scores. You will find methods for interpreting feedback and linking it to customer loyalty, alongside strategies that translate sentiment into a quantifiable increase in your Net Promoter Score.

Sentiment Analysis and Its Role in Net Promoter Score

Understanding the role of sentiment analysis in improving NPS involves a three-fold exploration. First, we need to get a handle on what Net Promoter Score and Sentiment Analysis are.

Next, we need to connect the dots between the two and analyze how sentiment analysis can help boost Net Promoter Score (NPS). 

Understanding Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction by measuring their likelihood to recommend your company, product, or service to others. Here's a breakdown of the key points:

What it measures:

• Customer loyalty: NPS essentially indicates how likely customers are to become promoters (enthusiastic advocates) of your brand.
• Customer satisfaction: While closely related, NPS goes beyond pure customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer might not actively recommend you, while a promoter goes the extra mile by advocating for your brand.

How Traditional NPS Surveys Work?

The traditional NPS process, often referred to as the "Fred Reichheld" method, involves the following steps:

• Distribute a short survey containing a single core question: "On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [company/product/service] to a friend or colleague?"
• Categorize responses into three groups:
  • Promoters (9-10): Loyal customers who are highly likely to recommend your offering.
  • Passives (7-8): Neutral customers who might be swayed by competitors.
  • Detractors (0-6): Unhappy customers who could potentially damage your brand through negative word-of-mouth.
  
• Calculate the NPS score: The NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. This results in a single score ranging from -100 (all detractors) to +100 (all promoters).
• Interpreting the score:
  • Scores above 0-70: Generally considered good, indicating more promoters than detractors.
  • Scores between 70-100: Considered excellent, signifying a strong likelihood of customer recommendations and potential for growth.
  • Scores below 0: Indicate more detractors than promoters, suggesting potential issues with customer experience and brand perception.

Overall NPS is one of the key CX metrics that businesses use to measure customer loyalty, enhance customer retention, boost CLV, and much more. 

Here's how measuring NPS helps you: 

• Track customer sentiment: Monitor changes in customer loyalty and satisfaction over time.
• Benchmark performance: Compare your NPS against competitors and industry averages.
• Identify areas for improvement: Analyze open-ended feedback alongside the score to understand specific customer concerns and areas for improvement.

However, NPS is just one piece of the puzzle.

It misses out on a number of details useful in analyzing the emotions and sentiments of customers. Even before we delve into the intricacies of nuanced emotions, there may be detractors who still have a liking for the customer service and promoters critical of certain elements of the process.   

Here's a quick depiction of what NPS survey reports showcase:

Net Promoter Score simply tells the score, not the "why" behind it. Despite knowing the score, businesses lack crucial information on the elements that elicit the feeling of happiness or unhappiness. 

What's Missing in this NPS Analysis Process?

While NPS provides a valuable snapshot of customer sentiment, it has several limitations:

1. Lack of nuance: The single-question format restricts capturing detailed feedback about the "why" behind the score. While the score indicates overall satisfaction, it doesn't reveal the specific reasons for positive or negative experiences.

2. Limited actionability: The NPS score alone doesn't directly translate into actionable insights. It requires analyzing open-ended feedback alongside the score to understand specific customer concerns and areas for improvement. This can be time-consuming and subjective.

3. Potential for bias: The wording and context of the survey can influence responses, leading to potential bias. Additionally, the score can be skewed if the survey is not distributed to a representative sample of the customer base.

4. Difficulty in comparison: NPS scores can vary significantly across industries and company sizes, making it challenging to compare directly with competitors. This can limit the usefulness of the score as a benchmark.

5. Ignores customer effort: NPS doesn't explicitly measure customer effort, which is an increasingly important factor in customer satisfaction. If customers have to go through a lot of difficulty to interact with your business, they might be less likely to recommend it even if they are satisfied with the outcome.

6. Potential for manipulation: There's a possibility for manipulation of the score if companies pressure satisfied customers to give high ratings or discourage feedback from detractors. This can lead to inaccurate results and hinder its effectiveness in capturing genuine customer sentiment.

To counter this issue, a large majority of businesses have started combining NPS questions with an open-ended survey question. This does help them in gauging the reason behind the score. However, it still misses out on customer's nuanced emotions and sentiments. 

Modern techniques like sentiment analysis can uncover the underlying emotions and specific reasons behind customer feedback. This, in turn, can lead to more actionable insights for improving customer satisfaction and ultimately, NPS.

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a data processing technique that evaluates and interprets customers’ opinions, emotions, intent, and attitudes from their written or spoken feedback. In layman's terms, sentiment analysis helps detect human emotions (negative, positive, or neutral) from text data.    

It assigns metrics to text data between negative and positive. Also known as polarity, this metric returns a value between +1 for extremely positive and -1 for extremely negative.   

Focusing on the polarity of text, this technique enables businesses to convert subjective sentiments into actionable insights, thus providing an effective response to customer perceptions. In several cases, it also goes beyond the polarity of text and identifies nuanced emotions like anger, disappointment, urgency, intent, etc. 

The Connection Between Sentiment Analysis and NPS

While NPS measures general customer satisfaction levels, it often lacks the depth to reveal the underlying reasons behind the scores. Here’s where sentiment analysis steps in, offering a more detailed understanding of customer feelings and motivations behind their scores.

Effective interpretation of NPS scores hinges on acknowledging both the NPS Score and the underlying reasons for their value, as both are key for improvement. By correlating NPS with operational metrics and key performance indicators, companies can strategically focus on initiatives that directly influence favorable business results.

Sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of NPS by addressing some of its key limitations and providing deeper insights into customer sentiment.

Here's how:

#1. Unveiling the "why" behind the score

NPS only provides a single data point (the score) without explaining the reasons behind customer responses. Sentiment analysis helps decipher the emotional tone of open-ended feedback, revealing the underlying emotions and specific reasons behind their NPS score (promoter, passive, detractor). This allows you to understand what truly drives customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

#2. Unlocking actionable insights

By understanding the specific reasons for customer sentiment through sentiment analysis, you gain valuable actionable insights to address their concerns and improve your product or service. This empowers you to take targeted actions that directly address customer pain points, leading to improved customer satisfaction and potentially a higher NPS.

#3. Identifying areas for improvement

Sentiment analysis helps you categorize feedback based on sentiment and topics (e.g., praise, frustration, specific feature feedback). This allows you to prioritize improvements based on the impact and urgency of customer sentiment. Addressing widespread concerns or areas causing significant frustration leads to a more significant and measurable impact on your NPS.

#4. Enhancing customer understanding

By analyzing customer emotions, sentiment analysis provides a deeper understanding of your customer base. This allows you to tailor your communication and marketing strategies to resonate better with different customer segments and address their specific needs and concerns.

#5. Identifying emerging trends

Sentiment analysis can help you identify emerging trends in customer feedback over time. This allows you to proactively address potential issues before they escalate and impact your overall customer satisfaction and NPS score.

Implementing Sentiment Analysis in Your NPS Strategy

Having grasped the link between sentiment analysis and NPS, the subsequent move is to incorporate sentiment analysis into your NPS strategy. This involves a series of steps, from defining objectives and choosing the right tools to analyzing customer feedback.

Get clarity on what you want to achieve by analyzing customer feedback

Any strategy begins with defining clear objectives and goals. In the context of NPS sentiment analysis, these objectives help focus on addressing specific areas that impact customer scores, leading to targeted improvements.

Establishing NPS targets for every department is essential, given that the quality of customer interactions and experiences varies across departments, thereby influencing the overall customer experience and NPS. It’s also essential to define clear sentiment categories and criteria to ensure that sentiment analysis outputs align with strategic objectives.

Find the perfect tool for collecting NPS and sentiment analysis

Select a platform that allows you to collect both NPS scores and open-ended feedback from customers.
Design your survey: Keep the NPS question clear and concise. Craft open-ended follow-up questions that encourage

Choosing the right feedback tools for collecting NPS surveys, open-ended feedback, and also having sentiment analysis tools integrated within is a critical step in your NPS strategy.

You can also go with separate NPS survey tools and tools for sentiment analysis and pass the NPS data between the two for further analysis. 

Various tools offer a variety of features tailored to different business needs. For instance, tools like Zonka Feedback provide both software to create & send NPS surveys and measure loyalty as well as a sentiment analysis tool. It also offers customization for industry-specific language and slang, while fine-tuning AI models can significantly improve accuracy in sentiment analysis.

When selecting an NPS and sentiment analysis tool, businesses should take into account the following factors:

• For NPS Survey Tool:
  • The tool’s ability to manage the bulk of NPS responses
  • The tool’s ability to provide instant analysis
  • The tool’s ability to accommodate multilingual data, thereby adapting to the scale and diversity of the business
• For Sentiment Analysis Tool:
  • Text classification: Categorize feedback based on sentiment (positive, negative, neutral).
  • Aspect-based sentiment analysis: Identify specific aspects (e.g., product features, customer service) mentioned in feedback and analyze sentiment around them.
  • Integration with your NPS platform: Ensure the chosen tool integrates seamlessly with your existing NPS platform for smooth data transfer and analysis. 

It’s also crucial to be aware of potential biases in model training and the limitations of sentiment analysis tools to prevent skewed results and ensure accurate interpretation of customers’ sentiments.

Put the tool(s) to test and let your customer feedback flow in

Once you’ve defined your objectives and selected your tools, the next step is to analyze customer feedback. Sentiment analysis on NPS feedback provides insights into customers’ perceptions of various product or service aspects, such as support, quality, and pricing, helping identify themes and pinpoint areas for service improvement.

You can get NPS score and tags - promoters, detractors, and passives for your feedback within the Net Promoter Score software. Once that data is collected, you can pass it onto your sentiment analysis tool to categorize sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and identify recurring themes and specific aspects mentioned in the feedback.

Now, you can combine the quantitative data (NPS score) with the qualitative insights (sentiment analysis) to gain a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiment.

Capitalize on the insights and take action 

By effectively implementing sentiment analysis in your NPS strategy, you can gain valuable insights into the "why" behind customer responses, identify areas for improvement, and take targeted actions to enhance customer experience and ultimately drive a positive impact on your NPS score and overall business success. 

• Identify areas for improvement: Based on the sentiment analysis results, pinpoint specific areas where customer sentiment falls short and requires improvement.
• Develop action plans: Create actionable plans to address the identified issues. This could involve improving product features, enhancing customer service experiences, or addressing specific pain points.
• Monitor progress and iterate: Track the impact of your actions on customer sentiment and NPS score over time. Continuously refine your approach based on the results and iterate your strategy for continuous improvement.

How to Leverage Sentiment Analysis to Improve NPS

Following the integration of sentiment analysis into your NPS strategy, the ensuing task is to utilize the obtained insights to enhance your NPS. This can be achieved by identifying key drivers of customer satisfaction, prioritizing actions based on sentiment analysis findings, and continuously monitoring progress.

Identify Key Drivers of Customer Satisfaction

Recognizing the primary contributors to customer satisfaction forms a crucial segment of utilizing sentiment analysis insights. Sentiment analysis can uncover the emotional reactions customers have towards products, services, or brands, providing insights into customer satisfaction drivers.

Positive emotions expressed by customers, such as joy and appreciation, are direct indicators of high customer satisfaction, whereas negative emotions like frustration suggest areas for improvement. Implementing aspect-based sentiment analysis allows for a granular understanding of specific topics that contribute to customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction, helping businesses meet customer expectations.

Prioritize Actions Based on Sentiment Analysis Findings

Armed with insights, the focus shifts to prioritizing actions derived from sentiment analysis observations. By focusing on negative sentiments, companies can pinpoint specific areas of dissatisfaction and target improvements to enhance customer satisfaction.

Identifying the root causes of customer issues allows for targeted problem-solving, improving customer experience and potentially increasing NPS. Conducting a root cause analysis helps in prioritizing actions after sentiment analysis, which involves:

• Identifying high-impact customer journeys
• Identifying key milestones and touchpoints
• Improving these milestones and touchpoints to enhance overall satisfaction.

Monitor Progress and Iterate

The concluding phase in utilizing sentiment analysis insights involves tracking progress and refining strategies. Continuous measurement of NPS is critical for evaluating the effectiveness of actions taken and understanding the evolution of customer sentiment over time.

Refining sentiment analysis strategies through continuous feedback and AI model training enables businesses to:

• Adapt to changing customer needs
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Enhance product and service offerings
• Identify areas for improvement
• Anticipate customer preferences and trends

Sharing sentiment analysis findings within the organization fosters a customer-centric culture and drives continuous improvement efforts.

Overcoming Challenges in Using Sentiment Analysis for NPS Improvement

Although sentiment analysis has the potential to substantially boost NPS, it does come with its share of challenges. Two key areas that businesses need to address are data quality and preprocessing, and the limitations of sentiment analysis tools.

How can you overcome the challenge of data quality and preprocessing

For sentiment analysis, high-quality data - clean, diverse, and pertinent - is necessary to guarantee the robustness of the dataset. Cross-validation between different data sources, such as social media sentiment and market research surveys, helps in identifying inconsistencies and assessing the reliability of sentiment analysis outcomes.

Moreover, evaluating NPS survey distribution channels and NPS surveys for their response rates aids in enhancing the collection of customer feedback, thereby improving the data quality for sentiment analysis.

Understanding Limitations of Sentiment Analysis Tools

Recognizing the limitations of sentiment analysis tools forms another essential part of their effective usage.

• Accuracy and subjectivity: Sentiment analysis tools are not perfect, and their accuracy can be impacted by factors like sarcasm, slang, and ambiguity in language. 
  Solution: Combining sentiment analysis results with human review and interpretation can ensure accuracy and even capture full context. 
• Lack of nuance: Sentiment analysis often categorizes feedback into broad categories like positive, negative, or neutral. This can miss out on the subtle nuances of customer sentiment. 
  Solution: Utilizing tools offering aspect-based analysis of sentiments can be helpful in identifying specific aspects. 
• Limited data: Particularly when starting, the amount of data available for analysis might be limited, impacting the accuracy and reliability of sentiment analysis results. 
  Solution: Collecting NPS feedback and open-ended responses from various channels like surveys, reviews, and social media across customer journey can help enrich data pool.
• Ethical considerations: Using sentiment analysis raises ethical concerns regarding data privacy and potential manipulation of results.
  Solution: Ensuring transparency about using their feedback for sentiment analysis and using of insights for improving customer experience and not manipulating NPS scores can help overcome this challenge.
• Technical expertise: Implementing and effectively utilizing sentiment analysis tools might require technical expertise or resources that are not readily available to all businesses.
  Solution: Looking for Look for user-friendly sentiment analysis tools with intuitive interfaces and clear documentation that don't require extensive technical knowledge 

They can also struggle with analyzing sentiments accurately in multilingual feedback due to varying contexts and language structures.

Sarcasm, nuanced language, and humor are often misinterpreted by algorithms, leading to the misclassification of sentiment data. Therefore, adding a layer of human interpretation helps overcome these limitations. 

Using Zonka Feedback's Sentiment Analysis to Improve NPS

The power of sentiment analysis in improving your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is undeniable. By evaluating and interpreting customer emotions and opinions, sentiment analysis provides invaluable insights for businesses, helping them understand their customers better and improve their services.

However, it’s crucial to remember that sentiment analysis is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires careful planning, implementation, and continuous monitoring and refinement to truly harness its potential in improving NPS. But with clear objectives, the right tools, and a dedicated approach, businesses can leverage sentiment analysis to keep their customers satisfied and drive business growth.

To get the best of both, you can leverage a feedback tool like Zonka Feedback that offers both feedback collection as well as sentiment analysis. This survey platform is lined with advanced AI technologies and NLP models to help you with using sentiment analysis to improve NPS.

It offers ready-to-use NPS survey template that can be easily customized to collect the level of recommendation of the target audience.  Once the survey is distributed, one can get an analysis of customer sentiments in terms of positive, negative, and neutral within the analytics dashboard. 

In addition to sentiment analysis, it also performs text analysis, intent analysis, emotion detection, text mining, opinion mining, and much more.

You can sign up for a free 14-day trial or schedule a demo to get a walkthrough of the product.