Why Your NPS Survey is Not Getting Responses

In the times of Instagram Reels, LinkedIn Feed, Facebook Feed, the thumb slides automatically to the next bit of interesting content. It is challenging to get people to stop and reflect.

That is why getting people to fill out review forms is a tough job, even in the best scenarios.

An NPS survey is like connecting to the pulse of the customers. A considerable amount of organic data is required to extract meaningful information like an elixir. Insights from NPS surveys influence product evolution, marketing strategy, and ultimately overall company growth.

A variety of factors affect the quality of response an NPS survey garners. If you are not getting a good response to your NPS Survey, it could be any of those factors.

So, what are these various factors that affect your NPS survey? In this guide, we explore some of those by asking the right questions.

Table of contents

• What communication channel to use for a better NPS Survey response?

  • In-App
  • Text message
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • AMP Email

• What are the applicable best practices to help increase the response rate?

  • Tell them how long it will take
  • Keep it short, simple, and objective
  • Time it right
  • Highlight the importance and value
  • Follow up

• Other creative ways of increasing NPS Survey responses

  • Incentivize the effort
  • Make it personalized

• What comes next?

  • Categorize and analyze the feedback
  • Share the feedback with in-house teams

• Wrap up

What communication channel to use for a better NPS Survey response?

There is a wide variety of channels to choose from for your NPS Survey. You can go with the in-app survey, WhatsApp survey, phone survey, email, and even physical forms, should you choose to. There are pros and cons to all the channels of communication. The best is the one on which customers engage the most.

In-App

This is used to conduct a survey within the application, usually after completing a transaction.

Pros:

1. Fastest response from an active customer

2. Great response rate

Cons:

1. It could be transactional in nature. Survey response would be based totally on the last transaction and not the holistic application experience.

2. The most valuable feedback comes from people who no longer use the application. Difficult to include the detractors since they would not be active on the app.

Text message

Many companies send an NPS Survey on the link within the text message. Some surveyors like mobile companies also include a free text message with a survey answer to be sent as a response.

Pros:

1. Fast response

2. Can include passive customers too.

Cons:

1. Expensive and not pocket friendly.

2. Text Messages may get buried.

Email

An email with a poster and survey link can be sent to the patrons for NPS Survey participation.

Pros:

1. Cheap and pocket-friendly

2. Can be sent to the widest possible audience including passives and detractors.

Cons:

1. Not very engaging. May look like an eBrochure.

2. Complicated user journey with multiple steps

3. Lower response rate

WhatsApp

Communication can be sent with a link to the survey, or you can use an AI tool for a dynamic experience.

Pros:

1. Fast response

2. Good response rate

Cons:

1. The additional step of WhatsApp consent and confirmation of WhatsApp number makes the dataset considerably narrow.

2. WhatsApp messages can be easy to miss since each person receives hundreds of messages a day

3. Without the AI tool, the user journey becomes complicated with multiple steps.

AMP Email

It is an email with website functionalities and dynamic content within the email body. Users can respond to surveys, mark checkboxes, add comments inside the email body in real-time. AMP Email advantages are better than a combination of traditional email and Whatsapp survey.

Pros:

1. Faster response

2. Can be sent to the widest possible audience including passives and detractors

3. Engaging and attractive

4. Good response rate

5. One step user journey

Cons:

1. Emails are easy to miss since a person receives an average of 100+ emails/day.

Through any channel, you can either send a link to the survey (traditional email/SMS survey/WhatsApp survey) or conduct the NPS survey on the page where the customer is already present (like an AMP email/in-app survey/ AI-based WhatsApp survey).

When the call-to-action asks a user to click on a survey link, people hesitate for various reasons:

• A new link will take more time to load the new page.

• Multi-step, complicated user journeys.

• Each click is a time-consuming potential distraction.

• Less secure as fake links can redirect consumers to unknown pages.

Instead, what we need is:

• Lesser steps for survey completion.

• More interactive engagement with the customer.

• Better response rate.

• Call to action achieved within one step.

Here is a quick summary of all channels across different parameters for an easy choice:

Feature	Traditional email	In-app	SMS	Link-based WhatsApp	AI-based WhatsAPP	AMP email
Good opening rate	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
Non-intrusive	Yes	No	No	No	No	Yes
Pocket-friendly	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes
Dynamic forms	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
No redirection	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Security	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Large dataset	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Non-transactional feedback	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
More responsive	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
No ads/3rd party intrusions	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Using the right channel and a shift in strategy can show mind-blowing results.

• A payment gateway provider saw a massive 250% increase in responses to their NPS survey emails on moving to interactive surveys on AMP emails.

• A luxury brand saw 800% (8X more) conversions on an NPS Survey in an interactive email compared to the HTML/static emails sent with the same survey.

After determining the channel that works best for you- the next step is to consider what the communication looks like.

What are the applicable best practices to help increase the response rate?

NPS Surveys are simple, yet quality content in the communication makes a huge difference in response rates. The biggest challenge is getting people to land on the page with the only question that needs to be answered- How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

And yet, emails remain unopened, text messages get ignored/buried, in-app communication results in a transactional answer that may not reflect the honest opinion. What is the key?

We all know that emails need to have an attractive subject line, be accessible, and should not land in spam. What other best practices can be adopted that can be applied across any channel?

Tell them how long it will take

Nestle’s Maggie ran an entire campaign for 20+ years with ‘just 2 minutes.’ To treat the customer’s time as precious is a time-tested strategy. Online articles and blogs put that information upfront- “5 minutes read” or “15 minutes read”. Giving that information upfront increases the chances of successful participation.

Keep it short, simple, and objective

Even though an NPS Survey usually has only one main question, should you have additional questions, a multiple-choice answer is easier and faster. The survey participant immediately understands the context of questions and the answers expected. Remember, no one likes a multi-page survey. So in a multiple-question NPS survey, it is better if everything is on the same page. Such surveys clearly have more participants and better responses.

Time it right

Sending NPS surveys once every month or two gives a great idea of overall customer sentiment. NPS Survey can also be strategically timed to understand customer response to a new upgrade or before a new product line launch.

For example: A groceries delivery application made changes in UI that were meant to make navigation easier. A few weeks after the upgrade release, an NPS Survey can be conducted. Should the NPS score decrease suddenly, the customers are not finding the changes helpful. A course correction strategy can then be formed and implemented.

Highlight the importance and value

Let the customers know why their response is valuable. You can share an example or two of how feedback created the right impact. This shows that you value their time, thought, and effort.

Follow up

It is imperative to send out a follow-up or a reminder communication. A person, on average, gets about 100 personal emails, texts, WhatsApp messages in a day. It is easily possible for the survey email to get buried. Create a follow-up strategy of how many reminders and at what frequency.

Other creative ways of increasing NPS Survey responses

Companies frequently introduce creative ways of increasing engagement with customers in their customer feedback surveys.

Incentivize the effort

A discount voucher or an offer on survey completion is usually a strong motivator for survey participants. This incentive program can be used for more elaborate multi-question NPS surveys where the participant may have to put in more time and effort.

Make it personalized

An important best practice is to address the recipient by name, or design the right signature at the very least. And then you can take it further from there.

A more effective way would be to add more personalized information to the content. Information like this will make it more likely that they will participate and complete the NPS survey.

What comes next?

The best place to start will be to know where you stand. NPS Score gives a score of overall customer satisfaction.

In a survey, people who want to refer to others are ‘Promoters’, who are not sure are ‘Passives’, and people who will not promote you are ‘Detractors’.

NPS Score is = (% of Promoters) - (% of Detractors)

The higher the score is, the better.

Once you know where you stand, it gives a base to see how you do over a period of time. Here are a few things you can do to understand the open-ended responses.

Categorize and analyze the feedback

People are more inclined to share a bad review than a good one. Yet, only 1 out of 10 people leave a good review on a good experience. So statistically speaking, there will be many more negatives than positives. And that’s a great opportunity to know what's working and what's not. So, categorize feedback into positive and negative.

Tag keywords on why a customer loved a product/service and also for the reasons listed for a bad review. It is also helpful to add demographic details on categories.

You can also use AI tools like monkeylearn, radarr, awario to gather insights about NPS open-ended responses.

For example - Urban, younger users loved the new product line and yet people from all age groups in the country hated it.

Share the feedback with in-house teams

Once NPS data is analyzed, share the findings with the in-house teams. This will give a clear idea of what the customers of different segments actually feel and strategies can be made accordingly.

Wrap up

If analyzed well, open-ended customer feedback has many hidden gems about growth and product ideas. By cracking the customer feedback loop, the only way to go for your business growth journey is onwards and upwards!