As a sales professional, it’s incredibly important to understand how your customers feel about working with you. A bold claim, we know.

But it’s true: asking for feedback creates new opportunities to engage customers and strengthen your business.

Start collecting actionable feedback and assessing your customer experience by using a widely accepted indicator: Net Promoter Score.

What is Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measurement of your customer’s willingness to recommend your product to their friends or co-workers. This gives you a holistic way to measure the satisfaction of your customers.

A net promoter score is an index that ranges from -100 to 100, with a score over 60 being the gold standard. To figure out your NPS, you send a single question survey to your customers, post-closing when their buying journey has finished.

The question to ask is some variation of “how likely are you to recommend us to your friends or family?”. The answer places on a scale of 0-10: 0 being not likely at all and 10 being very likely.

Responses from 0-6 are considered “detractors”. Responses from 7-8 are neutral. Your promoters will be those that give a 9 or 10.

To calculate your net promoter score, subtract the percentage of respondents that were detractors from the percentage that were promoters.

So, if you had 100 people answer your survey and 70 were promoters, 15 were neutral, and 15 were detractors, your NPS would be 55 (70% promoter – 15% detractor = 55 NPS).

Now comes the real fun. What do you do with all of this incoming data?

When you set up an NPS, you also want to set up 3 “thank you” landing pages. One for promoters, one for neutrals, and one for detractors.

Upon submission of the survey, the customer is redirected to the appropriate thank you page based on their response.

Promoters

As a promoter, you should first thank them for taking the time to give their feedback. Then, you can provide a way for the customer to share their fantastic experience (social media sharing) or provide referrals to family/friends/colleagues.

When promoters are happy with the work you’ve done, they are excited to give you positive feedback. Often, they are ripe for a referral ask right then as they’re thinking about the great service they received.

Neutrals

When a customer gives you a neutral response, again, thank them for taking the time to answer your survey. Now ask them to tell you, “Why?”. There is an opportunity to turn neutrals into promoters by engaging them in their feedback.

Even further, another interesting question to ask these customers is, “What would it take to raise our score by one point?” The feedback you gain from this segment of your customer base can be the difference between having a robust network of referrers or a long list of missed opportunities.

Detractors

When a customer is a detractor, it’s because something either went wrong or was sub-optimal during their home buying experience. They are invested enough to answer your survey, so now is the time to ask them additional questions about which part(s) of the process caused them to give you a lower rating. What didn’t happen that they wish would have?

Consequently, detractors provide a great opportunity to learn about your loan process and workflow. They help identify any perceived issues that you can quickly clear up. Detractors generally don’t become repeat customers, so engage them as best you can to clear up their issues or fears.

Overall, getting your start with NPS is easy. You just need a simple email survey and some well-designed landing pages. With these things in place, you’ll be informed about your customers’ experience, gain insights that drive profitable change and primed to ask for referrals at the height of customer satisfaction.