Sales is a huge focus for all B2B SaaS companies. This is justified since without customers, you don’t have a business. At the same time, your business should be just as focused on ensuring you retain customers once they’re signed on.

Even with an excellent lead generation strategy, it’s still essential to delight current customers and retain them. How do you know if you’re delighting customers or if you have a gap to close? The net promoter score (NPS) survey is the answer.

How does the NPS survey work?

The NPS survey is great because it doesn’t take much effort on your part, or on your customers. Start by sending your customers a quarterly survey asking one question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [your company] to a friend or colleague?” Use scoring from 0-10. 

In addition to being fast and easy for both you and your participants, the NPS survey opens the door to have a quick, but meaningful conversation with customers about their experience, allowing you to identify opportunities for improvement. Further, it encourages innovation within operations and across your company.

Decoding responses

While a 0-10 scoring system might not seem to collect a ton of data, it’s a great jumping point for understanding more about how a customer interacts with your brand.

• Respondents that select 9 or 10 are promoters—they love your brand and they tell everyone about it, driving business growth. Promoters have an average lifetime value 3-8x that of a detractor.
• Respondents that select 7 or 8 are passives—they are satisfied, but not moved to refer your business. They can also be open to leaving your company for another.
• Those respondents that select 0-6 are detractors—they are unhappy customers that can slow your growth and spread negative feedback about your company.

Boosting your response rate

Convincing people to take a short survey can be strangely difficult. If you struggle to get your customers to respond, try incentivizing the response. Offer to put them into a drawing for a gift card or send every respondent a free item.

If you’re still struggling, don’t be afraid to email more than once. Switch up your subject line and email copy when resending to people who haven’t yet responded to your survey.

Best practices

You don’t want to overwhelm your customers. Stick to running 2-3 NPS surveys each year, unless your service offerings change and warrant increased frequency. You should also use your CRM system for increased success with surveys. This will help ensure you’re targeting the right stakeholder and that feedback is documented for follow-up at a later time.

Most importantly, it’s absolutely crucial that you do something with the responses you receive. The purpose of the NPS survey isn’t just to collect numbers—it’s about measuring and acting on feedback. 

Retention is immensely important for your B2B SaaS company. Just focusing on sales isn’t enough anymore. Executing NPS surveys are relatively quick and easy, providing an opportunity to ensure you’re delighting your customers (or make changes if you’re not).

Looking for more opportunities to retain clients? Look no further. This checklist covers 11 strategies for boosting client retention rates.