How often should we do NPS?

I read a post today on LinkedIn by Jason Lemkin entitled, "The Two Things to Do. When You Don’t Know What to Do."

In a nutshell, the post recommends two things when you're going through stressful times in your startup:

• Go visit customers
• Boost your NPS (Net Promoter Score)
  
  

Regardless of stressful times or not, I thoroughly enjoy spending time with our customers. It's one of my favorite things to do and it's how we built Paubox in the first place. =)

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Leveling up via SaaStr

As previously covered, we are big fans of the continuing education we receive by attending SaaStr events.

Here are some of them:

• My Takeaways from SaaStr Annual 2017 Conference (Day 1)
• My Takeaways from SaaStr Annual 2017 Conference (Day 2)
• My Takeaways from SaaStr Annual 2017 Conference (Day 3)
• My Continuing Education via SaaStr CSS Speaking Series
• The Rule of 40 and More: SaaStr Speaker Series with Sameer Dholakia and Ajay Agarwal
  
  

In addition, I recently finished reading "From Impossible to Inevitable" by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin. One of my takeaways from the book was tying comp for the Customer Success team to a high NPS.

What is NPS?

NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is a customer loyalty metric that can be tied to revenue growth. In addition to being widely adopted by Fortune 1000 companies, NPS is vastly popular in the SaaS industry.

NPS can be as low as −100 (everyone is a detractor) or as high as 100 (everyone is a promoter). It's generally agreed that an NPS above 50 is very good. 

In a nutshell, Net Promoter Score measures the loyalty that exists between a vendor and a customer.

NPS is calculated based on a single question: How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is based on a scale of 0 to 10.

How Often Should We Do NPS?

Advocately co-Founder Patrick Barnes in power user model

We've run NPS surveys twice this year, once per quarter. While we scored well above 50 on both occasions, I began to think we weren't doing it often enough. My hypothesis was confirmed a few weeks ago when I saw Patrick Barnes, co-Founder of Advocately. We are early adopters of Advocately and I think Patrick is a cool dude in general.

Rather than ask customers to do NPS once per quarter, Patrick suggested we look at running NPS with more frequency and around different trigger events.

After conducting some research on how often to run NPS, I found a set of criteria we can follow. I'd like to base our NPS cycle around:

• First survey: Sent 14 days after Paubox installation.
• Second survey: Sent 60 days after first survey.
• Third survey: Recurring and sent every 90 days after second survey.

Ideally we'll be constantly sending NPS surveys to different segments of Paubox customers. The journey continues.