NPS Most Wanted: How We Chose the Best-Fit NPS Software [Update]

NPS calculation starts with asking your customers one simple question, where your goal is to receive maximum feedback. Here is the question we ask our users:

"How likely is it that you would recommend Serpstat to a friend or colleague?"

The scale is usually from 0 to 10. Customers who give you a 9 or 10 are promoters, 7 or 8 are passives, and six or below are detractors. After the data is collected, it's time to count the NPS. It equals the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. For example, if you received 56% of promoters and 8% of detractors. Then the NPS equals 48%.

There is a bunch of different NPS tools to choose from. I picked 5 NPS tools for this comparative research; here they are:

1. Retently;
2. Ask Nicely;
3. Delighted;
4. Promoter;
5. SatisMeter;
6. Zonka Feedback.

Why these five tools? All of them are highly preferred by our colleagues from various SaaS companies. Moreover, these 5 NPS tools have lots of positive reviews on Quora.

I analyzed lots of various parameters while comparing these 5 tools, here are some of them:

• survey channel;

• Intercom integration;

• the ability to upload a logo;

• opportunity to set up several projects for one account;

• the number of managers having access to account;

• trends analysis;

• delivery confirmation, and so on.

I won't cover all of them in this article, just 4 key ones. Some parameters are more important than others, thus you'll see the numbers that mark the weight of this or that metric.

• Survey channel — 0,3

• Integration with Intercom — 0,3

• Response rate — 0,1

• Price — 0,3

Our primary goal was not to find just the best of the best tool, but the one that is the best for us. We're searching for a service that meets the following requirements:

• In-app survey available;

• Integration with Intercom;

• Response Rate metric available;

• Maximum feedback for $50/month.

There are 3 most popular survey channels:

• Email;

• SMS;

• In-app.
  

Email is the core survey channel for all NPS tools, it's like a cornerstone all these tools started with. The huge disadvantage of this channel is its low response rate. As the average person receives dozens of emails per day, thus it's impossible to respond to every email that lands up in your inbox.

Another NPS channel is SMS. This channel deeply narrows the outreach of the NPS campaign, as you can send the survey only to those clients who have shared their contact info with you. A low response rate is a disadvantage SMS channel also suffers from. Moreover, sending surveys via email and text messages at the right time is crucial.

Let's pass to in-app channel. It has two advantages:

High response rate – unlike the two previous channels, the users are asked to evaluate the service on the website and thus are focused on it. It doubles the chances that user won't ignore the question.

Immediate feedback – unlike email and SMS, via in-app, a user sees your question in several seconds after it's sent. Moreover, nothing is easier than just tick the mark you think aligns with the service's quality.

We chose an in-app channel as the best fit for our needs. This survey channel is available at Retently, Delighted and SatisMeter. Moreover, Satismeter allows collecting feedbacks via mobile apps (iOS and Android)

Intercom is a real swiss army knife, which we use both as a Customer Relation platform for technical support and Customer Success platform that allow us to:

• welcome our new clients (onboarding);

• engage them into active tool's using;

• tell our users about product news;

• explore their behavior;

• collect customer feedback.

Thus the ability to integrate Intercom with NPS platform was an important metric for us while choosing the NPS tool. It allows us to:

• accumulate NPS score in one place;

• collect not just the score but the comments as well, as NPS score is useless without further communication with the user;

• segment NPS scores by different user categories;

• effectively close the customer feedback loop via Intercom.

Let's dwell on the last opportunity in detail. Abstract NPS scores tell us a little about customer loyalty. Thus, even if the user doesn't comment on the score, don't leave such feedback without a response. Mind that there is no need to spam and thank the promoters (9-10). While always ask passives and detractors about the reasons for such low scores (1-8). It's what's called closing the loop.

Response rate is a metric that shows the number of people who answered the survey divided by the number of people in the sample.

Response rate metric also allows calculating the average number of surveys per month and estimate costs. All NPS tools usually have a free trial period during which you'll receive preliminary statistics.

• You can send up to 100 surveys for free within 7 days;

• Ask Nicely has no limitations as to the number of surveys sent during the trial period (14 days).

• Promoter allows sending 250 surveys during its trial.

• SatisMeter has no limitations as to the number of sent surveys while you'll receive only first 300 responses.

Let's pass to such crucial metric as price. A price overview of all analyzed tools is mentioned in the table below.

AskNicely, Delighted, Retently and Promoter tariff plans depend on the number of surveys sent, which is inefficient. Let's imagine that we bought a monthly subscription to Promoter, which costs $50. It allows to send NPS surveys to 750 customers and only via email. The average response rate is 20% under these conditions. Thus, we'll get just 150 responses (750x0,2).

The monthly subscription to SatisMeter price depends on the number of replies. Compared to Promoter's similar tariff plan ($49), SatisMeter is much more profitable. As we can send NPS surveys to a bigger audience (>1500 respondents), we'll receive two times more responses (300).

BTW, guys from SatisMeter promise just 10% response rate, which is very fair to their users.

The number of responses you'll receive for $50 with basic 20% response rate is mentioned in the comparative table below:

Let's pass to the results of our little research. I summed up all the points the NPS tools got, taking into account the metrics' weight mentioned at the very beginning of the post. Here is what I got:

I don't claim that this research to be fundamental as I analyzed only 4 basic metrics (having a budget $50/month). As I already mentioned, there is a bunch of parameters to analyze while choosing the NPS tool. Everything depends on your company's needs and demands. But I hope that our use case will be useful for you, and you'll find your best fit.

Good luck ;)