How Using AI to Understand Your Net Promoter Score Will Help Your Business

If you’re a product manager or customer experience professional, you know how important it is to understand your net promoter score (NPS). NPS is a widely-accepted marker of customer sentiment that helps businesses understand how likely their customers are to recommend their products and services to others.

NPS isn’t an all-encompassing metric, but it can help you make data-driven changes to your customer experience. Various studies have shown that high NPS scores are correlated with positive business outcomes such as revenue growth and customer loyalty. However, unless customers provide commentary in addition to their survey responses, it’s hard to know why they gave you the rating they did, and what actions you can take to improve the score. So when customers do provide valuable feedback within the open-ended text field on your NPS survey, it's critical to listen. But understanding all that unstructured data takes a ton of time and resources, and becomes virtually impossible at scale.

Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) tools are making it easier for businesses to understand how to improve their NPS performance by unlocking hidden insights in customer feedback data. Let’s take a closer look at why using AI for this purpose is so powerful.

AI picks up on details that humans often miss

AI gives you a nuanced understanding of customer sentiment that traditional survey methods simply can’t provide. First of all, surveys are limited by their structure—they can only ask questions that the survey designer has anticipated. AI, on the other hand, is able to pick up on subtle nuances in language and uncover insights about customers that hadn’t previously been considered. This gives product managers and customer experience professionals a more complete picture of their customers' feelings towards their products or services, and enables them to make informed decisions about how to improve their offerings.

Due to our limited capacity for processing large amounts of data, humans often miss patterns in language that AI is able to detect and organize. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, AI can analyze hundreds of thousands of survey responses and identify common themes that might otherwise be overlooked. This allows businesses to quickly identify improvement areas and address them promptly, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.

How AI can help you improve NPS

AI tools don’t just give you a deeper understanding of customer sentiment; they also make sure that the gathered data is accurate, reliable, and actionable. Tools like Viable can help companies ensure they’re collecting quality feedback from customers by filtering out immaterial information while still capturing all relevant details related to their NPS score. 

Here are some of the ways that AI can help improve your company’s NPS.

Better understand the customer journey

Companies want to know as much as they can about their customers’ journeys—it helps them identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and areas where they can better meet customer needs. But surveys don't always paint the full picture—without digging deeper into their journey, companies may miss valuable opportunities to improve and optimize it. By analyzing qualitative data beyond surveys, AI tools help you pinpoint exactly where customers are having issues or could use improved service—giving your company invaluable insights on how to meet their needs every step of the way.

Nip negative feedback in the bud

Poor online reviews can be a huge setback for companies, and regaining trust with potential customers can be a steep uphill climb. Therefore, nipping poor sentiment in the bud before it’s able to spread is crucial. AI tools are able to recognize the sentiment behind low scores and suggest proper resolutions, giving you the opportunity to take action before negative sentiment can spread. In the best cases, this can even help turn dissatisfied customers into promoters.

Empower customer service agents

As marketers know, customer service agents are critical for strong NPS scores. But they have a tough job—customers are usually calling to deal with an issue they’re having, and finding a proper resolution can be tricky. AI tools equip agents with deeper insights into each individual customer by gathering data from relevant sources like CRMs, giving them an edge in problem-solving and personalized support.

Get the most out of your passives

In most cases, the vast majority of customers are “passives,” which means they have average feelings about your company. This group is less likely to respond to surveys than those that have strongly positive or negative experiences. Too many businesses overlook this valuable customer segment, and AI tools can help you understand them better. They’re able to gather whatever feedback passive customers provide, such as conversations with chatbots, and deliver useful insights. That means more feedback that can be used to improve your offerings—even from customers that are unlikely to respond to surveys.

Once you understand the customer behavior that’s driving NPS scores, AI can help you take actionable steps towards improvement. Generative analysis tools like Viable provide recommendations on how best to address customer complaints and suggestions for ways to improve overall customer satisfaction. By taking advantage of these insights, you can improve your products or services in ways that will directly benefit your customers—which should result in higher NPS scores over time.

Get more out of NPS surveys with the help of AI

The power of artificial intelligence (AI) should not be underestimated when it comes to understanding your net promoter score, and taking action to improve it. Modern AI tools such as those offered by Viable give companies an incredibly nuanced understanding of their customers' sentiments towards their products or services, as well as actionable insights into potential areas for improvement within their organizations—all while ensuring that the data gathered is accurate and reliable.

Ready to see how generative analysis tools can help improve your NPS scores? Try our AI today.

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