How we bumped up our NPS by… (read to know by how much)

In May of 2019 Hiver ran its first ever NPS survey. What we saw did not impress us at all. Our NPS score was low and my customer success team had a job on their hands.

Depending on what school of thought you are from, you will either take NPS very seriously or shrug it off as a ‘one question does not fit all situations’ solution.

The customer success team at Hiver took our low NPS score seriously. We put our heads down and came up with a quantifiable plan that would help us improve our score. (Spoiler: I will tell you exactly how much we managed to get it up by at the end :D).

CSAT: The micro NPS

The primary interaction point for most of our customers is our support team. Needless to say, it was essential we made sure that every interaction they had with the team was measured objectively for satisfaction.

We enabled CSAT for all our support conversations and took any poor CSAT (customer satisfaction surveys) seriously.

Props to the support team for being on the ball and making sure they reached out to each dissatisfied customer.

Both the support and customer success teams spent a small part of their day observing CSAT trends and making sure their portfolio of customers was satisfied. The CSAT gave us a decent indicator that we were heading in the right direction.

Product improvements

NPS is not just about customer satisfaction, it is also about customer joy. The product/development team improved the overall performance of the product and also made sure that we were turning out a host of new features that helped ‘wow’ customers and improve the overall satisfaction with the product.

The customer success team at Hiver also played a vital role. The success team made sure that improvements were frequently transmitted to existing customers and also worked to ensure that there was adoption of new features (where they identified a customer could benefit from the features. Needlessly pushing features can hurt more than benefit).

The overall impact was that our existing customers could see that we were making strides on the product front.

Improving our product onboarding and value delivery

I could write a small book on the many improvements we made to our customer onboarding and value delivery. However, without this important improvement, we would never have been able to improve our NPS.

Customers were onboarded faster and the onboarding was tailored for each customer’s specific use case.

Without being very philosophical about the whole approach to fixing NPS, we wanted to make sure that the customer was happy at the product/support end as well as with the people they interacted with. I can safely say that the success team at Hiver stepped up on this front.

The team at Hiver has done an awesome job of stamping their personality on every customer interaction. I know because when I visited the customers, they actually remembered the names of the support staff members their team has been interacting with.

But the biggest thing was… the team actually cares about our customers

I think the biggest differentiator for the team at Hiver was our undying commitment to improve and help our customers. We did not think of the NPS as another target or KPI indicator.

Everyone involved genuinely took the older NPS as a challenge they wanted to ace. The results were there for everyone to see and I cannot be prouder of the work the team at Hiver has put in.

That leaves just one question. By how much did we improve our NPS score? 18 points. :D

That is not where we are stopping though, as we hope to improve it even more by the time the next NPS survey is out.