When you set up your first NPS campaign, you survey every contact in your system at once to gauge broad sentiment.
This should give you a trove of meaningful information that you can act on. For example, you’re able to gauge what makes clients happy so you can build stronger relationships, or what needs improvement so you can reduce churn.
You should run this campaign until you get a level of maturity with NPS data and are looking to dig deeper. When this happens, it’s time to run your next NPS campaign(s). This means segmenting the survey so it goes to specific groups at optimal cadences.
For example, you can send a segmented NPS campaign to executives shortly before a quarterly business review (QBR) to capture their feedback and come prepared with responses and recommendations based on it.
In this guide, we’ll share how to define the segments your next NPS campaign should be sent to and exactly how to set up your next NPS campaign.
Table of contents
- The three key groups for your next NPS campaign
- How to set up segmented NPS campaigns
The three key groups for your next NPS campaign
Segmentation is powerful because you’re going to get different data from different segments that call for different responses.
Generally, there are three key groups to consider for your next NPS campaign:
- Decision-makers: The c-suite, or the people that can hire and fire you
- Power users: The general population minus decision-makers (including managers), or the people you interact with regularly
- New clients: The new users that just came aboard
Let’s look at each one in more detail.
1. Decision-makers
It’s rare to interact with decision-makers regularly. Unlike managers or the rest of the team, they only see your business (and analyze your relationships) from the broadest level. This means they won’t have much to say about the day to day ins and outs of working together.
Because of this, it’s not necessary to survey them monthly or quarterly. Instead, you should ask for their opinion once or twice a year and time your survey with your QBRs.
Top Tip: To learn more about how to act on NPS data from decision-makers to improve your relationship, read our guide to How to Leverage Customer Feedback Data to Ace QBRs.
Because this audience is tougher and the group is smaller, expect the response rate and scores to be lower than average. That said, the feedback should be incredibly meaningful because it pertains to the essence of your business relationship.
What this group has to say can make or break everything, which is why it’s so important to capture it right before QBRs and act on it accordingly.
2. Power users
Unlike the c-suite, power users interact with your business and your team regularly. This means they’ll have a lot more to say and will have feedback on your employees, systems, workflows, response times, features, etc.
Because of this, the feedback will be more similar to CSAT responses (e.g. “I like [name] they do great work” or “Always on time, they respond to tickets in a prompt fashion”).
This information is critical, as it helps you understand what’s working well and what needs to be optimized to improve the customer experience. Because they likely have a lot to say, you should survey them continuously. At Smileback, we survey our power users on a three month cadence.
3. New clients
New users are fragile. If they have a great experience early on, they’ll likely become long term customers. If they have a negative experience, they may churn.
This is why it’s critical to send new clients an NPS survey as soon as possible. Their insights can help you tailor their experience so they’re happy and getting the most out of your business relationship.
For example, you may get a response from a new user after 30 days that says, “I like your platform, but I haven’t used enough of its features to give meaningful feedback yet”, accompanied by an NPS score of 7. Unbeknownst to them, they just gave you very meaningful feedback.
You can use this information to ask follow up questions about what parts of your platform they haven’t used yet, and then show them what they’re missing out on and why engaging with it will improve their experience. That small action can turn a passive into a promoter and stop them from churning.
Top Tip: To learn more about how to respond to NPS data of all types, read our guide on How to Act on NPS Data to Reduce Churn.
It’s tricky to know exactly when to send an NPS campaign to new users. At what point will they have engaged with your company enough to form an initial meaningful impression?
At Smileback, we send our new user survey after 30 days. For your MSP, it depends entirely on what your onboarding cycle looks like. Until they have something valuable to say, it’s not worth sending. But if you wait too long, you may miss capturing their raw thoughts while they’re top of mind.
The key factor here is a meaningful impression. Find the sweet spot between giving them enough time to get acclimated and missing out on their initial feedback while it’s fresh.
How to set up segmented NPS campaigns
When you set up your first NPS campaign, nobody was filtered out. To set up your next NPS campaigns, you need to use your newly defined segments.
As a rule of thumb, users should only ever be in one segment. You can proceed from here in one of two ways:
- Delete your first NPS campaign and set up three new segmented ones (based on the three key groups defined above).
- Keep your first NPS campaign running but filter out decision-makers. Now, your first NPS campaign becomes your “Power users” segment, and you only need to set up two new campaigns instead of three.
To keep things simple, we’ll follow option #1 above and show you how to set up three new campaigns. We’ll also be using the ConnectWise platform in our example, so keep in mind the filter choices may vary slightly depending on your platform.
Top Tip: Learn about how to import and filter contacts from your designated platform by reading our Help Center guides full of NPS campaign setup tips.
Before you get started, make sure that your existing data is organized and categorized in your platform based on the three key groups we’ve outlined above. Perhaps you label “power users” as “end users” and “decision-makers” as “VIPs”. Whatever current system you have to segment existing data by contact type, use it to find the right users for your NPS filters. There’s no need to create more work for yourself than necessary.
Let’s start with decision-makers. Head to your SmileBack dashboard and click on “Campaigns”:
Click “Create new campaign”. This time, when naming the campaign, instead of a generic “Quarterly NPS Survey – All Clients” give it a name that suits the survey to stay organized, for example, “Decision-makers 6 Monthly”.
Choose to have it repeat at your preferred cadence (we’ll choose every 6 months here) and follow the rest of steps as you did when setting up your first NPS campaign:
After you import or upload your contacts, you’ll reach the “Select your filters” screen. For your first NPS campaign, you selected everybody and filtered nobody. This time, you’ll want to filter by “Decision-maker” (or whatever you’ve named them in your system):
You can filter further by Company Status and Company Type if you’d like. It depends on whether you want to send an NPS survey to all clients that are decision makers at the same cadence (e.g. every 6 months), or if some clients only need to be surveyed once a year, for example.
Click “Next” and make sure to review you recipients to ensure everybody that is included in this VIP list is meant to be there:
If everything looks good, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save and continue”. Then, click “Activate campaign”:
Repeat this process two more times to set up NPS campaigns for power users and new users.
Once all three of your campaigns are set up, you’ll need to return to your original NPS campaign and delete it. If you leave it running, every contact will get two NPS campaigns instead of one, which will negatively impact your response rate, scores, and feedback quality.
To do this, navigate back to “Campaigns”, choose your original NPS campaign, click on “Campaign settings” and then press “Delete campaign”:
If you followed option #2 above and segmented decision-makers out of your first NPS campaign, do not delete anything.
Moving forward, you’ll also need to define when a contact becomes a new user, and when a new user should get enrolled into the power users or gen pop segment.
Whatever process you follow, make sure that every time you add a user to a new segment, you remove them from the old one.
Key takeaways
Segmenting your NPS campaigns helps you capture more valuable feedback. This way, you can stay on top of client satisfaction so you can improve your business relationships and reduce churn.
Want to talk to a member of our team about setting up your next NPS campaign?
