These 4 factors will make or break your software company’s NPS
Is your company paying attention to these key metrics?
Behind every Net Promoter® Score (NPS) is a series of factors that influence it. Have a great app but a lousy user interface? That’s going to affect your NPS.
But how? Your score is a single number, so it’s hard to tell how much of an influence each of these factors has. Maybe your user interface issues are causing your NPS to drop, but there might be other issues that are having a greater impact.
SurveyMonkey set out to uncover the most impactful factors on NPS in the software and apps industry, using our own research.
The results were convincing. There were 4 factors, rated on a 5-point scale between extremely satisfied and not at all satisfied, that stood above all the others.
- Reliability: For every 1-point increase in satisfaction for reliability, a company can boost their NPS by 29 points.
- Security: Every 1-point increase in security boosted NPS by 17 points.
- The ability to integrate with other software: A 1-point increase in the satisfaction for how apps work with other software increased NPS by 10 points.
- A functional user interface: Each 1-point increase in satisfaction for user interface boosted NPS by 19 points.
For example, what if you were able to move your score for security from “not at all satisfied” to “somewhat satisfied” and move your score for user interface from “somewhat satisfied” to extremely satisfied?
The research shows that you could improve your NPS by as much as 36 points.
Surprised? Take an in-depth look at how our team uncovered these values.
Find out what’s driving your NPS
Use our template built specifically for software companies uncover what’s behind your Net Promoter Score.
The studies behind the data
The survey research team ran 2 studies to determine what factors were impacting NPS scores for software and app companies.
Study 1 – Before the team could go about ranking which factors impact NPS the most for software companies, they first needed to find out more about what types of issues their users face.
NPS questions are often accompanied by open-ended questions that ask respondents to explain why they gave the score they did. The team accessed the responses to these questions from SurveyMonkey’s vault of responses to surveys about software products.
These responses are aggregated, which means they’re not in any way tied to the specific companies or products the questions involved.
The team put together the data from these open-ended questions and came up with 17 common themes. Using SurveyMonkey Audience, they surveyed 483 people full-time employees who had used one of 13 software products in the past 6 months.
They asked for an NPS on all of the products they had used in the past 6 months, then asked respondents to rate each of 17 attributes on a scale from extremely important to not at all important.
Study 2 – Using the results of Study 1, the team chose 13 topics that respondents said were highly important when using software products.
The team used SurveyMonkey Audience again to ask 1,091 full-time employees about these factors.
- Respondents were asked if they had used one of 12 software products in the past 6 months. If they had not used any of the products in the past 6 months, they were rejected from the survey.
- The remaining respondents were asked to answer an NPS question about the product they had used and another series of questions about the 13 factors gathered from the first study.
- The NPS question was always shown first on a separate page and attributes were randomized and asked on a 5-point satisfaction scale from Extremely Satisfied to Not at all satisfied.
The team found that reliability, security, the ability to integrate with other apps, and a functional user interface were the factors that had the greatest impact on NPS.
Careful thought and research went into the creation of NPS and it has been shown to be a useful metric to understand consumers’ experiences.
With the addition of the factors that most impact NPS, you have more power and flexibility to make your products and services more appealing.
NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.
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