When you begin using Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys as part of your CX program, you should probably keep it simple. That means surveying every customer with the same NPS question on a cadence that makes sense for your business. As your customer experience program matures, there are scenarios where treating groups of users differently can help you get more strategic value from your Net Promoter Score program. That’s where a targeted NPS survey strategy comes in.

With a targeted NPS survey strategy, you control who gets surveyed when and where. You may also customize the version of the NPS survey a specific customer segment will see.  

Strategic reasons to target NPS surveys 

First, let’s look at why you might implement NPS differently for various customer segments:

1. Receive better data and better UX through hyper-targeted surveys.
2. Obtain sufficient feedback from essential, but smaller, user segments.
3. Direct customer segments to take different actions after they respond to a survey.
4. Support a phased roll-out of an NPS program.
5. Restrict where customers see or don’t see an NPS survey.

Now let’s see how to use these strategies in real-world scenarios.

1. Hyper-targeted surveys for better data, better UX

Hyper-targeted surveys ask customers a single question about their experience immediately after a task is completed. They improve the experience of being surveyed. Imagine the frustration of opening an email with a lengthy survey about a product you used hours or even days ago. A relevant, fast, and easy NPS micro-survey is a much better experience for the customer, resulting in higher response rates for the company. 

A leader in the travel industry gathers feedback from hoteliers about the experience of a platform feature. This company has users worldwide, so it is important to ask for feedback in the hotelier’s language. 

The company can get precisely the feedback they need about this product feature by creating a customer segment based on 

1. The user’s language (a property)
2. The feature use (an event)

In the image below, the company asks for feedback when a Spanish-speaking hotelier uses a specific feature.

Hyper-targeting can be implemented on all types of CX surveys, including CSAT, Product Satisfaction, and Customer Effort Score.

2.  Obtain sufficient feedback from smaller customer segments

Your most essential users may not be your largest group of users.

Hootsuite, the social media management platform, listens to feedback from various customer personas, including administrators and read-only users.  The enterprise customers who use Hootsuite to manage their social media efforts may have scores of read-only users for every admin on the account. To balance the feedback, Hootsuite defines survey sampling parameters for these two segments differently.  

1. Read-only users: They cap the survey responses they receive from the read-only users.
2. Admins: They boost the percentage of admins that are surveyed. 

This balance ensures that the feedback from read-only users does not drown out the all-important admin perspective. 

Hootsuite tripled its Net Promoter Score with a modern approach to NPS. Learn how they did it.

VSCO, the popular photo-editing app, has product teams devoted to iOS and Android versions of their application.  As you might expect, they have more users of their iOS app and, naturally, far more feedback from them as well.  For the Android product team to receive sufficient feedback in their dashboard, they created separate customer segments and sampling requirements for each. 

Example NPS analytics dashboards for Android and iOS product teams.

3. Differentiate customer actions after the NPS survey

This strategy is about achieving a different post-survey outcome for different groups.  In this scenario, you show different versions of your NPS survey to different customer segments to encourage unique next steps after they respond.  Here are two examples:

Ask for reviews on separate sites

While VSCO has different versions of their NPS survey for iOS and Android users, the NPS question is identical. The difference is in the final screen that these user segments see.  

1. iPhone users who are happy: asked to rate the app in the AppStore
2. Android users who are happy: sent to the Google Play Store

A B2B software company might direct enterprise customers to G2, while small business users are asked to leave a review on Trustpilot. 

Ask some customer segments to provide more feedback

Perhaps you would like to gather more information from a particular segment of users.  You could create a customer segment based on any number of parameters, for example: 

1. Feature use (event)
2. Persona or geography (property)

Then on the final screen of their NPS survey, you could provide an incentive and a link to fill out a longer survey or participate in user research.  

This Wootric NPS survey in Zoom does just that:

4. Support a phased rollout of an NPS program 

The power of an NPS program lies in taking action on the feedback you receive. Let’s say you want to ensure your close-the-loop processes work well before launching an NPS program across your entire customer base.  

You could start by launching your program to one segment of customers — based on role, country, language, or other segmentation criteria. For example:

1. Start by surveying platform administrators
2. Ask end-users for NPS feedback in a future phase of the program

In the case of a geographic rollout, you could start by surveying only users in Brazil. Since you have defined Brazilian users as a unique customer segment, you can also specify that they receive the NPS survey in Portuguese.  Once you are confident that NPS data is flowing into all your systems of record — and that any detractors in Brazil are receiving timely follow-up — you can confidently expand your program to additional countries without engaging development resources.

5. Restrict where customers see an NPS survey

This flexibility is particularly useful for UX teams. Perhaps you want to ask the NPS question about a particular feature. To accomplish this, you could:

1. Restrict NPS to the specific page in your application
2. Target by user role or pricing plan to further scope who will see a survey

On the other hand, there are times when you do not want to interfere with a user’s workflow in your product. In this case, you might add specific URLs to a block list to ensure they do not see a survey on these pages. This list of URLs could apply to a single customer segment or, for that matter, all customers. 

How to set up NPS surveys targeted by customer segment

An engineering team can implement a targeted NPS strategy for you. If you do not have development resources at your disposal, a customer experience management platform like Wootric can make implementation easy for business teams. For example, advanced targeting gives our customers the ability to deploy unique versions of an in-app NPS survey to customer segments that meet specific criteria, all within Wootric account settings.

This targeting is made possible by defining customer segments based on data you already have. 

• User properties such as user role, product plan, or language
• Events such as an action in your product, like feature use.
• Page/location information (URL, name, or path)

Sources of this data could include user properties and events you are tracking in your product or a data platform like Segment.  Once properties are defined and available, setting up a targeted survey strategy (and modifying over time) is easy and code-free in the Wootric platform. 

What if you don’t have access to customer data like properties or events?  This situation is where the creative use of page targeting can be handy.  For example, you may only want to survey users who are administrators. You also want to restrict the survey to pages that only admins have access to. Is there a confirmation page that a user lands on when they achieve a journey milestone? That URL can serve as a proxy for an event. 

Avoid survey fatigue 

It is important to remember that surveys are themselves part of your customer experience. You’ll come across as tone-deaf if you repeatedly ask a user for feedback, leading to lower response rates and well-justified irritation with your brand. It is natural to be leery of creating too much complexity when you set up a targeted NPS sampling program. 

The beauty of setting up a targeted survey strategy within a platform like Wootric is that we (Wootric) play traffic cop. We can ensure that no customer gets over-surveyed. This service applies within your NPS program and across the customer journey too.

Imagine a user is shown an NPS survey one day. The next day the user tries a new feature, and that event makes them eligible for a Customer Effort Score survey. Wootric can ensure a built-in buffer so that this user won’t see both surveys in a defined window of time.  The goal is to ensure that customer experience is paramount. 

As a result, teams can spin up new targeted survey scenarios at will. They can focus on getting the information they need without fear of creating a poor end-user experience. 

Go forth, segment, and target!