What is the Cost of Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

An effective customer experience management (CXM) program doesn’t come for free. In fact, it shouldn’t.

Delivering an impeccable experience to your customers—and ensuring they are satisfied—takes time, effort, and commitment. While Net Promoter Score, the most widely recognized system to measure CX, makes that easier, there’s still work to do.

So, what is the cost of NPS?

While it’s a natural question for any organization launching its CX journey, it’s not easy to give a simple dollar-and-cents answer.

Depending on your needs—your client numbers or the number of customer touchpoints, for example—the cost of your NPS program will change.

But there’s another, more important, question here: what’s the cost of not investing in an NPS system? By neglecting your CX, you’ll lose customers to churn and fail to take advantage of opportunities for referrals and upsells. And what’s worse, you’ll never understand why.

At CustomerGauge, our Account Experience software makes it easy for B2B businesses to leverage NPS to optimize their CX and take advantage of growth opportunities.

What’s the Cost of Setting Up Net Promoter Score at Your Company?

The costs of NPS can be broken down into software costs, implementation costs, and operational costs. Depending on the support you require, there may be some additional costs to consider too.

Let’s break it down:

How Much Does Net Promoter Software Cost?

The cost of your NPS software will depend on what you want to get out of it, the size of your business, and what additional functions you require.

Here are some questions you’ll need to ask yourself before committing to any particular NPS software:

• How many people will use the software? Typically, NPS software charges are based on the number of people who will use the platform in your company.

• How many clients do you need to survey? If you have a reasonably limited customer base, you may not need the capacity to survey thousands of people. However, the bigger your brand, the more important this need becomes. Of course, these differences will have an impact on price, so it’s worth knowing in advance.

• How many touchpoints do you want to monitor? Your customers’ experience is best understood across different touchpoints—from purchase to support. And the number of these you want to monitor will affect the software’s price.

However, different NPS software will have payment plans that work slightly differently. At CustomerGauge, for example, our basic plan allows you to monitor six customer touchpoints. Our extended package can add a further three touchpoints.

• What features and integrations do you require? Often, you’ll want to integrate your NPS capabilities with customer satisfaction metrics, CRM software, or features that enable you to close the loop more easily. There is no set price for these added features and integrations.

You can integrate your CustomerGauge platform with all of the different business tools you need—from Salesforce and HubSpot Marketing to Zendesk, Pendo, and Microsoft Teams.

These are some of the initial questions you will want to consider before you make your purchase. But there will be other elements to consider, such as implementation costs.

How Much Does Implementation Cost?

NPS software implementation is probably the part of the package whose price varies most considerably. That’s because it depends on what you’ll need—and how much work is required of the software vendor.

This can mean:

• Training. Assistance with getting started with software is usually necessary. This usually comes in the form of a one-off launch and ongoing support. Certification is typically an added extra, but we’ll come to that below.

• Customer data uploads. As part of your software launch, you’ll need to input customer data into the platform. This can incur additional costs.

• Integrations. If you need a custom integration to be built, this is likely to come at an additional cost. The same applies for other customizations too.

Typically, you’ll pay a one-off fee that will cover everything you need from your implementation.

What are the Operational Costs of NPS?

After initial purchase and setup, the good news is that NPS software doesn’t cost much to run at all. The main cost that you’ll incur will be the cost of sending surveys to your customers. And how much that costs will depend on the channel you use. For example:

• Email is typically the most affordable. but it may not have the best response rates. Our research found that phone interviews have a 42% response rate, compared to 30% over email.

• Mobile surveys do provide better NPS response rates. If you’re sending SMS surveys globally, however, you should expect to pay international rates.

Any Other Costs?

Finally, there are two other costs of NPS that you’ll need to consider. That’s the cost of NPS certification and the demand for flexibility.

• NPS certification costs. Usually, training in NPS software will be built into implementation costs. But you may want to commit your whole team to customer experience excellence with NPS certification. This could make a huge difference to the way that you understand your customers and close the loop—and it boosts the changes of revenue growth.

At CustomerGauge, for example, an NPS certification costs $999 a year for full access to our training and education portal.

• Flexibility. Comparing the cost of NPS software is a lot easier for you if you know exactly what you want. But brands who are starting off with CX often don’t have that knowledge. That means that you may want flexibility built into your contracts and payment plans.

What is the Cost of Not Investing in NPS?

NPS programs come with a price tag. That’s inevitable. But the cost of NPS implementation is dwarfed in comparison to the costs of not doing anything at all.

You can see for yourself what doing nothing is costing you with our ROI calculator. But here’s a little of what you can expect if you don’t invest in NPS software:

• Your customer churn will stay high. A 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 25% increase in profit, according to studies. But without the right NPS software, these are profits that will go untapped.

NPS can help you to understand exactly how you can improve retention. Often, it can be as simple as reaching out to ask customers how they feel. We can help. By working with CustomerGauge, INAP cut their churn rate in half.

• You’ll waste cash on customer acquisition. It’s said that it costs between 5 and 25 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. Meanwhile, satisfied customers tend to spend 140% more. An effective NPS strategy enables you to identify your most valuable clients, turn them into promoters, and reap the benefits of better retention.

• You’ll miss referral opportunities. Your most loyal customers are incredibly powerful sources of further revenue. Of course, they are themselves opportunities for upselling and reselling. But just as importantly, they are channels through which you can find new customers too.

Again, though, without an effective CXM program, it’s difficult to understand who your most loyal customers are. And that matters. Take SmartBear as an example. With Account Experience, they secured $6 million of referrals in only 18 months.

• You’ll fail to understand what your customers say about you. 82% of customers do business with a company based on past experience or word of mouth. But studies show they’re much more likely to share negative feedback over positive.

With NPS, you can understand who is saying what about you. And at CustomerGauge, you can do even better. By getting clarity on your coverage, you can identify those customers with whom you’re experiencing an absence of signal—one of the biggest predictors of churn.

💡Hear from an expert:

Natasa Prodanovic, Head of Lean and Agile Center of Excellence at Coca-Cola HBC, wasn't sure of the results they'd receive launching the CustomerGauge pilot.

However, she knew CX had to improve to achieve their goal of becoming the leading 24/7 beverage partner.

She shared with us at Monetize! her biggest piece of advice for companies that may be hesitant to implement NPS:

Discover: 4 Ways to Answer 'What is a good NPS score?'

Knowing the Return on Your Investment in NPS

Ultimately, customer experience has a massive impact on your business success. But it’s a blunt tool if you’re not assessing the way your NPS and CX affect your revenue and costs.

In our report The State of Account Experience, we found that 62% of businesses can’t calculate the return on their CX investment. That’s seriously limiting their capabilities.

With an effective NPS software, you can expect clear, concrete data on your CX’s financial impact:

• You’ll identify which touchpoints are most directly contributing to revenue churn. With this knowledge, you can put targeted steps in place to improve CX in that specific touchpoint.

• Increase referral sales volume through account management tools. NPS software can tell you which customers are the best targets for referral campaigns—and help you secure results.

• Eliminate potential losses from detractors. Detractors aren’t just churn risks. They can affect the way other accounts feel about your offering too. Turning detractors into promoters will have a big impact on your bottom line now and in the future.

While NPS programs don’t come for free, the costs of doing nothing make your CX program a matter of urgency. And the benefits they promise far outweigh the costs.

Choose CustomerGauge

CustomerGauge can help you reap the financial rewards of NPS. Book a demo to see how it works.