Episode 49 - How to Use NPS Surveys for Your Bank & Credit Union

Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and Founder of FI GROW Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales agency and we work exclusively with banks and credit unions. And I am here with one of our inbound marketing managers, Kristin Mock, and she and I were just having this really great conversation about surveys. So say hi, Kristin.

Hi.

So Kristin was talking to me, we were talking a bit specifically about NPS surveys, and I think almost everyone knows what those are, but Kristin's been doing some work with a number of our clients really digging in to the purpose of NPS surveys and surveys in general, and then how to really leverage those survey results to help improve products and services for banks and credit unions. So I was like, okay, let's stop for a second, let's hit record. I want to make sure we share this with our entire audience. So Kristin, first of all, what is an NPS survey?

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, and you're surveying your customers with this metric that's used to measure the likelihood of retaining those customers.

So it's a little bit more narrow than people might think. A lot of people, so it's like this generic survey, it's not really generic, but it's like this survey where it's 0 to 10 is usually how you see it. And it's basically it asks, it's one question, often you see it, and it says, how likely are you to recommend X, Y, Z, your institution, whatever, to a friend or family member? That's kind of like the basic wording. And then you, it's a sliding scale and you pick 1 to 10 and that's it. So that's the survey type that we're talking about. It's built into HubSpot, which is a tool that we use for most of our clients. So you use it to understand if people generally who've been working with you for a while are feeling good about your institution and would recommend you to a friend or a family member. Okay. But when would you not use an NPS survey, if in a circumstance where you're trying to learn more about how you're doing as an institution?

So the NPS surveys are really best if you have a customer base that you're maintaining if you're offering them a service. So for banks and credit unions, you are going to want to survey your people who have had accounts with you and who have held alone with you and not a new customer. If you're surveying your new customers, you would use a different type of survey specific to the process that they just went through.

Okay. So if somebody comes in and they are, say they're an indirect customer or an indirect member, they come in because they applied through an auto loan from a dealership, for example, for car dealership, you might want to specifically survey indirect members or customers to make sure that their experience of getting your loan through the dealership went well, but the NPS type of survey isn't good for that scenario.

Correct. Those people are not going to have as much of a relationship with your brand to be out there either promoting your brand or not promoting your brand.

Okay. All right. So setting that aside, so if we're not really trying to dig into the specifics of a specific loan process or how somebody went through that, but you are really wanting to understand from existing customers who've been with you, I don't know, a few months or six months or whatever, how would you carry that out? When you implement that for a client, what does that look like?

Sure. So like you said earlier with the survey, you want it to really be focused on that one question on whether you would recommend the brand or not, the company. And you're going to also want to add a section in for comments. So you can ask why would you give us score? And so in the HubSpot tool, you're going to have a few options to say, based on what score they give me, 0 to 10, this is the question that I want it to say next. So it might say, if you rank a 0, the question might be something like, how could we improve your experience? Versus if they ranked you a 9 or a 10, you might say, what was so great about your experience? So really making it not just say, give me a comment, but actually asking something specific to why it was so great or what you could do to improve.

Okay. And so how do you know, from the 0 to 10, how do you know which people, tell me what those different scores mean?

Sure. So someone who gives you a zero to a six is a detractor, and so that's someone who's actually going to be actively saying negative things about your brand. They might go to their friend or their family member and be like, do not do business with this place. Someone who ranks a seven or an eight is going to be passive, where they might say, hey, this was good, this wasn't good. But really only if they're asked, so they're not really out there promoting or detracting from your brand. And you'll find that through most of this NPS process, we kind of ignore those passive people because they're not out there really talking about you. And then those nines and tens are your promoters and those people are out there actively leaving comments on your Facebook page, following you and telling their friends and family that you're a great bank, or credit union, or brand.

Gotcha. All right. Now you guys calculate an actual score, like with all of these votes or whatever survey results, they come in, you calculate an NPS score. How do you do that and what's a good score from that?

Yeah, so your NPS score can be anything from -100 to 100. And this is all based on percentages. So the way you calculate your NPS score is you take all of those results from what people are ranking you and you say you ignore the passives and you take your percentage of people ranking you zero to six, your percentage of detractors, and you subtract that from the percentage of promoters, those nines and tens. So if you had 60% of your customers said 9 or 10, great job, definitely recommend you. And then 10% are zero through six, no. You would take 60% minus 10% giving you an NPS score of 50, which is actually a really good score.

As I thought. Okay.

Depending on the industry, the scores can really vary. Some industries, anything over zero means you have more promoters than detractors, so you're doing great. In the financial industry specifically, a good score sits around 53 or higher, so you're really looking to get more than just one or two, whereas some industries not so.

Okay. Gotcha. All right. So we're going to talk about the biggest takeaways, but I guess the real question is what do you do with this information? So that's kind of some of the big takeaways from surveys. I mean, you can build a great survey, use it for the right thing, but then what are you going to do with that, the results?

Yeah. So that question about what could we do better or what was so great about your experience, that's where this really comes in. So a lot of people will just give you a score and if you don't make the second comment mandatory, then you might not get comments from everyone. Those comments are really the actionable results. That's what you can actually do something with, and you should. You shouldn't just let somebody rank you a 0, say I had a terrible experience with your brand, and then you just do nothing with that. You've asked them and then they're like, it was terrible, thanks for asking. You have to address that. You should reach out to them and address the issue, or you should look at those comments and see if there's a trend.

If there's a trend of people saying something about a particular branch or people saying something about a particular product, then you can start to dig down and address those issues and fix them. The great thing that you can do with this is when you get your promoters to comment and they tell you what's happening so well, and then you can ask those promoters, leave us a Google review, and you can send them a link to a Google review, or you can go to your associate, maybe they called somebody out and you can say, hey, you're doing a really great job, here's a comment we got recently. And that does a lot for your associates.

Gotcha.

You can use it in your marketing, use testimonials. There's just a lot that you can do with those positive comments.

So some big takeaways are definitely make sure that not only are you calculating your score and wanting to make sure that score is staying high or even moving up, but that you want to have a plan in place for both, for putting some action around negative comments and positive comments. So have some plan in place. You want to make sure you're using NPS survey efforts for really focused on existing members that have kind of bid with you probably 6 or 12 months, and that any other customers that are new, if you may want to evaluate their process for becoming a customer, closing their first loan, opening their first account, whatever that is, but it probably should be some kind of more detailed survey than an NPS survey. And then the last thing I wanted to ask you is how often should they, should a bank or credit union use NPS surveys? How often should they be surveying their customers?

So kind of a general rule of thumb is to survey a quarter of your customers every quarter. And so that gives you a really good baseline of what your NPS score is, and then making sure that it stays relatively the same or goes up. So you don't want to send somebody the same survey four times a year, but you also don't want to wait a full year to see if your score went up or down. So that's kind of why you would do it that way.

Oh, cool. Okay. So basically you would take like 25% and you make sure you kind of break it up the same way every year. So every year, the first quarter of the alphabet gets their survey in Q1. Then the next year they'll get it again in Q1 and so on. It's the same group, but they only get surveyed once a year versus the everybody else is kind of spread out throughout the year. That makes sense. And then you're getting constant feedback rather than only getting NPS results in March of every year. Gotcha.

Yeah, that would be a lot of comments to deal with all at once.

It would be. Awesome. All right. Well, these are great tips. Thank you so much for the insight. I hadn't really thought through NPS surveys in this much detail or surveys in general, so it's super useful. So if you all have any more, if you want to learn any more information about working with marketing and digital marketing for financial institutions, please visit us at figrow.com. We have lots more information, other episodes on with great tips like these, and otherwise let's just all get out there and make it happen.