NPS question bank · by survey type
Relationship NPS questions
A relationship survey asks how people feel about your company or product overall, independent of anything that happened this week. You send it on a schedule, to a sample of active customers, and you watch how the score and its reasons move between rounds.
Because it is about the whole relationship, the wording should name the company or the product as a whole, and the follow-ups should invite people to look back over their time with you rather than at their last click.
Try the question
Pick a score to see which follow-up this page suggests for it. Nothing is sent.
The follow-up for each answer
- Scores 0 to 6 (detractors)
- Looking back over your time with us, what has let you down the most?
- Scores 7 or 8 (passives)
- Over the last few months, what has kept [Company] from being a clear favourite for you?
- Scores 9 or 10 (promoters)
- What has [Company] done well for you over the time you have been a customer?
Questions to ask
How likely is it that you would recommend [Company] to a friend or colleague?
Name the company rather than one feature or team. The point of a relationship survey is the overall verdict, including billing, support and how you communicate.
Looking back over your time with us, what has let you down the most?
Invites a long view. Expect answers about reliability, pricing changes or slow fixes: the slow-moving problems a transactional survey never sees.
How has your opinion of [Company] changed since you started?
Useful from the second round on. The direction of change often matters more than the absolute rating, and people can tell you what moved it.
Which part of [Company] would you miss most if you stopped using it?
A softer way to find your core value. The answers tell you what to keep stable while you change everything else.
Is there anything we have promised and not delivered?
Blunt, but relationships break on broken promises. Use it once a year, not every round, and act on what comes back.
How often to ask
Ask each person at most a few times a year, and spread the sends across the period instead of emailing everyone on the same day. A rolling sample gives you a steady stream of answers, smooths out the week a big incident happened, and keeps people from getting the survey so often that they stop opening it.
Leave out people who joined very recently. They have not formed an opinion of the relationship yet; a survey at the end of onboarding serves them better.
Reading the result
Compare each round with your own previous rounds first. A relationship score moves slowly, so look at the trend over several rounds and at the reasons people give, rather than reacting to a small change between two sends.
How the answers are scored
Answers of 9 or 10 count as promoters and answers from 0 to 6 as detractors; the Net Promoter Score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.Source [1] What counts as a good score depends on the industry and the survey method: see thecited NPS benchmarks.
Keep going
- An NPS survey template you can schedule as a relationship survey
- Transactional NPS questions
- B2B NPS questions
- NPS follow-up questions for every answer group
- The whole NPS question bank
Answers to the follow-up question are often feature requests. On afeedback board they are counted with everyone else’s requests, and the people who asked hear when they ship.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between relationship and transactional NPS?
A relationship survey asks about the company as a whole on a schedule. A transactional survey asks right after one interaction, such as a purchase or a support conversation, and measures that moment.
Who should receive a relationship NPS survey?
Active customers who have used the product long enough to judge it. Leave out people in their first weeks and people you surveyed recently for another reason.
Should the relationship survey be anonymous?
It can be, but then you cannot follow up with detractors. A middle ground is to ask at the end whether the person agrees to be contacted about their answer.
Sources
- Bain & Company, “Measuring Your Net Promoter Score”: www.netpromotersystem.com/about/measuring-your-net-promoter-score/, retrieved .
Net Promoter, NPS and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.
Ask these questions with UpVoiced
UpVoiced is adding NPS and CSAT microsurveys to its widget; they are coming soon and not available yet. Its feedback board, roadmap and changelog are in development, and you can try them on a fictional demo.