Your product is excellent, and the initial user base is promising. Yet, you know this does not guarantee the success of your SaaS. To make it, you need to cross the chasm.

You're walking a fine line - this is where most startups fail.

What makes it such dangerous territory? The new customer group you need to attract as a young SaaS is of a different kind. They differ very much from your current customer base.

Early adopters have been driven by novelty and could turn a blind eye to potential glitches. The early majority that is ahead of you is more demanding. This target group expects both great functionalities and a great customer experience.

To attract and maintain this group, your product and services need to be designed exceptionally well. So that the customer experience you offer meets or, better still, surpasses the new target's expectations. That's why collecting customer feedback is not just an option for SaaS. It's a must and a key growth driver.

This blog post explains why an NPS is an essential KPI for SaaS companies. We explain why generic form tools are not enough, and we help choose the right NPS software for SaaS.

Why Measure NPS If You Run a SaaS

Despite some skepticism the metric attracts, NPS is a popular KPI. As a software survey company, we can testify: NPS surveys are the surveys our clients frequently use. Continuously so.

NPS matters for all. But the metric is especially vital for SaaS startups. Why? There's a strong correlation between their pressure to grow and the need to ensure customer satisfaction is high.

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The growth factor

Growth is a priority for SaaS, and a Net Promoter Score helps predict growth generated through referrals. Skeptics criticize it for collecting only declarations of recommendations. They say cannot entirely rely on the scores. To a point, they are right. NPS is not an ultimate predictor of growth as there are a lot of factors contributing to business growth. Yet, measuring NPS helps you form hypotheses on growth and estimate your business strength.

NPS helps keep customer satisfaction high

The Net Promoter Score is a loyalty metric. It is based on the presumption that customers ready to recommend are happy with your services and likely to stay. NPS surveys are easy to run and can be triggered at any point in customer journeys. They help ensure customer satisfaction levels are high on all user touchpoints.

This is important as sustainable growth is tied to customer happiness. To increase the customer lifetime value of users, SaaS companies need to create a positive product experience. They need to keep customer satisfaction high along all user journeys - not an easy feat when your team is small, and you need to grow fast to last.

Optimal feedback collection

Luckily, NPS surveys are short. They're quick to send and to answer. Also, the customers - familiar with NPS - are willing to leave their scores. The surveys are not only easy to launch, but they also generate high response rates, giving you volumes of customer input to analyze.

They're also great conversation openers for businesses interested in learning more. When deepened with follow-up questions or paired with surveys like CSAT and CES,they give actionable insights for product design and customer experience teams to rely on.

Stop customer churn

Last but not least - there is a correlation between the NPS and customer churn. A low Net Promoter Score is a clear signal of dissatisfaction and a warning light the customer may drop out. Using dedicated NPS software lets you quickly engage with unhappy users, making amends and preventing churn. ‍

Retaining customers is even more important than acquiring new ones. So, being able to stop churn is invaluable for every SaaS startup.

But, if the survey is so simple, isn't a generic forms tool enough to measure an NPS?

Why Dedicated NPS Software Is a Must for SaaS

NPS surveys have such a simple structure that, in theory, you could do without a specialized tool. Almost any form builder is enough to create an NPS survey, generate a link, and send it out.

Yet, investing in proper Net Promoter Score software pays off, and it's the only logical option for a SaaS.

As said before, NPS - useful as it is to estimate the business strength - cannot be the only CX metric you rely on. To ensure the customer experience generates stable growth, you also need to keep track of customer experience metrics like CSAT or CES, LVT, CAC, and more.

You also need solid reporting and the ability to send NPS surveys through various channels. (More about that - later on in the text.)

Dedicated NPS software gives you the functionalities that no generic form creator will. It helps you commit to systematically collecting user feedback.

And it does so in a time-saving way: It cuts down on the working hours needed to create a survey and handle its results.

There is even more:

The Pros of NPS Survey Tools

The benefits of using a good net promoter platform are many, but let's narrow the list down:

1. Net promoter score software offers you more than NPS

As already mentioned, to track and improve the customer experience, you need to measure not only the Net Promoter Score. Good customer feedback platforms enable you to do just that. On top of NPS, they help track other customer success metrics, like CES and CSAT.

And here is where specialized software comes in handy, as good NPS tools offer a whole host of other survey templates to use.
Test Survicate's CSAT survey template:

CES survey template - free to use:

But there's more. Apart from enabling customer success teams, customer feedback solutions cater to other teams as well. They make it easy to research personas, product satisfaction, website experience, and they do much more. A single investment empowers customer success as well as product development and marketing teams.

2. NPS platforms integrate with 3rd party tools

Top NPS software will integrate with the tools you use.

In the case of Survicate, the current integration stack includes: industry-leading collaboration tools, CRMs, analytics, and data and enrichment tools.

We also integrate with most market-leading marketing automation tools and email software.

Because NPS solutions integrate with CRMs, they let you segment users and send surveys in a more strategic way:

The integrations allow you to capitalize on your current customer data, as they enable sending surveys based on custom attributes or historical survey responses. So, you glean actionable insights from the survey results.

NPS tools also help close the feedback loop. They come with automated responses features. You can set them to appease detractors, warm up the passives, or invite promoters to referral campaigns.

So, dedicated NPS tools help your business in a tangible way. They can help you strengthen or save customer relationships. And - if used properly - they can boost growth.

3. A specialized NPS solution helps collect and analyze feedback from multiple channels

Since customer feedback platforms integrate with such a versatile stack, they help improve NPS and the experience in all the customer channels SaaS companies use.

You can send the surveys via email, make them pop up in an app, text it, or send them through a customer success chat app.

If you align their style with your brand and send them in the right moment of the customer journey, they won't damage but enhance the brand experience.

Many channels mean more data to analyze. Bigger survey sample sizes mean more valid results.

More data is harder to analyze. Yet, features like Survicate's Feedback Hub and NPS calculator help analyze the feedback - speed up the process and save working time.

4. Keep track of all customer journeys

To deliver a great customer experience that will satisfy a larger group, overseeing a singular touchpoint is not enough.

You need to look at the customer experience along the entire journey and all the journeys customers take.

According to McKinsey, companies with coherent customer journeys have much better business results. They enjoy increased retention and sales.

With multi-channel, it's much harder to create high customer satisfaction than with single-channel. Because it's not only individual touchpoints that make customers' experience. CX is the sum of all the experiences customers have had with a brand.

As a SaaS, you reach customers through different channels. You know how challenging it is to maintain the same quality across them all.

Most likely, you are understaffed and you need to act fast. If that's the case, you're the one who badly needs NPS software. It would help your team measure customer satisfaction regularly and without slowing down.

5. NPS tools are cost-saving

Buying a Net Promoter Score software, you won't splurge. Depending on the service provider and the pricing tier, the cost of a professional package is 100 - 200 USD. It's spending that startups can afford.

And the investment definitely pays off:

1. Your team cuts down on working hours necessary to create surveys and analyze the results.
2. Real-time reports and notifications let you react quickly to negative feedback and prevent churn.
3. Integrations with collaboration tools like Slack make it easy for your team to handle feedback. They can do it without slowing down to change their workflows.
4. Regular feedback collection increases your understanding of your customer base. It lets you improve services and leads to higher price tags and better returns.
5. Feedback collection tools help you innovate your offer based on the deepened understanding of your user base.

Must-Have Features of NPS Software

Given everything that we've just said, you're looking for a solution equipped with:

1. Integrations

By connecting your survey NPS solution to 3rd party tools, you can start regular feedback collection. You also build on all the data and processes you already have in place.

Thanks to the integrations with Slack, Google Spreadsheets, Airtable, or Mixpanel the feedback collection becomes a natural part of your team's workflow. They can handle user feedback without extra adjustments to their processes.

The integrations with Intercom and Hubspot CRM or marketing automation tools like ActiveCampaign or GetResponse let you leverage existing customer communication channels. They enable you to choose the channel that is optimal for your customers and one that is bound to yield the best results.

2. Customization

We're placing customization high on the list, as this feature is more than a vanity one. Only by customizing your NPS surveys, you're able to provide a coherent customer experience across all customer channels.

Good NPS software offers white-labeling and personalization features. By using them, you to make the surveys feel on-brand and natural for your customers. You should eb able to customize your NPS survey to fit your exact needs. And you collect feedback without distorting the customer experience.

If you take into account how vital a coherent customer experience is, you'll realize customization is more than a whim.

Take a look at the data below, and you'll see our point:

A consistent multi-channel customer experience increases both customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend. As a result, high customer satisfaction, reflected in the CSAT and NPS metrics, translates into higher revenue growth.

Here is how customer satisfaction correlates with the bottom line:

Undoubtedly, keeping track of the customer experience and ensuring it's consistent all along the way pays off.

3. Advanced reporting features

Good NPS software allows you to break down the volumes of data you receive. This feature is handy if you haven't put an NPS strategy in place yet.

Maybe, you haven't broken down the user base yet. Or, you haven't prepared any processes related to feedback from given segments.

We recommend having such strategies thought through. But, we appreciate that you're only about to begin your adventure with NPS. Also, when running a startup, you like to act fast.

Survicate's advanced reporting features comes in handy here. With the tool, you can easily segment respondents based on the various criteria:

• NPS score
• Types of follow-up questions answered and the answer given
• User roles, department, and company types
• The date a survey was submitted.

Analyzing such segments lets you better understand your customer base. As a result, you're able to draw more actionable insights to improve your software. And you can perfect your feedback collection strategies to yield better results in the future.

4. Notifications and access to feedback in real-time

Customized notification and real-time access to customer feedback are helpful if you try to sort out high user churn.

NPS platforms that offer those features will ensure you're notified in time. You can decide to be notified when any feedback flows in, when the feedback from detractors appears, or when you've got responses containing high scores.

Depending on your situation, you can use the feature to either prevent NPS detractors from damaging your reputation and churning. Or, you can make the most of the positive sentiments and prompt NPS promoters to recommend your app.

5. Support of various channels

This ties to what we've said about a consistent customer experience.

Your customers expect their experience with you to be coherent regardless of how many channels they use to get in touch. To be sure you meet this expectation, you should be able to measure customer satisfaction with your tools in a discrete, on-brand way. And you need to do so across for your customer channels and journeys. You're looking for a tool that would make it possible.

6. In-app surveys

Good customer feedback solutions offer you the ability to send an NPS survey in your app. Being able to trigger an NPS survey in your app make is invaluable if your goal is to reduce churn. But, asking for feedback in the app has many other benefits.

It lets you:

• Understand better user adoption of certain app features
• Identify user pain points
• Boost retention
• Plan product road map
• Optimize your pricing strategy.

If you worry that in-app surveys will damage user experience, don't. If customized and on-brand, they may enhance it and increase user engagement.

They can also boost customer loyalty. By asking for their opinions, you invite your users to co-create the product and take part in building the brand. As a result, users who have a say on the shape of the brand feel more connected to it and are less likely to walk away.

7. Multi-language support

In this day and age it's safe to assume you have some international customers. Measuring customer satisfaction is more precise when you are confident respodents understand the intricacies in your surveys. Also, qualitative data is likely going to be more accurate and insightful when provided in one's mother tongue.

That's why you should make sure you NPS tool has the capabilities of offering several language versions to your respodents. A good piece of software will also be equipped with features that make analyzing data in different languages quick and effortless.

3 Best NPS Platforms Available for SaaS Companies [Comparison]

We've already covered the pros and cons of various survey tools on our blog.

Here, we’re comparing Survicate's offer with two other tools small and medium-sized SaaS companies tend to choose. We’re focusing on the most important criteria to consider when making a choice:

8 Questions to Ask When Selecting The NPS Software for a SaaS

The multitude of NPS tools available doesn't make things easy. Below, you'll find questions that should help ease the pain of choice.

1. How many surveys do the survey software allow you to send out at a time?
2. Can it help me sync the customer data from and to your CRM?
3. Does it integrate with the collaboration tools I use? Will it support my workflow?
4. Does it integrate with other 3rd party tools I use?
5. Does the software handle other types of customer satisfaction surveys, aside from NPS surveys?
6. Does it support sending surveys through the communication channels I want to use?
7. What kind of reporting is available? How does it help me analyze the feedback?
8. Do I have real-time access to survey responses?
9. Does the survey tool offer customization and/or white labeling?
10. Do I pay for individual users or for single access?

All in All

Collecting Net Promoter Scores enables you to make sure you grow fast enough and in a sustainable way. It is a must for SaaS.

As a survey tool provider, we know for a fact how important it is for NPS software to fit users’ workflows. That is why we make a point of designing Survicate to be easy to set up and handle.

The tool lets you gain powerful customer insights at all stages of the funnel. It helps with customer acquisition, boosts engagement, and increases retention.

Give Survicate survey software a spin. Start slow - try the tool for free. Or go full speed and commit to improving the bottom line.

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