The background:

Here at Appcues, we use surveys throughout the customer journey. Here’s a few examples:

• Customer effort score right after onboarding
• Trial feedback
• Integration requests/feedback
• Content requests
• Cancellation
  

All that said, NPS is our primary way of surveying customers and a handy feature we have baked into the product. We love NPS data, it tells us so much about our customers. It doesn’t just live in Appcues though, we share it company-wide so everyone can jump in and help someone, process feedback, or celebrate a happy customer. 

We also use that moment of interaction with someone to potentially learn more about their situation. If we get negative feedback, we discuss it in Slack and reach out to the customer both automatically and on an individual basis if the situation calls for it. The same basic process happens when we get great feedback. We have automated communications and also will reach out if it looks like there’s an opportunity for someone to share their success. 

I’ll walk you through a couple ways we talk to people who leave us feedback and I’ll also briefly discuss how to segment NPS respondents. 

Plan of action:

Finding the right time to ask a user how they feel about your product is tough. We’re still learning ourselves, but flow frequency limits and smart segmentation provide the right levers of control to maximize responses while decreasing interruptions and asks.

This matters because people often have their survey segmentation too wide (not enough rules and restrictions) which gives you less of a pool of respondents to work with and learn from. If you’re experiencing lower conversion rates with your flows overall, turn on flow frequency limits. Adding limits increases people’s tolerance for messages and likelihood to interact with them. The more you respect people’s space, the more they will respect your message. 

I’ve been adjusting and tweaking things for weeks, but I’ve found a good balance at a flow limit of 1 per day and sampling the vast majority of people (80%) who visit Appcues in a day. This gives us a steady stream of responses with qualitative feedback. When someone responds to an NPS survey, their responses are routed to different places and sent different communications based on their score. Our customer experience team leaders follow up directly with detractors to hear how we can improve and what went wrong. 

For promoters, we use a simple slideout and our Hubspot integration to ask for G2 reviews. (By the way, have you reviewed us on G2? 😁)

We are still experimenting with this approach. I’m personally trying to learn what combination of email and in-app asks, at which moments, will yield the most reviews without interrupting people’s daily work. After all, these are folks who just went out of their way to say they are a fan of Appcues. I really don’t want to erode any goodwill with constant asks and interruptions.

How we built it:

Because we’re using the Appcues NPS feature out of the box, we have an auto-property baked into Appcues for NPS scores. This basically means we don’t have to hook into any other systems like Delighted, Wootric, or other NPS providers and pass another field as a property. 

Anyone using NPS in Appcues can create a segment that looks at scores and group people by promoters, detractors, and passives to target flows or other communications, as I mentioned we do earlier. I made sure to add some date guardrails around my segment so I’m not asking people who left a survey ages ago.

We also take advantage of our Hubspot integration to trigger that reminder email you see in the flow screenshot shown in the previous section.  

The flow itself is connected to a workflow in Hubspot that sends an email once someone completes the flow. I set this up by adding that “Email a reminder” button, setting that to advance the flow to the next step, marking it complete, and showing a confirmation to the user so they feel confident we’re sending that email. To break it out into steps:

1. Add a secondary button to your flow that has a “Next step” action
2. Clone your first step and add some confirmation language, like “Nice, we are working on it!”
3. Remove skip ability and add a button to the confirmation step that dismisses the flow and marks it complete
   

‍

Now, we have the flow marked as completed for anyone who goes through these 2 steps. I walk through an example of how you might set up this flow in this quick video. I move quickly, so definitely pause or drag the progress bar slowly to catch each step.

‍

‍

This flow kicks off the Hubspot workflow shown below.

‍

This sends a nice little email from Eric, marketing leader, and responses go right to his inbox as well. 

‍

We use this for a pretty simple use case–collecting reviews. But this basic format can do so much more. It connects buttons in your app to instant marketing automation, with no code required. How cool is that?

Did I overcomplicate this? How do you set up follow up with your promoters and detractors? Reach out to me at lyla@appcues.com or send me a note on LinkedIn and tell me what you’re up to.