Ever wondered what is a good NPS for your SaaS business?
It’s a question that usually comes up from investors during funding rounds and many investors wouldn’t try their luck unless the evaluation is backed by an above-average SaaS NPS score.
But if you’re yet to encounter the question, it’s important to have a clear idea about what does NPS mean in SaaS and why it’s important. Let’s have a brief overview of what is a good NPS rating for SaaS and its significance.
What is NPS?
NPS or net promoter score is an internationally recognized metric to evaluate customer loyalty and is based on a model that works by asking how likely an existing customer will recommend a business’s product or service to another person.
It’s defined on a scale of 0 to 10 with a higher NPS rating of 9 to 10 implying that a customer would be a promoter of the brand or its offerings.
Lower ratings indicate a risky market proposition with a score of 0 to 6 considered as a detractor rating which implies a customer won’t recommend an offering from the business. A score of 7 to 8 indicates a customer would simply use the product again but isn’t likely to promote it amongst their social and family circles.
The NPS score for a business is obtained by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
Ever since its inception, NPS scores have become a key priority and strategic target for leadership as it’s perceived as a direct indicator of their business’s relationship with customers.
It may vary in score magnitude from industry to industry, but there will be recognized standards within each industry to serve as a benchmark for customer loyalty and satisfaction. For SaaS businesses, there is no exception in this regard.
What is a good NPS score for B2B SaaS businesses?
Finalizing an exact number to set as a NPS benchmark for SaaS is a difficult proposition.
The reason is the wide gamut of domains that today’s SaaS businesses cater to. From retail to education, entertainment, life sciences, finance, healthcare, and even government bodies leverage SaaS solutions from different vendors.
The diversity in application makes it difficult to arrive at a precise ballpark figure for the general SaaS NPS score. However, based on different estimates, an average NPS for SaaS around 50 will be considered good even though there are respectable SaaS brands with NPS scores starting at 28.
Why is it important to obtain a good NPS score?
It’s true that several SaaS founders may not think about an NPS rating early on as they would be engaged in multiple other activities for promoting their business.
But we have already seen the major differences between SaaS marketing and traditional marketing strategies in a previous post. SaaS marketing requires unique approaches and storylines supported by solid calculations about the potential of the business to create ROI for investors in the future.
NPS scores play a crucial role in creating a foundation over which marketers can build convincing narratives to create more credibility as a startup. Failure to obtain a good NPS score can create severe problems when SaaS companies scout for support from investors or when they are getting ready to go public with shares.
Lower NPS scores are known to drive away investor sentiments which if lost once will be hard to recover.
How to obtain a good NPS score for SaaS companies?
NPS is not a metric that can be bolstered via a plug-in feature introduced into a poorly architected SaaS solution. The journey to achieving a good NPS score starts from the first stage of building the business’s core SaaS platform.
For any SaaS business, it’s important to have customer centricity at the core of every design and development initiative they engage in for the main product.
From selecting a technology architecture to defining a roadmap for deployment and maintenance, every stage must incorporate strategies that add up valuable elements to the business’s overall customer appeal. This will directly influence positive NPS growth.
Building for customer centricity
SaaS companies need to leverage design philosophies, development approaches, technical architecture, software tools, and other resources that are aligned to their key objective of solving a particular pain point.
For this, it’s important to partner with an experienced Digital Product Agency that can offer strategic advice on building a customer-centric SaaS ecosystem for your business. Book a call with VeryCreatives and take your SaaS business to the next level.
