What is the Net Promoter Score (NPS)? The Net Promoter Score is an index that is a direct indication of the likelihood that a customer will recommend an organization, product, or service, and an indirect indication of customer satisfaction with an organization, a product, or a service. It provides alternative insights to traditional means for determining customer relationships, as special emphasis is placed on the aspect of word-of-mouth marketing.   It is said that the NPS value is heavily linked with revenue growth and, therefore, a key metric to establish customer loyalty by a provider of a product or service. The Net Promoter Score consists of a single powerful question that simply asks “How likely is it that you would recommend company/product/service XYZ to a friend or a colleague?”. It offers an array of answer options ranging from values 0 (“Not at all likely”) to 10 (“Extremely likely”).It was developed by Fred Reichheld and introduced in 2003.* How to calculate the Net Promoter Score First, your survey respondents are divided into three groups: Those that chose answer options 0 to 6 are categorized as detractors, i.e., people who are not particularly satisfied with your products or services. Respondents who chose 7 or 8 are labeled passives who are neutrally motivated users and later ignored when calculating the Net Promoter Score. Lastly, those who chose 9 or 10 are your promoters, i.e., your loyal and satisfied customers who would gladly recommend your company and its products and services to other people. The actual NPS calculation is done in two steps. First, you need to determine the percentage of promoters and detractors: Number of promoters / Number of total respondents * 100 Number of detractors / Number of total respondents * 100 Example: You have received a total of 100 responses on your survey. 30 respondents (detractors) chose 0 to 6, 30 respondents (passives) chose 7 and 8 and 40 respondents (promoters) chose 9 and 10. 40 promoters / 100 total respondents * 100 = 40% promoters 30 detractors / 100 total respondents * 100 = 30% detractors The second calculation step is the respective NPS equation: % promoters - % detractors = Net Promoter Score The Net Promoter Score can reach a maximum value of +100(%) if you receive 100% promoters and 0% detractors and passives or a minimum value of -100(%) if you receive 100% detractors and 0% promoters and passives.Let’s take a look at our previous example and calculate the Net Promoter Score.Example: We had 40% promoters and 30% detractors.   40% promoters – 30% detractors = 10(%) Net Promoter Score Note: There is broad uncertainty about whether the Net Promoter Score is displayed as a percentage or not. The fact is, there is no specific evidence so far to determine which is better. However, there are publications by the inventor of the NPS himself, Fred Reichheld, who specifies the NPS in percent, for example, see here which is why I decided to stick to percent. What is Considered a Good Net Promoter Score? This question is not easily answered or assessed in a standardized way despite being purely numeric in determination.As mentioned before, the NPS can range from -100 to +100. If you have an equal number of promoters and detractors, you will always end up with an NPS of exactly 0. Therefore, it makes sense to treat 0 as the mean NPS, making it an average score, neither very good nor bad. Anything below 0 should sound an alarm since it indicates customer satisfaction levels are tending towards negative values, and an organization’s products, services, or processes require considerable improvement to avoid substantial customer churn.Obviously, strategy and efforts should be aimed at achieving the highest possible positive NPS score. According to global NPS standards, a score from 0 to 49 is considered “good”, a score from 50 to 69 is considered “excellent”, while a score of 70 and higher is considered “world-class”.For benchmarking reasons, pages such as Customergauge.com offer great insights into well-known brands’ NPS results. For example, Tesla Motors currently has an NPS of 97, while Apple has an NPS of 89, and Samsung, however, only manages an NPS of 70. Interestingly, the Apple iPhone has an NPS of only 55 and the Samsung Galaxy only 45, hence, making the overall brands more satisfactory from a consumer perspective than the companies' products. Tip: If you are able to retrieve information on competitors’ or industries’ Net Promoter Scores, this may give you a good starting point to work towards gaining a competitive edge. Advantages and Disadvantages of the Net Promoter Score There are plenty of advantages of conducting a Net Promoter Score survey to gain knowledge on how satisfied your customers are: Setup and processing are easy and fast due to user-friendliness. NPS question is intuitive for most respondents. The shortness of the survey reduces survey fatigue and results in a better response rate. Studies by Satmetrix and Bain & Company have shown that NPS and revenue growth are correlated. There can be good benchmarking possibilities. Customer classification can be undertaken easily.   There are also disadvantages to the Net Promoter Score: It is criticized as being too general and unspecific, as it doesn’t reflect the reasons for the low satisfaction of the detractors. It’s a snapshot of the general satisfaction level but lacks natural motivation and a plan for what to do with the attained data. It fails to predict future loyalty trends. Tip: if you feel you are not getting enough information out of your NPS question data, simply extend your survey by questions such as ”Would you elaborate on why you chose {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}” and ”Which changes would have to be implemented regarding company/product/service XYZ in order for your recommendation to increase by just one point?”, each with an open text box. These additional questions extend your NPS status quo by asking customers specifically for improvement areas and enabling concrete action to spur growth.  *Net Promoter Score is a trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld  

Online versus offline surveys When using surveys for data collection, you are facing multiple decisions. One of them is to choose a delivery medium.   The evolution of surveys has kept up with the development of technology: going from door to door, mailing questionnaires out, calling people to complete phone interviews, using portable computers – and finally online surveys.Online surveys provide some obvious advantages such as reduced paper and administration costs. However, it makes sense to look a bit deeper into the differences between the two general options, online and offline surveys, especially with respect to the quality of the collected data. Quality of data The quality of survey results is made up of the right questions, the representativeness of the examined group of interest, and the validity and depth of the answers. Error in your data can occur systematically due to biases, like researcher bias, survey bias, respondent bias, and non-response bias, or randomly by misrepresentation.But it’s not just the accuracy of the data: Especially when surveying feedback on customers or an event experience or gathering new ideas and suggestions for improvement, the quality of free text fields is crucial for usable data. All those aspects are notably influenced by your choice of survey format. Response time and rates Online surveys most certainly produce quicker responses, since you can share the link to your survey immediately after creating it without having to call people, mail it to them or meet them in person. Offline surveys, on the other hand, usually produce higher response rates with in-person surveys being the most effective, followed by mail surveys. Online and email surveys still have a better response rate than telephone surveys.The height of response rates doesn’t necessarily translate to representation: If you want to represent the whole population of one country, you’ll need a much lower response rate than when you wish for feedback from a defined group. In a smaller group, you’ll get much smaller sample sizes and it’s much more likely to miss neutral responses and get more positive and negative results. Target group selection Most of the time, the lower response rates of online surveys can be compensated by being able to reach more people – even worldwide if you wish. With the right software, you can run a survey in multiple languages which the participants can select.If the survey has a specific target group or needs a certain frequency distribution in order to be representative, quota setting is a solution that can be used in survey software.A downside to online surveys is that random sampling is more difficult since generating random email addresses like phone numbers is not possible. That is not a problem if the group of interest consists of the members of a club, the students of a certain university, or registered customers of a shop. Otherwise, panel companies can offer a solution to getting the wished sample size.The benefits of offline interviews include going to specific places after an event to reach specific people and also reaching the computer-illiterate population. Though the “online population” used to have special characteristics like being younger, better educated, and more tech-savvy, the computer literacy has drastically increased in the last 15 years. Online surveys are thus reaching more and more people, whereas phone surveys, being still a popular medium of choice, are reaching fewer and fewer people, since households that have no landline are increasing, in particular with younger people. (Perceived) anonymity Especially upon addressing sensitive topics like smoking, drinking, sexual behavior, cheating on taxes, or gambling, self-protective answering can be observed. This means the participant is not answering honestly, downplaying, or exaggerating his or her answer. It occurs especially with an interviewer present and even depends on factors like age, gender, and ethnicity. But also when asking less sensitive questions, and instead about the experience with a product or event, the results might be biased by the presence of the interviewer in in-person interviews, since people may be more polite and less honest. This also applies to situations with an existing relationship of dependence, as often observed at universities, where the professor to be rated is present at the evaluation. Oftentimes people mistrust online surveys, when they are unsure of their data safety. Particularly if you want to prevent multiple participation, you either have to select setting cookies, saving the IP address, or only allow access with a personalized token. All those options might prevent the participants from answering upfront or from answering at all if you neglect to assure the participants of their anonymity and also choose a software tool that allows anonymization as needed.This not only concerns the data accessible to the survey creators but also to the software provider. This is why the hosting and data storage should be at best on servers within countries with high data protection legislation like Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands, or Spain.       Other technical advantages Although the readability of black ink on white paper goes unchallenged, online surveys still win the victory in the design category. By not being restricted in space, it is not only possible to create a more appealing appearance with more coloring and implementation of pictures and videos but also to provide unlimited space for free text entries.To keep participants interested, online surveys allow many options for personalization, including branching to only show relevant questions, piping to reuse answers, or defining different end URLs. Though readability might be better in paper surveys, online surveys grant access to people with disabilities such as poor eyesight by being compatible with screen readers. On the researcher’s side deciphering handwriting is being skipped and fewer errors in data entry occur with online surveys. Interaction A special benefit of personal interviews arises when you want feedback on an event taking place or to ask for customer feedback immediately after the experience: Since the experience (and the excitement at best) is still fresh in their mind, the motivation to fill in a questionnaire might be higher, particularly in regards to open text fields.The interviewer bias, which has already been mentioned, can be utilized in a good way: From my own experience, face-to-face interaction can be beneficial when you are looking for answers in the form of free text fields. I learned that people often do not think of their opinion or thoughts as relevant, and so they’d rather skip a question than enter something they deem wrong. In personal interviews, you can encourage those to share their experiences. If required, you can give further explanations or ask further questions when fitting. Although offline surveys immediately after the examined experience make a lot of sense, online surveys are still superior when it comes to time management. People are often reluctant to answer at all or fill out their questionnaires as quickly as possible if they feel pressured.Did you know? When creating questionnaires with LimeSurvey, you can have respondents take your questionnaire offline with no need for internet availability. The free Android app OfflineSurveys enables caching any LimeSurvey survey and collecting your data offline. Once the Internet is available again, the app can automatically synchronize the collected responses with your LimeSurvey system. Feel free to check it out here. Conclusion The question of whether to choose an online or offline survey cannot be answered conclusively – and it does not need to be. The choice has to be made based on the particular cause depending on the survey goal and type, employee or customer feedback, academic research, or feedback to an event.In many cases, a combination of both might make the most sense, because that way you can also combine the benefits of both: broadly speaking, the number of online surveys with the quality of paper surveys and the combined accessibility of different target groups. LimeSurvey provides a convenient way to combine both: questionnaires that have been created online can be easily converted into a Word document or a PDF file. The question display is thereby adjusted in order to be used in a written or personal interview. Afterwards, the collected data can be entered manually into LimeSurvey, so that in the end both data sets can be analyzed collectively. All aforementioned features like multiple languages, data security, choosing the degree of anonymity, and personalization of the survey design are also provided by LimeSurvey.

What exactly is a Likert Scale? The Likert scale or Likert-type scale, named after its inventor, the American social scientist Rensis Likert, is a usually ordinal type of psychometric rating scale that is used to capture attitudes within an agreement-disagreement range. Hence, a Likert scale is the sum of responses on several Likert options.When conducting a survey, the response on a Likert scale represents either the intensity of agreement to disagreement ("Extremely agree" vs. "Extremely disagree") with the question statement, making it a bipolar rating method, or the intensity of just an agreement or just a disagreement ("Extremely agree" vs. "Not at all agree" or "Extremely disagree" vs. "Not at all disagree") with the question statement, making it a unipolar rating method. It can be designed as an uneven-point scale, e.g., a 5-point or 7-point scale, with a neutral middle option, or as an even-point scale, e.g., a 4-point or 6-point scale, omitting a neutral option and forcing a more positive or more negative response choice. Either of these two options require full symmetry, i.e., ensuring bilateral symmetric distances from an existing or an imaginary neutral option and equal numbers of positive and negative options. How to Present Likert Scales in Online Surveys Ultimately, a Likert scale question may be arranged vertically or horizontally. However, there have been researchers investigating the possibility of something called a left-side bias when displaying a Likert scale question horizontally. Essentially, left-side bias means that when placing answer options on the left side of the Likert scale, there is a tendency among respondents to select these options, said tendency being somewhat stronger for positive options on the left side than negative options. Furthermore, there has been equivalent research showing a similar, yet even stronger selection bias for vertical Likert scales as respondents tend to skip lower displayed answer options and more often select the top options. Based on these statements, certain scale layouts appear more suitable to avoid survey bias and sloppy question answering than others. Horizontal Likert Scale: According to the Likert scale bias matrix, to keep the bias as low as possible in a horizontal order, it appears best to place negative attitude options on the left side of the scale and positive attitude options on the right side of the scale. Vertical Likert Scale: According to the Likert scale bias matrix, to keep the bias as low as possible in vertical order, it appears best to place negative attitude options at the top of the scale and positive attitude options at the bottom of the scale.In addition, Likert scales can be modified to hold 7 or more answer options depending on the level of refinement that is required for a specific question or survey. Horizontal 7-point Likert Scale: Vertical 7-point Likert Scale: Creating Likert Scales in LimeSurvey There are several possibilities in LimeSurvey to create Likert scale questions either in horizontal or vertical order. To create horizontal Likert scales with text items, you may, for instance, use the array or array dual scale question types. To create vertical Likert scales with text items, you may, for instance, use the radio button list or the dropdown list question types. When to use Likert Scales? The Likert Scale is particularly valuable when you are trying to understand complex sentiments about your product, service, or initiative. Whether you're gauging employee satisfaction, customer experiences, or public opinions. Let's say you're conducting a customer satisfaction survey. A simple yes/no question might tell you whether the customers are satisfied, but a Likert scale will reveal the extent of their satisfaction. This degree of satisfaction can be the decisive factor for product improvements, service modifications, or marketing tactics. Moreover, Likert Scales are easy for respondents to understand and complete, contributing to better response rates and less survey fatigue. Plus, they are statistically sound, giving your data analysis process robust and reliable inputs.