Improving NPS through user insights: a quick-start guide

For UX researchers, UX leaders, Product leaders, and emerging roles like UX Research Operations Managers, proving the impact of their work is a top priority. Connecting research findings to business metrics to improve NPS is vital for influencing decisions, driving customer loyalty, and securing executive buy-in.

The UserTesting Human Insight Platform and QXscore™ empowers teams to bridge the gap between user insights and measurable business outcomes. By simplifying workflows and delivering actionable insights, they enable teams to:

• Quantify the value of their work in terms of NPS and other key metrics.
• Build empathy by uncovering user pain points and opportunities for improvement.
• Deliver faster, data-driven decisions that align with organizational goals.

Actionable insights at every stage of development

With the UserTesting Human Insight Platform and QXscore, you can get fast feedback from your customers or other audiences to fully understand what people think about your products, your digital experiences, and any other interactions they have with your brand. This can reveal problems and challenges you didn’t know existed, as well as open up your understanding of new opportunities and improvements to tackle. 

By providing a solution that covers unmoderated testing as well as live interviews, targeting our on-demand network of contributors or your private audiences, the UserTesting platform can support a wide spectrum of use cases across different teams—from UX and Product to Marketing.

This guide has been developed to share some common use cases and stories of how our customers have used UserTesting to gather fast and relevant insights to:

• Get started on the right foot: Early insights with UserTesting and QXscore help align strategies to measurable outcomes like improving NPS.

• Launch successfully: Validate and refine user experiences pre-launch with actionable insights tied to NPS.

• Drive ongoing wins: Benchmark progress with QXscore and use NPS tracking to identify trends and opportunities.

• Optimize content: Test and improve messaging to resonate with customers and boost satisfaction metrics.

• Increase customer empathy:

Get started on the right foot

In the world of software development, there is a saying (seemingly adapted from a quote from architect Frank Lloyd Wright), “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer on the construction site.” In essence, problems can be discovered and easily corrected when in draft format, or they can be forcefully adjusted (at a loss of time and money in the process) when at a more complete stage. 

By getting customer and other critical stakeholder feedback early in your process, you gather the data that helps you make more informed decisions when everything is greenfield and focus on the efforts that drive the best outcomes.

Needs discovery 

During the discovery phase, this is a great opportunity to better understand your customers—yet this is often perceived to be a time-consuming endeavor and is often skipped in product development. 

Talking to customers during early-stage discovery could mean identifying and getting to know different personas, or understanding high-level pain points.

Regardless of your goal, as soon as you have a concept in mind, even if it’s just a sketch on a whiteboard, run a few quick tests with customers and potential customers to validate that you’re on the right track. Gathering customer insight early on can save time and budget later on in development—not to mention avoid the risk of building a product no one wants.

How to do it

Remote, live customer interviews are a great place to start during early-stage discovery and validation. Gathering feedback via interview enables your team to have open-ended discussions about a variety of topics, ask customers about their habits, and even have them complete specific tasks (with guidance if they get stuck). 

Interviews also enable teams to ask follow-up questions and observe non-verbal cues, helping them quickly gather critical insights that will drive more informed decisions.

Teams can also benefit from remote, self-guided tests as well. At this point in your development, you might not have a product to test, but that’s OK. This is a great time to do some competitive research and discovery to gain a better understanding of how customers currently interact with what’s available—and what they like or dislike about those products or experiences. 

Tests don’t have to be complicated, either. They can be as simple as asking your target audience how they currently perform a particular task with your competition, and how they feel about that experience.  Or, you can ask about their everyday lifestyle and habits, and their thoughts on a particular product.

In the following video, see the UserTesting Contributor Network in action, and how they evaluate mobile experiences—from first impressions to site satisfaction.

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The insights you’ll uncover will give you a fast (think hours, not days) gut check early in the development process—before any code has been written. This ensures your team moves forward, equipped with data to support a confident decision. 

If you're feeling inspired, you can get candid feedback to help validate new concepts or ideas right away with a test template. 

Concept validation template

More efficient A/B testing

When you run an A/B test, you’re pitting two designs against each other to see which one people prefer. However, a research study showed that only one of every eight A/B tests leads to significant change. 

If you’re constantly running A/B tests without a game plan and failing to see clear winners or get statistically significant results, you should consider getting qualitative feedback before finalizing on designs. Get direct customer feedback first to hone in on the greatest pain points and areas of opportunity, then A/B test variations to strategically fine-tune your experience.

• Generate ideas about what to A/B test. Like needs discovery, get a sense of your customers’ preferences and expectations before narrowing down specific options to A/B test.
• Get qualitative feedback before you A/B test, to ensure that you are in the right “neighborhood” before you hone in on the exact “house.”
• Understand why customers voice a preference for one design or image over another.

Qualitative insights are great when paired with analytics or quantitative metrics you may be tracking. Together, they can provide a fuller understanding of the reasons (the ‘why’) behind user behaviors.

For inspiration, you can add context and depth to your quantitative data—and develop more targeted A/B testing ideas, by pairing human insight with your data. Try a test template to understand what converts.

Website conversion template

Prototyping

When you have some early sketches or designs, gather feedback to validate usability before investing resources to build it out. Does the design make sense? Is it clear and intuitive to the user? 

And if you find out that something in your early designs is problematic, you can change it and then test again to see if it’s a better experience, before proceeding to development or production. 

Can’t decide on a single design? You don’t have to! Ask test participants to evaluate multiple design ideas in a single session. Continue to iterate, getting feedback as you hone in on preferred design(s). 

How to do it

If you have a more complex design that might be confusing or isn't fully functional if presented during a self-guided test, a live customer interview is a great option. Presenting your designs during a live interview offers you the best of both worlds: giving you control over when, where, and with whom your designs are shared and allowing you to guide test participants should they encounter challenges.

The flexible and dynamic interaction gives you an unrestricted opportunity to gain insights. This can help you radically reimagine and redesign your product before any development begins.

In the video below, we rounded up examples of contributor feedback on prototypes, where our customers could evaluate if they were targeting the right audience or identify technical issues.

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If you're short on time, self-guided tests are also a great option at this stage of development. Provide a link to your design from your chosen design tool or hosting solution, or if secure prototype hosting is an option, you can upload your prototype directly to your insights platform and ask for feedback.

If you're feeling inspired, you can observe people using a pre-production experience with the prototype evaluation template below.

Prototype template

Survey validation

Releasing a poorly designed survey can waste money and invalidate your results. You don’t want to get back responses that are irrelevant or fail to inform next steps because respondents had a different understanding of your questions. 

Test the design and questions for comprehension first, ensuring they’re clear and result in the types of responses you are expecting, then release it into the wild.

Test your survey before you launch by validating your proposition and ensuring your survey resonates with your audience with the template below.

Value proposition validation template 

Mobile app validation and design

Designing the next killer app? Get feedback to make sure your app appeals to your target audience. Validate the concept, perfect the first-time user experience, and even pre-test app store images and copy to see what drives downloads.

Assess critical app characteristics like ease of use, appearance, and trust with the template below.

Mobile app evaluation template

Customer journey mapping

You've probably heard the saying, “It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.” But do you understand your customers’ journeys—the challenges that they encounter and the decisions that they make when interacting with your brand? 

By observing customers and prospects—from initial perception to final steps in their decision-making process—you’re in the passenger’s seat in understanding the customer journey. These insights can help you generate ideas on what to change to improve everything from awareness to conversion.

Understand how your customers engage with your brand or products across multiple touchpoints with the template below.

Customer journey template

Launch successfully

You know the moment: everyone’s huddled around, eagerly anticipating the moment that you push the proverbial button and all the months of hard work go live. And if you’re like most folks, you have also gone through the experience where things don’t necessarily go to plan, and you’re left scrambling trying to patch up an unforeseen problem. 

Ensure go-to-market success by getting feedback prior to launch, whether it’s a new product, feature enhancement, marketing campaign, or another project. Get confirmation before you go live so you can launch with confidence.

Mobile validation

Your web or app can render very differently according to device type, screen size and operating system. Get confirmation based on these criteria to ensure users, across all different technologies, have the same positive experience.

Mobile is an important part of any successful company's strategy—but it's just one piece of a larger puzzle. At the heart of every successful company is a customer-centric mindset that relies on human insights at every stage of development, on every device, and on every channel to keep creating great experiences for their customers.

Testing your mobile experiences with real users throughout your development cycle will help you discover the drivers of behaviors on mobile, including why users abandon apps, what fuels frequent usage, and how you can improve experiences to drive greater adoption. Not sure what customers think of your mobile app? Try the template below and get actionable insights fast.

Mobile app evaluation template

Pre-launch

Whether it’s perfecting your pitch or making sure that your product is something that people will want, buy, and can use, UserTesting is a great solution for presenting concepts and ideas to potential customers to get feedback before you go live. Seeing a user struggling with your potential web or mobile experience gives you the much-needed evidence to revisit and revise before you launch.

Get feedback as you reach each milestone to ensure that you end up where you planned. And if feedback indicates there’s a problem or something that requires attention, you have the opportunity to fix these issues before proceeding to the next milestone. Studies show that problems that are discovered and fixed after a product release have up to 100x the cost compared to when issues are identified and addressed while in development. Reduce risk by testing with your target audience throughout development—especially prior to launching.

De-risk product decisions template

Drive ongoing wins

Once you’ve released your product or campaign, what do you do? You sit back, relax and enjoy the spoils, right? Of course not! In today’s fast-moving and competitive market, you have to keep moving, iterating, and innovating. Gather information to understand your customers’ evolving needs, and to get valuable insight on what your competitors are doing, to stay ahead and continue providing what your customers want and expect.

Competitive intelligence

Are you just dying to know what your competitor’s secret sauce is? What is giving them the edge? Our contributor network of real consumers will give you the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what’s working for competitors and areas where you may be falling behind. When you understand your competitors’ kryptonite (or their competitive advantage), you can make the improvements that help you surge ahead and win more business.

Learn how customers feel about your competitors and uncover how your experiences can outperform.

Competitor evaluation template

Ecommerce optimization

Are you wondering where customers are getting tripped up, why they are dropping off, and why conversions aren’t happening? By watching a recording of the customers' screens and hearing them explain why they are making the choices they are making, you gain a deeper understanding of customer intent, expectations, and the challenges they experience. Insights inform optimizations from start to finish.

Address customer drop-off and abandoned shopping carts using the template below.

Cart abandonment template

Strengthen quantitative data

Many quantitative tools show in aggregate what users are doing on your site. You know what a large audience is doing, but you don’t know why. By helping you understand how real customers use your site or mobile app, UserTesting provides the true voice of customer that complements analytics data. You get critical context about the root of the problem to effectively triage and design solutions.

Try asking customers to evaluate popular landing pages to address conversion rates and optimize pages based on feedback. Try the landing page conversion template for fast insights anyone can leverage for targeted improvements. 

Landing page conversions template

Optimize content

Content that's clear, engaging, conveys a point, and is well organized is more likely to be consumed. You’ve made it this far in this use case ebook so you really can’t disagree. Whether it’s a marketing campaign or in-product messaging, it’s critical to provide the right content experiences to engage and educate customers, to encourage expected behaviors or workflows.

Cart sort and information architecture

Just as a new building needs a strong foundation and a logic to its layout, the same is true for the presentation of your ideas and concepts. Whether you’re redesigning a complex web or mobile application or curating website content for prospective buyers, get insight on optimizing information architecture, so that you are effectively guiding customers through layers of information to ensure an optimal workflow or a customer journey that ends in conversion.

Learn from your audience as they group content and label categories with the card sorting template below. 

Card sorting template

Site design validation and discovery

Just as the actual content on your website matters, equally important is the layout and display of that information. Putting too much or not enough can result in feast or famine. Get customer reactions to understand how much information is enough to effectively compel audiences, to optimize the design and layout according to their needs and preferences.

Understand how much information is enough to optimize site design and layout and effectively compel customers to engage with the template below. 

Website evaluation template

Ad creative and messaging validation

The best ads capture the human experience and touch customers at an intellectual and emotional level. And the worst? The worst ads are created based on a misguided understanding of how to connect with customers, and they often end up dissected and derided on social media. Get feedback on whether your ads resonate with your target audiences before you launch. Ensure that the response you’re expecting is the response that you get.

Make sure your ads resonate with your target audiences before you launch, using the template below.

Ad testing template

Site content validation and discovery (SEM/SEO)

Presenting easy-to-find, compelling, and relevant content—at the moment that customers are searching for it—is key to communicating your product and brand’s worth and convincing customers to choose your offerings. 

With qualitative feedback, alongside other analytics data you may be using, you can better understand the ideas and topics your customers are looking for to inform your content strategy.

Use the template below to understand the topics your customers are searching for and pair them with analytics data.

Needs and discovery template

Real-world experiences

Ever wish you could be a fly on the wall and watch your customers as they went about activities and decisions? And even better: if you could read their minds to better understand why they do the things they do? 

Using the back-facing camera on their phones, consumers record their experience at home, in-store (shop-alongs), competitor stores, or anywhere else, giving you the most direct view of how they live and make decisions.

Gain the most authentic lifestyle insights, observing as customers freely move about in their native settings with the template below.

Customer environment and context template

Improve customer empathy

When it comes to creating a world-class customer experience, you need to mind the gap—the empathy gap, that is. But before we dive right in, let’s first set the stage. Briefly, don’t worry.

The CX industry is constantly evolving—to keep pace with the needs of consumers. A global economy means businesses are forced to pivot and adapt—one day, that might be due to a global pandemic, and the next, it'll be something different. So whether you’re building the next best SaaS product or redesigning your mobile banking app, the old motto still rings true: you are not your user.

Despite the success you’ve had so far, there’s always so much to learn about your customers. And believe it or not, most brands aren’t as customer-centric as they think. Enter, the empathy gap.

What is the empathy gap?

In general, the empathy gap refers to the idea of not being able to relate to the emotions, needs, and feelings of others because they’re naturally experiencing the world around them differently than you are. 

Many brands suffer from what’s been coined the empathy gap. Studies by Gartner and PwC, respectively, found that while 90% of customer-facing employees said they understood the needs of their customers, only 38% of consumers feel the employees they interact with understand their needs. 

Collect customer feedback to close the empathy gap

It’s nearly impossible to predict the needs and actions of others. Which is why you probably shouldn’t. While it’s true that great product ideas can be stumbled upon, the most successful, lasting ones need testing and iterating to meet the needs of a wide audience, not just the needs of some.

If you haven’t guessed already, there’s no better way to understand what your customers need than by asking them.

It’s hard to overstate the value to a UX team of truly understanding customers, and helping them develop real empathy for what that user is going through, either on the site itself or the process.” 

— Bradley Miller, Senior User Experience Researcher

How UserTesting customers improve NPS with human insights

Sage

Sage’s Digital Experience team set out to enhance its digital experiences to meet evolving customer expectations and drive meaningful business results. The team wanted to improve three key areas:

• Lengthy product pages that overwhelmed potential customers
• Complex navigation that hindered users from finding relevant solutions quickly
• A lack of clarity in communicating product benefits, which led to lower conversion rates

To improve their customer experiences, Sage needed a solution that would provide actionable customer insights, enabling them to devise impactful experimentation strategies and deliver customer-centric designs. 

With UserTesting, the Sage team was able to:

• Analyze customer feedback, click paths, and task completion rates to uncover friction points and actionable opportunities
• Organize insights within the UserTesting Insights Hub, a centralized repository that enables stakeholders to access and act on data easily
• Innovate using a hypothesis-driven framework, focusing on experiments rooted in customer needs and data insights

We track the impact of our user research by running QXScore studies alongside reporting on our NPS scores and brand metrics. Together, these measures form part of our scorecard. This helps us benchmark and optimize Sage's digital journeys.

Caitlin Hindle User Researcher, Sage

Read the full Sage customer story here

Wells Fargo

More than 30 million customers take care of their financial needs through Wells Fargo's mobile experience.  Customers need to quickly view where they stand financially and be able to easily send, receive, deposit, and transfer money successfully.

To ensure a smooth customer experience across channels, the team tests experiences at multiple touchpoints and benchmarks those experiences across several indices to track and optimize the customer journey.

Sharon Meaney, Design Research & Strategy Specialist, Wells Fargo, acknowledges these indices track customer behaviors, but she believes a substantial portion of their value comes from determining the correct path for Wells Fargo stakeholders. 

These three indices help us provide quantifiable metrics that can then be benchmarked in the future–as well as take emotional subjects and ground them in business realities. They provide us a way to find out what is not performing well and weed out, early, any ideas or designs that are lower-scoring.

Sharon Meaney Design Research & Strategy Specialist, Wells Fargo

Watch the video below to hear more about Wells Fargo's success with UserTesting.

Remote video URL

American Airlines

American’s UX team provides QXscores to the organization’s product owners. This gives the teams a common, quantifiable metric to track success over time. The teams share the related data sets and provide a common set of measures to senior executives, to justify their decisions. 

Human Insight leads to understanding the full end-to-end customer journey to make sure that we have that seamless experience from inspiration and booking, to travel, to when you've arrived at your destination.

Kimberly Cisek VP of Customer Experience, American Airlines

Watch below to hear American Airlines' success story.

Remote video URL

Let your customers be your North Star

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that while the steps of product development or any project plan are often presented as linear, in reality, inspiration, and challenges can crop up anywhere and at any stage. It’s rare for a team to follow the process from start to finish.

If, during development, you get feedback that creates the opportunity to pivot and change direction or creates an offshoot project for another team to pursue, these are moments to regroup and decide how to proceed. 

The point is to let feedback from your customers be your guiding light—your proverbial North Star—to ensure that all the work, time, and other resources you put into creating newer and better experiences align with what your customers want.