Your comprehensive guide to Transactional NPS® (tNPS) surveys

The Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is a powerful measure of how customers feel about your business. Your NPS is an excellent measure of your customer loyalty, which directly impacts your profitability and growth potential. In fact, research by Bain & Company has found that companies with industry-leading NPS outgrow their competitors by more than double. 

But there’s more than one kind of NPS survey, and knowing which ones to use in certain scenarios will help you get a better, holistic view of your overall customer experience and loyalty. 

In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about transactional NPS surveys—what tNPS is, how to use these surveys, and where they fit into your customer experience (CX) strategy. 

Transactional NPS® (tNPS) is a specific kind of survey that measures NPS feedback at a granular level after a customer completes a transaction with your business. This could be a purchase, a customer service call, a visit to your store, or any other specific event in the customer journey. (We’ll cover all the potential uses of the tNPS survey below.) 

The NPS question is very flexible—it can be adapted to fit many situations so you can clearly see every aspect of your customer experience. Use tNPS surveys to better understand your customer data and measure how customers feel after interacting with some part of your business. 

Transactional NPS is based on one simple question: How likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?  Customers answer on a scale from 0-10, and the responses are then sorted into promoters (those who respond with a 9 or 10), passives (7 or 8), and detractors (6 or below). 

What you’re looking for here is the ratio between the different types of customers to understand how happy your customers are with their interaction with your business. To calculate tNPS, simply take the percentage of promoters and subtract the percentage of detractors. Passive answers are not factored into this equation. 

tNPS = % of promoters - % of detractors

You’ll get a score that ranges from -100 to +100. So, for example, if an interaction had 50% promoters, 25% passive, and 25% detractors, your tNPS will be 50% - 25% = 25. 

Relational NPS, also known as brand NPS or just NPS, is a measure of how your customers feel about your organization as a whole. Relational NPS helps you get a pulse on how your customers perceive your brand and understand your overall customer loyalty. This is a valuable metric to measure quarter over quarter (and year over year), and benchmark against others in your industry.  

On the other hand, transactional NPS is focused on customer satisfaction in a specific scenario–like after they’ve made a purchase or submitted a ticket to customer support. This gives your teams direct feedback on very specific issues, allows you to measure your team's effectiveness in terms of customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, optimize each touchpoint to enhance the customer experience at every stage of the customer journey. 

Transactional NPS surveys, when strategically implemented, offer invaluable insights into customer satisfaction and loyalty following specific interactions with your brand. By leveraging tNPS effectively, you can pinpoint CX strengths and weaknesses, amplify positive feedback through testimonials and reviews, and highlight standout features in future marketing campaigns. This approach allows you to drive continuous improvement by refining products, services, and processes based on real-time feedback.

Moreover, tNPS surveys enhance customer engagement by enabling prompt follow-ups with detractors and recognizing employees who consistently generate positive feedback. These insights inform business strategy by guiding resource allocation, identifying trends, and supporting data-driven decision-making.

With an tNPS survey, you'll receive two key benefits: 

Gathering feedback after a transaction translates into extremely valuable data. For example, if you want to understand how the experience of making an online purchase, paying a bill, or visiting a store is for your customers, send a tNPS survey immediately after.

This timely approach captures customers' impressions while the experience is still fresh in their minds, providing more accurate and actionable insights than surveys conducted days or weeks later, when memories may have faded or been influenced by subsequent events.

Pro-tip: Connect SurveyMonkey to your CRM and send automatic surveys when customers complete specific actions you want their opinions on.

Not all tNPS feedback needs to be immediate, however. You can also send transactional NPS surveys to customers on a time delay when you are looking for ways to improve the customer experience. For example, if you’re looking to improve your products or services, a tNPS survey sent a week or two after they start using your product or service can give you actionable insight. 

When capturing this type of feedback, you don’t necessarily want to send a tNPS survey immediately after a customer has purchased a product or service. If you do, they will probably only have unpacked the product or just gotten the service. That’s not enough time to gauge how much they like and use the product and any specific problems they have experienced. 

Likewise, if you’re surveying customers about a service you provide, they may not have seen its full value right after receiving it. Instead, depending on the type of service, you might wait a week or longer before you send them a tNPS survey to get a more accurate understanding of how they feel about their purchase. This is another area where creating automatic triggers for survey sends can be helpful so you don’t miss a valuable opportunity for feedback. 

There are many types of tNPS surveys you can send to your customers, and each can help you gain different kinds of feedback to improve the customer experience. 

What all of these transactional NPS survey types have in common is that they specifically mention a transaction or interaction. Instead of asking a general question about their likelihood of recommending your company as a whole, you should ask them how likely they are to promote your business after their most recent purchase or customer service call. That way, you’re being direct about the connection between their recent touchpoint and their feelings about your business. 

You always have the option to send tNPS surveys about any interaction your business has with customers. But if you’re looking for the most common types of tNPS surveys, here are a few examples. 

The purchase process is a critical touchpoint that can make or break customer satisfaction. From website navigation to checkout completion, each step impacts your transactional NPS. Technical issues or a clunky checkout process can lead to cart abandonment, directly affecting your bottom line. Even successful purchases may have room for improvement.

Implementing tNPS surveys immediately after purchase provides real-time insights into the buying journey. This feedback helps you to streamline the process by identifying pain points and successes. Fostering customer loyalty and business growth depends on various factors, but resolving issues promptly is crucial.

Every customer service interaction is a critical moment that can either reinforce or erode brand loyalty. The efficiency and empathy of your support team can transform a frustrated customer into a brand advocate. For instance, a swiftly resolved billing error could lead to a customer recommending your service to others.

Sending a tNPS survey immediately after a support interaction captures the customer's emotional response while it's fresh. This timing is crucial for detecting nuances like the effectiveness of your self-service options or the clarity of your representatives' communication. By continually refining these touchpoints based on real-time feedback, you can create a support experience that not only resolves issues but also strengthens customer relationships and differentiates your brand in a competitive market.

Related: The ultimate guide to customer service 

Conducting surveys after customers have used your product for a period is crucial for boosting tNPS and improving overall product quality. These surveys capture real-world experiences, revealing both minor irritations and major issues that may not have been apparent during initial testing. This feedback is invaluable as it helps identify and rectify problems quickly, provides insights into actual product usage, and allows you to gauge the gap between customer expectations and reality.

Timing these surveys is critical, with waiting at least a week post-purchase ensuring customers have had sufficient time to fully explore the product's features and form considered opinions.

The onboarding process is a pivotal moment in the customer journey, setting the tone for their entire experience with your product or service. Gathering feedback through a transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) survey during this phase is invaluable, as it provides real-time insights into the effectiveness of your onboarding procedures.

Whether it's uncovering the need for additional self-help resources, improving customer service touchpoints, or fixing technical glitches in the implementation process, tNPS surveys during onboarding provide actionable data to enhance the customer experience from the very beginning of their relationship with your brand.

Implementing tNPS surveys immediately after a customer's visit provides invaluable, real-time feedback on various aspects of their experience, from staff interactions to store layout and product availability. This immediate feedback allows retailers to quickly identify and address issues, enhancing the overall shopping experience and potentially turning dissatisfied customers into loyal patrons.

These surveys offer insights into customer preferences and behaviors that may not be apparent through sales data alone. By analyzing tNPS responses, retailers can uncover trends, such as popular product combinations or preferred service features, enabling them to tailor their offerings and marketing strategies more effectively. 

Your website serves as the digital face of your business, often forming the first and most lasting impression on potential customers. Using tNPS surveys for website visitors provides crucial insights into user experience, navigation ease, and overall satisfaction. This feedback is instrumental in identifying pain points, optimizing user journeys, and enhancing conversion rates.

Transactional NPS surveys become particularly valuable during website redesigns or significant updates. They offer a quantifiable measure of user sentiment before and after changes, allowing you to gauge the impact of your modifications. Moreover, these surveys can reveal unexpected user preferences or needs, helping you prioritize future developments and allocate resources more effectively. 

Related: Try the SurveyMonkey website feedback survey template

Now that you know just a few of the ways you can use tNPS surveys for your business, what are the benefits of creating a feedback program built around key transactions? What’s the big payoff for setting up a system to send out tNPS surveys? Allow us to explain.

Relational NPS surveys offer valuable insights into long-term customer sentiment, providing a broad view of loyalty over time. Similarly, customer satisfaction metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) contribute to a comprehensive understanding of overall customer experience. 

But for businesses seeking to understand customer feelings directly following an engagement with their company, tNPS surveys become essential, offering real-time feedback that can highlight immediate issues or successes in the customer journey.

What makes your customers highly loyal and satisfied with your business? Knowing the answer allows you to create even more exceptional customer experiences that target exactly what your customers value. Transactional NPS surveys can help you pinpoint these drivers of customer satisfaction so you can replicate them in other areas and use them in your marketing as well. 

NPS surveys will help you determine if your customers are satisfied and loyal. Adding key driver questions to your surveys will help you discover why your customers are satisfied and loyal. To identify key drivers, you’ll need to add some follow-up questions that dig into the key attributes of your brand (like price, value, ease of use, etc) and ask the respondent to rate you in each of these categories.

What makes your customers go from being passives to promoters? What kinds of experiences change them from promoters to detractors? Finding the answers to these questions can significantly improve customer retention and satisfaction. And tNPS surveys help you do just that. 

By honing in on specific touchpoints in the customer journey, you can find any pain points that are dropping satisfaction rates. You can also find spots where you’re winning over customers by exceeding their expectations. All this knowledge is vital when designing your customer experience strategy. 

If your NPS score is lower than you anticipated, or simply lower than you’d like, you will want to find the exact pain points dragging your score down. It’s not enough to know your NPS score—you also need to know what you need to do better and how to take action on it. 

And your tNPS surveys will help you pinpoint what’s going wrong in the customer journey so you can fix it. If you’re just guessing what’s driving customer dissatisfaction, there’s a good chance you’ll get it wrong—so rely instead on the accurate data tNPS surveys give you. 

Tracking and monitoring customer satisfaction and loyalty is no easy task—there’s not one single survey that will give you an accurate view of the big picture. But tNPS surveys are an important part of your overall customer feedback program. They help you focus on specific customer interactions and how they impact the overall customer experience—and you should add them to your Voice of Customer (VoC) program today. 

To learn more, download our guide to running a successful VOC program. 

Net Promoter® and NPS® are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.