As a professional conducting workshops, trainings, or events, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an effective way to gauge a participant’s experience in your program. By asking a simple question of attendees and calculating the NPS, you can easily evaluate and implement improvements based on the feedback you receive.
NPS has become the standard worldwide for customer experience evaluation. It can be an effective tool for post assessment of workshops and events. As a consultant, coach, trainer, human resources, or organizational development professional, you can use it both inside and outside of an organization.
The Net Promoter Score
You can calculate the NPS after you ask participants a simple post-assessment question using a ranking of 1-10. The score of 10 is for the highest satisfaction. For example, an industry-standard question is, “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this training to a colleague or friend?” Depending on their answer, you can classify attendees as very satisfied (promoters) with a score of 9-10, somewhat satisfied (passives) when scoring 7-8, or unsatisfied (detractors) if their answer is between 0-6.
By taking the participants’ answers, you can then calculate the NPS by subtracting the percent of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Using the result, which will be a number ranging from -100 to 100, you now have a simple metric to evaluate the success of your program.
Hear The Voice of Participants
To get the highest response rate, make sure participants are aware you will ask them for feedback. Mention it to your participant(s) at the end of a workshop or session and include some information about the importance of getting their feedback in slides, handouts, printed workbooks, and online coursework. The NPS is a simple, single question survey and when used with a request for feedback during the process, can give you some greater clarity on the impact of your deliverables.
You can learn more about;
- the participants takeaways from your sessions,
- how beneficial your program is to each participant,
- why they are, or are not likely to recommend your service, and
- the likelihood they will use your services again.
By getting this feedback (the voice of your participant), you can gain some valuable insights to evaluate your offerings and make improvements based on their feedback.
Using the Net Promoter Score
NPS as a single number can give you some good benchmarking for your own services. Typically if your NPS is above 70 you’re doing pretty good. If you drop below 70 you need to pay attention to the feedback you’re getting from participants. The NPS score by itself is going to give you a grade on your services and the real change will come with the feedback you request (always ask for feedback). We’ve added an NPS project to the Shift Platform so our practitioners can send their participants an NPS survey and request feedback. It’s a modest price ($19 per project) and it’s meant to be run for every workshop or training – coaches could use one workshop and send their clients a survey from within one project. For this small fee you can survey participants and start gathering feedback from your participants and review the effectiveness of your programs.
Consider the uses for both your NPS score and the participant feedback.
If you’re an outside consultant to an organization, you can;
- Show the effectiveness of your workshops to your contacts and/or leadership of the organization. Imagine providing the client with a NPS score along with positive participant feedback for every workshop.
- If you’ve tracked NPS over time, you could provide a score to new potential clients as a success indicator for past services.
- Use your feedback as testimonials on your website and marketing materials. If you don’t have permission to use names you can use first initials or ‘workshop participant’ as the name.
If you’re an internal contributor delivering services to your organization, you can;:
- Show the effectiveness of your workshops to the leadership of the organization, or your direct manager, with a NPS score along with positive participant feedback for every workshop.
- If you’ve tracked NPS over time, you could provide a score as a case for newer workshops or to scale your services to other parts of the organization.
- Use your feedback as testimonials in your workshop materials to hype up your internal programs to gain greater interest.
Consider trying out the NPS surveys inside the Leader’s Beacon Shift Platform. If you have any questions about NPS or our survey system, please email me at kris@leadersbeacon.com. I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have.
