Implementing and Elevating NPS at ThriveCart: A Data-Driven Approach to Customer Sentiment
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Project Length: 1.5 years, 2023 - 2025
The Challenge
When ThriveCart was acquired, Net Promoter Score (NPS) wasn’t being tracked, leaving leadership without a clear understanding of customer sentiment. This lack of visibility made it difficult to measure customer loyalty, prioritize product improvements, or track the impact of operational changes.
The challenge was twofold:
- Implementation: Design and execute an NPS tracking system that integrated with existing workflows while being cost-efficient.
- Education & Strategy: Establish NPS as a company-wide business metric—ensuring every team, from frontline support to executive leadership, understood how to interpret the data and use it to drive meaningful change.
My Role & Strategy
As the Product Manager driving this initiative, I owned the entire product lifecycle—from conceptualization and implementation to ongoing optimization. This required not only introducing new processes but also fostering cross-functional collaboration and ensuring NPS became a strategic decision-making tool.
My approach was grounded in data-driven, iterative product development and focused on delivering scalable, long-term impact through key initiatives:
✅ Product Strategy & Vision: Defined the NPS rollout strategy aligned with leadership goals—focusing on cost-effective implementation and scalable reporting to empower decision-making.
✅ Process & Tool Optimization: Transitioned from Typeform (a paid tool) to SimpleSAT, leveraging existing systems to reduce costs and streamline workflows.
✅ Stakeholder Alignment: Led cross-functional education efforts, translating NPS data into actionable insights that shaped product roadmaps, support processes, and leadership decisions.
✅ Data-Driven Iteration: Established a continuous feedback loop—analyzing NPS trends, escalating product pain points, and optimizing processes based on real-time customer sentiment.
Execution & Key Decisions
🚀 Phase 1: NPS System Implementation
- Transitioned the company from a manual, third-party Typeform system to SimpleSAT, integrating it seamlessly into existing support workflows.
- Automated NPS responses using webhooks to feed real-time data into Slack, giving the entire company visibility into customer sentiment.
📊 Phase 2: Cross-Functional Education & Adoption
- Designed and facilitated company-wide training—ensuring teams understood NPS scoring, benchmarks, and how to use customer insights to inform their work.
- Documented processes in the internal knowledge base, making NPS a sustainable, repeatable system beyond the initial launch.
🔍 Phase 3: Establishing a Feedback Loop
- Created a structured reporting system with detailed breakdowns of key drivers (positive and negative) and actionable recommendations for leadership.
- Implemented a follow-up strategy:
- Detractors received outreach for deeper insights, reinforcing a commitment to listening.
- Promoters received personalized thank-you messages to strengthen positive relationships.
🛠️ Phase 4: Driving Long-Term Strategic Change
- Recommended and advocated for the creation of a Customer Success team to own NPS and proactive customer engagement—identifying this as a critical organizational gap.
- Introduced a bug triage process, meeting weekly with the Head of Product to prioritize fixes based on NPS insights and support trends.
- Expanded sentiment tracking by implementing Customer Effort Score (CES) for refund-related tickets, providing a more granular view of customer pain points.
The Results & Business Impact
📈 From Negative to +60 NPS at Its Peak: Implemented a structured system that raised NPS from a negative baseline to +60 and maintained this improvement through continuous optimization.
💡 Company-Wide Visibility & Action: Transformed NPS from an abstract metric into a core business KPI—with leadership using it to inform product and operational decisions.
🔁 Closed-Loop Feedback System: Created a scalable process where customer sentiment directly informed product development, bug prioritization, and support improvements.
🛠️ Operational Efficiency Gains: Reduced tool costs by consolidating NPS tracking within SimpleSAT and optimizing existing systems.
📊 Strategic Organizational Impact: Recommended the Customer Success function, identifying it as essential for maintaining long-term customer relationships and owning proactive engagement.
Key Takeaways
✅ End-to-End Product Ownership: Led the NPS initiative through strategy, execution, and continuous improvement, delivering both operational efficiency and customer experience gains.
✅ Agile, Iterative Process: Implemented an MVP solution, iterated based on real-time data, and expanded measurement frameworks (e.g., CES for refund-related cases).
✅ Cross-Functional Collaboration: Aligned leadership, product, and support teams around a shared vision, driving adoption through education and stakeholder engagement.
✅ Data-Driven Decision-Making: Transformed raw NPS data into actionable insights—empowering leadership to make informed, customer-centric decisions.
✅ Strategic Foresight: Identified and advocated for organizational improvements (Customer Success team) to ensure sustainable, long-term NPS ownership.