Table of Contents
- Five things to check in any NPS survey
- 1. SurveyMonkey NPS Template: the wording you are not allowed to change
- 2. SurveyMonkey email invitation: the score inside the inbox
- 3. Typeform's own NPS programme: score first, follow-up second, by bucket
- 4. Qualtrics recommended stack: reason, improve, permission
- 5. Typeform NPS form builder: the template SaaS teams actually ship
- 6. Testimonial respondent flow: three screens, under thirty seconds
- What these six agree on — and where they split
- Building yours this week
- Doing this with Testimonial
- Wrapping up
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AI summary
Six real SaaS NPS surveys are compared, highlighting common elements (a 0‑10 likelihood‑to‑recommend question with locked or editable wording) and key differences in follow‑up logic, channel choice, score capture, and thank‑you handling; the guide recommends using a single, unmodified question, optional bucket‑aware follow‑up, ensuring the score is recorded before any text response, skipping identity when known, and planning promoter next steps outside the survey.
Title
SaaS NPS Survey Teardown: 6 Real Examples, Annotated
Date
Oct 13, 2026
Description
Six real SaaS NPS surveys annotated: SurveyMonkey's locked question and email embed, Typeform's own programme, Qualtrics' follow-up stack, Typeform's builder, and Testimonial's three-screen flow.
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Most NPS blog posts stop at the definition. This one starts where the survey actually begins: the question on the screen, the follow-up behind it, and the channel that delivers both.
Below are six real SaaS NPS surveys, all checked against public documentation on 13 October 2026. Each one is annotated for the decision it made — wording locked or editable, follow-up the same for every score or split by bucket, score inside the email or behind a button, identity asked up front or skipped. If you want the programme that sits around the survey, start with NPS as a proof engine. For how the score is calculated once answers land, see how to calculate NPS.
Five things to check in any NPS survey
- Whether the question can be edited. Some tools lock the Reichheld wording so benchmarks stay valid. Others let you rewrite it — and quietly break comparability if you do.
- What the follow-up asks, and whether it changes by score. A promoter and a detractor should rarely get the same second question.
- Where the score is collected. Inside the email (one click) or on a page the button opens.
- What happens before the score on mobile. An identification screen, a pre-fill, or nothing.
- What the thank-you page does. Closes cleanly, or tries a second ask while the score is still warm.
1. SurveyMonkey NPS Template: the wording you are not allowed to change
SurveyMonkey's Net Promoter Score help page states the methodology question in full:
How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague? (Not at all likely) 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (Extremely likely)
When you add their NPS question type, the only editable piece is the company / brand / product noun in a dropdown. The rest of the question and the scale labels stay locked. SurveyMonkey says editing those would affect the methodology and could disqualify the question from benchmarks.
The Net Promoter Score Template builds on that. It starts with the NPS question, applies skip logic that groups answers into Detractors (0–6), Passives (7–8) and Promoters (9–10), and routes each group to an open-ended follow-up. The last page of the template is a set of demographic questions.
What it costs: demographics at the end lengthen a survey whose whole point is one score. And locking the wording is a feature until you need to ask about a specific product rather than "this company" — the dropdown covers that case, but nothing else.
Copy: the locked question if you want benchmarks. Skip: stacking demographics on the same survey when your CRM already has age, plan and tenure.
2. SurveyMonkey email invitation: the score inside the inbox
Same help docs, different channel decision. If you send via SurveyMonkey's Email Invitation collector, you can embed the NPS question in the email so the customer answers with one click from their inbox. The score lands without opening a separate page first.
That is the opposite of a "button that opens a survey" invite. One-click-from-inbox raises response rate for people who will tap a number and will not load another tab. It also means the first thing they see is the scale, not your brand page.
What it costs: you give up control of the page that follows the click — the follow-up and thank-you live in SurveyMonkey's flow, not on a page you designed. And some email clients render embedded surveys poorly; always send yourself a test.
Copy: the in-email scale when response rate is the bottleneck. Skip: it, if the follow-up page is where you do the real work (routing, tickets, personalised asks).
3. Typeform's own NPS programme: score first, follow-up second, by bucket
This one is not a product template. It is how Typeform, the SaaS company, ran NPS on itself — documented publicly from David Apple's talk at the Customer Success Summit and written up by Retently.
The shape:
- The email carried one question: "How are likely are you to recommend Typeform to a friend?" (wording as reported in that write-up). Clicking a score opened the follow-up.
- Follow-ups were bucket-specific. Scores 0–6 got a dissatisfaction prompt. Scores 9–10 got a "best features" prompt, then an ask to share the experience on Twitter.
- Every submission originally created a Zendesk ticket. Hidden fields carried plan type, geography and other context into reporting.
- First run: about 24% converted, but roughly 58% of people who clicked a score bounced on the follow-up — so about 42% of feedback never arrived. The fix was to record the LTR score in Google Analytics on the click, before the follow-up page. The score survived even when the open text did not.
- Later they narrowed Zendesk tickets to people who replied to an automated email, and added a trigger that surveyed new pro users twenty days after upgrade.
What it costs: the Twitter ask after a 9 or 10 is a second job on a warm promoter. It works when social sharing is the goal. It fights the survey when the goal is a testimonial or a case study — those asks belong after the score is safely stored, not inside it. And the first-run drop-off is the warning: if your follow-up is required, you will lose scores.
Copy: score captured independently of the follow-up; follow-up text that changes by bucket. Skip: a social share ask in the same breath as the score if proof (a quotable testimonial) is what you actually need next.
4. Qualtrics recommended stack: reason, improve, permission
Qualtrics' NPS guide gives the standard question:
How likely is it that you would recommend [Organization X/Product Y/Service Z] to a friend or colleague?
Then it recommends a short stack around it:
- "What's the reason for your score?" — open text, the driver.
- "How can we make your experience better?" — open text, the fix. Qualtrics notes you often do not need both; a bad score's reason and its fix are usually the same sentence.
- Permission to follow up — only if you do not already have contact details from the send.
They also take a clear position on timing: prefer relational NPS (quarterly or annually, about the overall relationship) over transactional NPS (after every purchase or support ticket). Their argument is that NPS measures a relationship; asking it on every small interaction trains people to ignore it.
What it costs: two open-text questions after a 0–10 is a lot on mobile. And the anti-transactional stance is right for relationship NPS — and wrong if what you actually need is a pulse after onboarding. In that case you are measuring onboarding, and you should say so, not call every pulse "NPS".
Copy: one open-text driver question; ask permission only when you lack the address. Skip: both "reason" and "improve" on the same survey unless you have evidence people answer both.
5. Typeform NPS form builder: the template SaaS teams actually ship
Separate from how Typeform surveys its own customers, Typeform's NPS form builder is the product template other teams use. It gives you the standard 0–10 "likelihood to recommend" question, optional open-ended follow-ups, automatic promoter / passive / detractor categorisation, and a score on the results screen. You share it as a link or embed it in emails or on your website. Branding (logo, colours) is editable.
This is the common SaaS shape in 2026: one score, one optional why, branded page, three share channels. It does not, on its own, decide what happens after a 9 or a 3 — that is automation you add with integrations (Typeform documents routing detractors to support and promoters to advocacy as a pattern, not a default).
What it costs: a beautiful form that ends at the dashboard is how most NPS programmes stall. The survey is the easy half. The routing is the half that turns a score into a conversation, a ticket, or a proof ask.
Copy: the one-score-plus-optional-why shape, and brand it so it looks like you. Skip: stopping at the results screen with no owner for detractors and no next step for promoters.
6. Testimonial respondent flow: three screens, under thirty seconds
This is what a respondent sees when they open a Testimonial NPS survey, per the help centre article on what respondents see (fetched 2026-10-13):
- Identification — name and email, so the response is attributed. Skipped when the embed is pre-filled with
&email=and&name=, or when you already know who you invited.
- The survey — 0–10 buttons labelled Not at all likely to Extremely likely, then an optional follow-up text field if you enabled it. Default question on the marketing page: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" Default follow-up shown there: "What's the main reason for your score?"
- Thank you — and if the survey is closed, a plain "This survey is closed and no longer accepting responses." Public respondents never see an upsell.
The product decision behind those screens is the routing, not the form: promoters can go to a testimonial request or a case-study invite with identity already filled; passives get a templated follow-up; detractors alert support. Thresholds are adjustable per survey. NPS sits on the Ultimate + plan, priced per space.
What it costs: an email invite opens on the identification screen before the score (unless you pre-fill). That is one more tap than an in-email scale. If one-click-from-inbox is the thing you care about most, an email tool that renders the scale inline fits better — and you can still route afterwards in your own stack. The honest limit is documented in NPS survey email templates.
Copy: skip the ID screen when you already know who it is; keep the thank-you page free of a second ask. Skip: making the follow-up required — optional is what keeps the score when someone will tap a number and will not type a paragraph.
What these six agree on — and where they split
Put the six next to each other and the splits are sharper than the overlaps.
- Everyone uses a 0–10 likelihood-to-recommend question. SurveyMonkey locks it. Qualtrics and Typeform's builder let you brand the noun. Typeform-the-company asked about Typeform by name. The label pair "Not at all likely / Extremely likely" shows up on SurveyMonkey and in Testimonial's help-centre description of the respondent screen (its marketing mock shortens them to "Not at all / Extremely").
- Follow-ups are where the programmes diverge. SurveyMonkey's template routes by bucket. Typeform-the-company wrote different prompts for detractors and promoters. Qualtrics offers reason + improve and warns you may only need one. Testimonial's default is a single optional "main reason".
- Channel is a product decision, not a preference. In-email scale (SurveyMonkey invitation) vs button-to-page (Typeform builder, Testimonial invite) vs in-app embed with pre-fill (Testimonial embed). Pick the channel that matches how you will act on the answer.
- The thank-you page is easy to get wrong. Typeform-the-company asked promoters to tweet. Testimonial shows a closed-survey message with no upsell. A second ask on the thank-you page is only free if it does not contaminate the score you just collected.
- Recording the score before the follow-up is the quiet reliability win. Typeform's GA fix is the clearest public example. If your tool drops the score when someone abandons the text box, you do not have an NPS programme — you have a form completion rate.
None of this replaces the whole testimonial pipeline. The survey is the measurement. The proof ask that follows a 9 or 10 is a different email on a different day.
Building yours this week
Here is the order I would use.
- Write the question once and leave it alone. Prefer the Reichheld wording with your product name in the noun slot. If you must change it, date the change and do not compare scores across that date — same rule as in the email templates post.
- One optional follow-up, bucket-aware if your tool allows. "What's the main reason for your score?" for everyone is fine. Better: a dissatisfaction prompt for 0–6 and a "what should we double down on?" prompt for 9–10.
- Capture the score even if the text is blank. If your tool cannot do that, make the follow-up optional and stop there.
- Skip identity when you already have it. Pre-fill the embed; invite by name and email; do not make a known customer re-type who they are.
- Decide the promoter next step before you send. A tweet, a review, a testimonial, a case study — pick one. The case-study path is in our guide to customer case studies. Do not put that ask inside the NPS survey itself.
- Send yourself the survey on your phone. If the ID screen, the scale and the follow-up take more than half a minute, cut something.
Doing this with Testimonial
You can run every pattern above in a general survey tool. Where NPS with auto-routing earns its place is the step after the score: promoters can get a testimonial request or a case-study invite with name and email already filled, passives a templated follow-up, detractors an alert to support. Thresholds move per survey. The respondent path is the three screens above.
NPS is on the Ultimate + plan, $95 a month per space. Details on pricing.
Where it is the wrong fit. If you need the 0–10 scale clickable inside the email body, send from a tool that embeds the scale and pipe the score into your routing afterwards. If you need twelve follow-up questions, you are not running NPS — use a research survey and keep this one short.
Wrapping up
Six SaaS NPS surveys, six different answers to the same jobs: lock or edit the question, split or share the follow-up, collect the score in the inbox or on a page, ask who they are or skip it, and leave the thank-you page alone.
Shipping a survey this week and stuck between an in-email scale and a branded page? Reply with which tool you are on and I will tell you which of these six I would copy first.
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