A practical guide to the Intercom NPS survey in 2025

Let's be honest, customer feedback isn't just a "nice-to-have" anymore. It's pretty much the lifeblood of any growing business. One of the quickest ways to check your customers' pulse is with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. It’s a simple, standard way to figure out how loyal your customers really are.

While a tool like Intercom gives you a built-in way to collect this data, just getting the scores is step one. The real magic, and the challenge, is turning all that feedback into actual improvements for your product and your support team. This guide will walk you through setting up your Intercom NPS survey, figuring out what the results are really telling you, and tackling its limitations so you can make that feedback work for you.

What exactly is an Intercom NPS survey?

First, a quick refresher. The Net Promoter Score comes from asking customers one simple question: "On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?"

Based on their score, customers fall into three camps:

• Promoters (9-10): These are your champions. They're loyal, love what you do, and are likely to spread the good word.

• Passives (7-8): They're happy enough, but not blown away. They could easily be swayed by a competitor with a shiny new offer.

• Detractors (0-6): These are your unhappy campers. They've had a bad experience and might share that negative feedback with others.

An Intercom NPS survey is just the feature inside the Intercom platform that lets you ask this question. The biggest plus is convenience. You can measure customer sentiment right inside the tool you're already using every day, without having to juggle another piece of software. You can pop these surveys up inside your app, on your website, or send them through email.

How to set up and send an Intercom NPS survey

Getting an NPS survey out the door in Intercom is surprisingly quick. Here’s a step-by-step look at how to get it done.

Create a new Intercom NPS survey

First things first, head over to the Outbound section in the main menu. From there, find the + New message button in the top right corner and pick Survey as your content type. You can either start from scratch or grab one of Intercom’s templates to get going faster.

Pick the right Intercom NPS survey format

Next, you’ll have to choose between a "Small format" or "Large format" survey.

• Small format surveys are less in-your-face, usually showing up as a small banner. They’re perfect for a classic NPS survey where you just want a quick pulse check without derailing what the user is doing. Stick with this one if you want the most replies.

• Large format surveys are bigger and let you add an intro screen to give a bit more context.

You can also tweak settings like who the survey looks like it's "from" (a specific person on your team or just the company) and whether people can just close it. You could make it mandatory by disabling the dismiss option, but tread carefully there, as it can feel a bit aggressive.

Customize your Intercom NPS survey questions

Now for the most important bit. In the survey editor, choose the NPS® question type from the dropdown. This automatically sets up the 0-10 scale for you.

But whatever you do, don't stop there. A number by itself doesn't tell you why someone is a detractor or a promoter. Always add a follow-up question. Click "Add question" and pick the "Long text entry" option. Ask something open-ended like, "What’s the main reason for your score?" This is where you'll find the gold. You can also change the survey's colors to match your brand so it feels like a part of your product.

Target the right people at the right time

Who you send the survey to and when you send it matters. A lot. Blasting every new user with an NPS survey on their second day is a recipe for useless data. Instead, use Intercom's audience rules to be more strategic.

For example, you could set up a rule to only survey users who have been around for more than 30 days and have recently done something important, like using a new feature or getting help from your support team. This way, you know the feedback is based on meaningful experience.

Schedule and launch your survey

Once everything looks good, it's time to go live. You can either send the survey immediately to everyone who fits your rules or put it on a recurring schedule. Sending it every six months, for instance, is a great way to see how customer loyalty is changing over time.

Looking at Intercom NPS feedback: What Intercom reports can (and can't) do

So, the data is rolling in. Great. Now the real work begins. Intercom gives you some basic reporting tools, but you’ll quickly notice where they fall a bit short.

What Intercom's survey reports show

Intercom's built-in reports offer a decent bird's-eye view. You'll see your overall NPS score, which is automatically calculated (it's the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors). The dashboard also has bar graphs showing the breakdown of your promoters, passives, and detractors, and you can track these numbers over time.

It’s fine for a quick look at customer sentiment or for sharing high-level numbers with the rest of the team. But it's really just a snapshot.

The tough part with Intercom NPS: Where the native reports leave you hanging

The big issue with relying only on Intercom's reports is that they leave the most important analysis entirely up to you, and it’s a manual slog.

• The qualitative feedback grind: Remember that follow-up question, "What’s the main reason for your score?" It’s going to generate hundreds, maybe thousands, of text comments. To make any sense of them, someone on your team has to read every single comment, manually tag them with themes (like "bug," "feature request," or "great support"), and then try to spot trends in a massive spreadsheet. It's slow, tedious work that just doesn't scale.

• A lack of clear actions: Intercom’s reports show you what the score is, but they don't connect the dots for you. They can’t tell you that a third of your detractors are complaining about the same bug, or that all your promoters are raving about a feature you should be investing more in. You're left to figure out the "so what?" on your own.

• Disconnected data: The NPS feedback lives in its own little bubble inside the survey report. It doesn't automatically get used to improve your help center articles, train your chatbot, or give your support agents more context for their next conversation. A detractor might complain about a confusing part of your app, but that insight doesn't automatically create a task to go update the knowledge base article about it. It's just a data point, and disconnected data rarely leads to action.

Intercom NPS pricing and a better way to use your feedback

Cost is another thing to think about. Getting access to Intercom's survey features isn't always cheap or easy. This is where you have to weigh the convenience of an all-in-one tool against the power you'd get from a more specialized platform.

How Intercom's survey pricing works

Intercom's Surveys feature usually isn't part of their standard plans. It’s often bundled as part of their "Proactive Support Plus" add-on, which costs extra on top of their core subscription.

Honestly, Intercom's pricing can be a bit of a maze. You're often paying per agent, plus extra for their AI agent, Fin, based on how many issues it resolves. This can make your monthly bill hard to predict, especially if your support volume goes up and down. To get surveys and other advanced features, you often have to be on their higher-tier plans, which usually means getting on a call with their sales team just to get a price. That can be a real drag for teams that just want to get started.

Turning Intercom NPS feedback into action with an AI support platform

This is where a tool like eesel AI changes the game. It’s not about replacing your survey; it’s about making the results you're already getting way more powerful. eesel AI connects the dots between collecting feedback and actually doing something with it.

• It just works with your tools: You don't have to rip out everything you're currently using. eesel AI connects to platforms like Intercom with a one-click setup that takes just a few minutes. No long onboarding calls or waiting around for developers.

• It does the tedious analysis for you: Instead of someone having to read through thousands of NPS comments, eesel AI pulls in and analyzes all of your customer conversations. It automatically spots trends, recurring problems, and gaps in your knowledge base from all that written feedback. It turns hours of manual work into an automated, real-time insights engine.

• It helps you fix problems proactively: This is the really cool part. When eesel AI finds a common complaint from your detractors, it doesn't just flag it. It can automatically draft a new article for your knowledge base to address the issue. This turns complaints directly into solutions, helping you fill those information gaps and improve your self-service support.

• Clear pricing: Unlike confusing, multi-layered pricing models, eesel AI has straightforward plans that make sense. There are no fees per resolution, so you're not punished for helping more customers. You know exactly what you're paying for, with no surprises.

Stop collecting Intercom NPS scores and start driving improvements

The Intercom NPS survey is a solid tool for grabbing customer loyalty data. It gets the job done if all you need is a number to put on a slide.

But the real value of NPS is buried in the written comments, and it's only unlocked when you can analyze that feedback efficiently and feed those insights back into your support operations. That’s where the native tools often hit a wall.

AI platforms like eesel AI are the logical next step. They turn raw, disconnected feedback into a cycle of continuous improvement, helping you build a better product and a happier, more loyal customer base.

Ready to stop just tracking scores and start taking action? See how eesel AI can bring all your customer feedback together and put your support on autopilot.