What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
NPS is a single-question survey turned into a number. Customers are asked how likely they are to recommend the company, product or service on a scale from 0 to 10. Scores of 9 and 10 are promoters, 7 and 8 are passives, 0 to 6 are detractors. Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters and the result, somewhere between minus 100 and plus 100, is the score. A follow-up question, usually "why?", collects the reasons.
It was introduced in 2003 as a simpler alternative to long satisfaction surveys, on the argument that willingness to recommend predicts growth better than stated satisfaction. It has since become a standard metric in boardrooms, often as the one customer number a leadership team tracks.
Why it matters
Why NPS matters
Because it is simple enough to be answered and compared. Customers will answer one question when they will not answer twenty, so response rates are high and the metric can be tracked over time, by segment and against industry benchmarks. For a service business, the score and the comments behind it are often the earliest signal that a relationship is drifting, well before the client stops calling.
It also matters because it forces a conversation about detractors. A business can have a satisfied majority and still be losing ground if its unhappy minority is loud. NPS makes that minority visible and gives it a number.
In practice
How NPS works in practice
- 01
Decide when to ask. Relationship NPS goes out on a schedule (quarterly or annually) to every active client and tracks the overall health of the relationship. Transactional NPS goes out after a specific event, such as a project wrapping or a delivery, and tracks the experience of that moment. Keep the survey to the score and one open question, send it from a person rather than a system, and decide up front whether responses are anonymous, since that changes whether you can follow up.
- 02
Then act on it. Read every comment. Call every detractor within days, not to argue but to understand. Look for patterns in the passives, who are the group most easily moved. Share the score and the themes with the team that does the work, since they are the ones who change it. Track the trend rather than the absolute number, and treat a drop as a problem to diagnose rather than a figure to explain away.
Watch out
What people get wrong about NPS
Treating the number as the point. A score without the comments is a thermometer with no diagnosis. The other mistake is comparing scores across industries or companies that survey differently; a 40 in one field is excellent and in another is average, and a score built from a hand-picked sample means nothing.
The third is surveying without acting. Customers who give feedback and see nothing change become detractors on principle, and they remember being asked.
