Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A survey metric derived from likelihood-to-recommend, reported as promoters minus detractors.
The calculation and what it discards
Ask how likely someone is to recommend you, 0 to 10. Promoters score 9–10, detractors 0–6, passives 7–8 and are excluded. Subtract detractor percentage from promoter percentage.
What the buckets hide
Making it useful
Fix the method — same question, same scale, same timing relative to the customer lifecycle — and treat any change as a break in the series.
Report the response rate. A score from 8% of customers is a measure of who felt strongly enough to answer.
Segment by tenure and size. A blended score averages a honeymoon cohort with a renewal-eligible one.
Read the comments. The free text is where the actionable content is; the number is a way of sorting it.
Where it misleads
Asking after a positive interaction inflates it; asking after support contact deflates it. Timing is a larger lever than sentiment.
Response bias is severe — satisfied and furious customers answer, the indifferent majority does not.
It measures stated intent, not behaviour. Promoters churn, detractors renew.
Used as a team target it stops measuring sentiment, because the people surveyed can be chosen and the moment can be picked.
How to use it without over-reading it
Treat the verbatim comments as the data and the score as the index. The number tells you something changed; the comments tell you what.
Hold the sampling method constant. Score movements caused by surveying a different population are indistinguishable from real change.
Report the response rate alongside the score. A score from 8% of customers describes the 8% willing to respond, who are rarely representative.
Segment by cohort and by role. An NPS blended across daily users and economic buyers averages two different relationships.
Track the trend over several periods. Single-period movement in NPS is dominated by sample composition at most realistic response rates.
RELATED TERMS
Churn
Customers or revenue lost over a period. The leak determining whether acquisition compounds or merely replaces.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
A survey measure of how much effort a customer had to expend to get something done.
Customer Health Score
A composite indicator combining usage, engagement and support signals to estimate the likelihood an account renews.
COMMON QUESTIONS
- How is NPS calculated?
- Percentage scoring 9–10 minus percentage scoring 0–6. Scores of 7–8 are counted as passives and excluded, which is why two very different response distributions can produce the same score.
- Is NPS a good metric?
- It is a reasonable trend measure within one company using one method. It is a poor comparison between companies, because sampling, timing and question wording differ and all three move the score more than sentiment does.
- What is a good NPS?
- Better than your own last one, measured the same way. Cross-company benchmarks compare different sampling methods, and the collapsing of 0–6 into one bucket means the same score can describe very different customer bases.
- What should you actually do with NPS?
- Read the free-text comments and close the loop with detractors. The score is a trigger for a conversation; the conversation is where anything actionable comes from.
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