Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer-loyalty metric built from a single survey question: "How likely are you to recommend [product/ company] to a friend or colleague?", scored 0 to 10. Its appeal is simplicity — one question, one number, cheap to run repeatedly and easy to trend over time.

Scoring method

Respondents are sorted into three groups by their score:

• Promoters (9-10) — loyal, enthusiastic customers likely to keep buying and to refer others.
• Passives (7-8) — satisfied but unenthusiastic; not actively promoting, not actively at risk.
• Detractors (0-6) — unhappy customers, at risk of churning and capable of actively discouraging others.

The score itself is the percentage of respondents who are promoters minus the percentage who are detractors (passives are counted in the total but don't otherwise enter the formula). The result ranges from -100 to +100; there's no universal "good" number — what matters is the score relative to the organization's own history and, where available, its industry.

What it's good for, and what it isn't

NPS is good for what it's designed for: a simple, cheap, trackable trend that can be run repeatedly (monthly, quarterly, per interaction) and compared over time or across segments. It is not a substitute for understanding why customers scored the way they did — the number by itself says nothing about what's driving loyalty or dissatisfaction. Pairing the score with a follow-up open-ended question ("What's the main reason for your score?") is what turns a trend line into something the business can act on.

Common pitfalls

• A single point-in-time score treated as meaningful on its own — an NPS of 40 means little without a trend or a comparable baseline to read it against; the value of NPS is mostly in its movement over time, not any one reading.
• Biased or too-small a sample — a survey sent only to happy, engaged customers (or with a response rate so low that only the most motivated respondents answer) produces a score that doesn't represent the broader customer base.
• No follow-up question — collecting the 0-10 score with nothing else leaves a low score with no clue what to actually fix, and a high score with no clue what to protect.
• Chasing the score itself — optimizing survey timing or wording to nudge the number up (e.g. surveying only right after a good experience) produces a flattering number that no longer reflects actual customer sentiment.
• Ignoring segment differences — one blended NPS across all customers can hide that a specific plan tier, region, or cohort is far less satisfied than the overall number suggests.

Learn more

• Customer Success Plan for using NPS as one ongoing health indicator within a customer relationship.
• Churn Analysis for correlating low scores and detractor status with actual churn outcomes.
• Customer Journey Map for deciding at which points in the journey to actually ask the NPS question.
• Customer Persona for interpreting NPS results by the type of customer responding rather than as one undifferentiated group.