What is Net Promoter Score?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric based on a single question: ‘How likely are you to recommend [product/company] to a friend or colleague?’ on a 0-10 scale.
How it works
Respondents are classified as Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), or Detractors (0-6). NPS is calculated as the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors, yielding a score from -100 to +100. Introduced by Fred Reichheld (2003), NPS is valued for its simplicity and correlation with business growth. However, it has significant limitations: the score itself provides no diagnostic information about why customers are satisfied or dissatisfied, the single number conflates very different sentiment patterns, and cultural differences affect rating scales. NPS is most useful as a trending metric over time, combined with follow-up questions about the reasons behind the score.
Applied example
A software company’s NPS drops from 45 to 30 after a major release. The score alone does not explain why. Follow-up analysis of the open-ended ‘why’ responses reveals that the new navigation redesign is the primary complaint among Detractors, providing the diagnostic information the number alone cannot.
Why it matters
NPS provides a simple, comparable measure of customer loyalty that is useful for tracking trends and benchmarking, but it must be paired with qualitative follow-up to be actionable.
