Use the NPS survey to put Net Promoter Score® to work. Quickly and easily find out how likely your customers are to recommend you, and track trends over time.

What is Net Promoter Score?

A Net Promoter Score is a measure of how happy your customers are with your business. NPS is based on two core ideas:

The first is that the most reliable way to measure customer satisfaction is to is to ask how likely a customer is to recommend your business to a friend or colleague.

The second is that customers fall into three broad types, or NPS groups: Detractors, Passives, and Promoters.

See also: Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS).

Net Promoter Score question

Asking your customers the question “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”, you invite them to give a value from 0 to 10.

Read more about the Net Promoter Score question.

What is a good NPS score?

The breakdown of the NPS groups goes like this:

Read more about what makes a good NPS score.

Advantages of Net Promoter Score

Because Net Promoter Scores are a standardised measure based on a single question, it makes it easy to compare your performance both over time and to other businesses in your industry or sector.

For your customers, asking a simple and quick question means that they’re more likely to give you a response where a more involved survey may be off-putting.

For the people in your business, it introduces a quantifiable measure, based on simple terminology; the benefit being an easy-to-understand measure of customer satisfaction.

Read more about the benefits of Net Promoter Score.

How do I use NPS with SmartSurvey?

We’ve introduced a pre-set question type to our survey software so you can quickly and easily add the NPS question to any survey that you create.

The Net Promoter Score question is available out-of-the-box with our Business plan or above, or can be constructed in our survey builder.

Net Promoter Score calculation

Once your NPS survey is complete, and you’ve collated the results, you’ll need to do a simple calculation to get your final score. You can do this quickly and easily by using a free NPS calculator like our own, illustrated above, or use a manual calculation to identify your score.

First of all, you need to identify the numbers for two of the three NPS groups, Detractors and Promoters.

Start with the number of Promoters and subtract the number of Detractors. Divide the answer by the number of responses in total. Then multiply your answer by 100. The number you get, rounded to the nearest whole number, is your NPS score.

For large survey sets, that could be tricky, but you can calculate Net Promoter Score in excel using a single calculation by using the following formula:

=ROUNDUP((100*((COUNTIF([Data],">8")-COUNTIF([Data],"<7"))/COUNT([Data]))),0)

Just replace [Data] with the location of the NPS answer data range in your response spreadsheet.

If that still seems too tricky, then don't worry. If you have your responses already collected, you can use our free NPS calculator to get an overall score. Or use the pre-set Net Promoter Score question when creating your survey in SmartSurvey, and let our software calculate your NPS for you.

Read more about how NPS is calculated.

Interpreting NPS

The lowest possible Net Promoter Score is -100, and the highest possible is 100, with zero being in the middle.

Any given score isn't necessarily good or bad, it has to be taken in context, either compared to your own business's performance over time (is it going up? then that's good), or benchmarked against other businesses in your sector. How do you get those benchmarks? Well, you can ask your customers how they feel about your competitors directly using SmartSurvey, or alternatively, benchmark reports for various industry sectors can be bought online.

With a simple focus, and a clear message to your business, the benefits of tracking Net Promoter Scores lie I the ability to get a clear idea of the challenges that face your business.

Net Promoter Score FAQs

Basics

What does Net Promoter Score mean?

Net Promoter Score is concerned with measuring a customer's willingness to recommend a company's products or services to others, based on an index ranging from -100 to 100. It's used to help gauge a customer's overall satisfaction with a company's product or service and their loyalty to that brand.

How does NPS work?

Net Promoter Score works by getting organisations to ask their customers the standardised NPS question "On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?".

Respondents' answers are then grouped according to whether they are detractors, neutral or promoters. The difference between the proportion of promoters and detractors is then calculated to generate an NPS score, giving a clearer picture about customer satisfaction levels.

What is Net Promoter Score used for?

By enabling organisations to track and measure how they are perceived by their customers, Net Promoter Score, which helps measure the loyalty of customers towards a company, is typically viewed as the gold standard metric in helping organisations measure the success of their customer experience programmes.

Is NPS a good metric

While NPS offers a great way to focus people's attention on customer loyalty, it's not strong enough as a stand-alone metric. To fully understand and improve your customers' loyalty towards you, you need a much more strategic and systematic approach to measuring it and taking follow up actions.

Is Net promoter score a percentage?

No, you work out your Net Promoter Score first, by calculating the difference between the percentage of your Promoters and Detractors. Then your NSP is expressed as an absolute number between -100 and +100. For example, if you have 30% Promoters, 50% Passives and 20% Detractors, your NPS is +10.

Why is NPS so important?

Organisations use Net Promoter Score, or 'NPS', to measure customer satisfaction and quickly assess their brand's health and the loyalty shown towards it. NPS is also valuable in enabling organisations to see how their customer service is perceived, where improvements might be made and benchmark their performance against others in their industry.

Is Net Promoter Score useful?

While NPS cannot give you a precise insight into customers' feelings and why they rated you the way they did, it's still valuable. It gives you a baseline from which to gauge the success of any improvements you have made, by viewing the respective changes in your score.

Using NPS

Who uses Net Promoter Score?

At least two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 use Net Promoter Score, including most or all financial service, airline, retail and telecom companies. Its benefits mean NPS has also moved into the C-suites of the largest companies and owner offices of thousands of smaller ones, broadly extending its global reach.

When should you run an NPS survey?

The best time to run your NPS survey depends on your business type. For example:

• A SaaS (Software as a Service) business typically asks the NPS question 30 days after sign-up - giving users time to get familiar with their service
• Businesses that own a service but not the final product (think eBay or Booking.com) typically ask the question when an order is placed/transaction completed - the point at which the customers' experience with the business ends and a third party provides the product or service

What should you ask when you run an NPS survey?

The standard NPS question asks, "On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?". A strong NPS survey also delves to understand why, through questions including:

• What's the reasoning behind your score?
• What can we do to improve your score?

These additional qualitative answers reveal what's working for a company's most satisfied customers, and what's causing any negative experience – to help resolve and improve the latter.

How to improve NPS

Having calculated your Net Promoter Score, there's 6 key steps to help further improve your NPS. Encourage internal buy-in. Make it easy for people to promote your brand. Engage with your promoters, but don't ignore your detractors. Respond to your customers. Maintain consistency. And finally keep monitoring and improving your score.

NPS and eNPS

What is difference between NPS and eNPS?

eNPS stands for Employee Net Promoter Score. While both NPS and eNPS measure loyalty they target difference audiences. NPS typically measures results from customers or members, while eNPS is more concerned with measuring the results and company ratings provided by employees.

What does eNPS measure?

The employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), or Employee NPS as it's otherwise known, allows you to measure your staff members' willingness to be ambassadors for your company by advocating employment there. It's based on the Net Promoter Score, developed by Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld to measure customer loyalty.

What is a good Net Promoter Score for employees?

Given that eNPS can range from -100 to 100, then technically, a good Net Promoter Score is anything above zero, since this implies that you have more promoters than detractors. However, more generally, a score between 10-30 is considered good, above 50 excellent and one above 70 outstanding (and rare).

NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter Score® are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.