While running NPS® Surveys can provide a great overview of how happy your customers are with your business they can also highlight the numbers that are unhappy. This is equally important, because if you’re to improve your overall Net Promoter Score, you will need to reduce your number of unhappy customers, while further increasing the numbers that love your business, which any good Net Promoter Score example will demonstrate.

By focusing on exactly this and using NPS surveys to better understand why some of their customers were unhappy and identify ways to resolve this, one client's NPS example perfectly highlights the value of what can be achieved through NPS.

But before we explore this in a bit more depth, it’s important to properly understand Net Promoter Score.

What is Net Promoter Score?

Essentially the definition of Net Promoter Score is a standardised metric, which you can use to measure how happy customers are with your business.

It’s based on the idea that the key indicator of satisfaction with your company, product or service is whether a customer will recommend a friend, family member, or colleague to use or purchase it.

The NPS question

The common NPS question asks respondents, “How likely is it that you would recommend our [company] [product] [service] to a friend or colleague? – and getting them to rate their response on a scale of 1 to 10.

Based on their answers, respondents are then placed into three groups, with those who’ve offered a rating of between 1 and 6 labelled as “detractors”, those between 7 or 8 “neutral” and those answering 9 or 10 “promoters”.

Having identified your total number of promoters and detractors, the responses are then collated and calculated to provide the overall score.

Calculation of Net Promoter Score

After you’ve collated your responses, you can calculate your NPS by working out the difference between the proportion of promoters and detractors, to generate a score of between -100 and 100.

Depending your data size there are two main ways of doing this:

• A simple manual calculation – ideal when you have a small number of responses
• NPS Excel Formula – better for larger data sets, which would be more time consuming to calculate manually

However, some NPS survey software, including our very own is now available with a built-in Net Promoter Score question, that will collect data that’s automatically processed to show you the correct score via our reporting tools.

The positive impact of NPS

Re-visiting our earlier Net Promoter Score example, our client - a flat-pack furniture giant - employed NPS as part of a business strategy to improve understanding of their smaller group of unhappy customers, and in doing so resolve more of their issues and improve their overall NPS.

When employing this strategy in tandem with switching to mobile surveys utilising our surveys by SMS option, they were able to increase their overall Net Promoter Score from 25 to 70.

More about NPS

• The benefits of Net Promoter Score
• What does a good NPS look like?
• Try our free NPS calculator

Get started with NPS

To start capturing your Net Promoter Score, sign up to SmartSurvey or speak to our sales team.

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