Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS asks one question, how likely are you to recommend us, and sorts the answers into Detractors, Passives and Promoters to give a single trackable number for whether customers are pulling for you or tolerating you.
Three rungs climb from Detractor to Promoter, with Passives sitting on the middle step.
Reach for this when…
- You need one comparable number for customer sentiment across teams or time.
- Churn is rising and you want an early signal before the invoices confirm it.
- Leadership wants a simple loyalty metric they can track quarter to quarter.
How to run it
- Ask the one question: how likely are you to recommend us, 0 to 10.
- Sort responses: 0-6 Detractors, 7-8 Passives, 9-10 Promoters.
- Calculate the score: percentage Promoters minus percentage Detractors.
- Follow up every Detractor and Promoter with why, not just the number.
- Track the trend over time, and act on the follow-up answers, not the score alone.
A worked example
Situation. Anna Gruber managed customer experience at Hausglanz, a home appliance retailer in Graz, Austria, that had healthy sales but a rising number of quiet returns nobody had explained.
Applied. She rolled out NPS after every purchase and delivery, then read every Detractor comment instead of just watching the score, which surfaced a pattern: installation appointments were arriving without the parts the technician needed.
Result. Fixing the parts-dispatch process moved the score from +12 to +34 over two quarters, and returns dropped alongside it, because the fix addressed what Detractors had actually written, not the number itself.
The catch
The single score hides the reasons underneath it, so teams chase the number without fixing anything, or game it by asking only happy customers. It also compares badly across industries and cultures, since what counts as a '9' varies by market.
A rising NPS with no change in what customers actually complain about is a survey artefact, not a recovery.
Origin: Fred Reichheld; Bain & Company