The NPS® Question
The Net Promoter Score® question, which the NPS survey is built on is the standardised metric that businesses and other organisations can use to measure customer satisfaction.
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.
This is achieved by asking your customer the following NPS question - with the wording of the question being consistent for all respondents in the sample - and having them rate their response on a scale of 1 to 10.
How likely is it that you would recommend [our company] [our product] [our service] to a friend or colleague?
Those answering between 1 and 6 will be labelled "detractors", those between 7 or 8 "neutral" and those answering 9 or 10 as "promoters".
The responses are then collated and calculated to give an overall score.
How is NPS calculated?
You can calculate your Net Promoter Score by working out the difference between the proportion of promoters and detractors, to generate a score of between -100 and 100.
Depending on the size of your survey sample there are two common ways of doing this:
- Using a simple manual calculation, for surveys where you only have a small number of responses to the question
- Using an Excel formula, for any survey with a larger data set, where the score would be time consuming to calculate manually
Our guide to calculating your Net Promoter Score goes into this in more detail, however SmartSurvey users can also benefit from our Net Promoter Score survey software. This includes a built-in NPS question and will collect data that’s automatically processed to show you the correct score via our reporting tools.
What is a good NPS score?
A good Net Promoter Score is technically anything above zero, since this implies that you have more promoters than detractors. A score above 50 is viewed as excellent and above 70 outstanding (and rare). Given that there isn’t a universal standard for NPS, most companies will compare their scores to other businesses in their industry.
What are the benefits of a healthy NPS score?
Net Promoter Score benefits can be wide ranging, with the advantages that a high NPS score brings including anything from helping to grow your customer base, to increasing the number of products and services that existing customers buy from you.
You can also think of the NPS definition as a growth indicator, as it’s essentially a customer satisfaction metric with responses to the NPS question ultimately helping you to find out:
- How satisfied consumers are with your products or services.
- How loyal they are to your brand.
- How likely they are to recommend your company to others.
If your organisation runs regular customer surveys or more specifically surveys to measure customer satisfaction, collecting NPS data can be an extremely useful part of your strategy, enabling you to better track your customers overall contentment levels.
A great example can be provided by our Net Promoter Score case study, which highlights the work that our client IKEA did to better engage and improve their customers’ satisfaction levels. Following the deployment of their strategy IKEA’s Net Promoter Score jumped from 25 to 70.
Similarly, the use of NPS data can be hugely beneficial in supporting other customer experience strategies. A good example is the growing number of brands deploying Voice of the Customer questionnaires, where the Net Promoter Score question can be used to help increase understanding of customers’ preferences and expectations.
Get started with NPS
Pick from a selection of suitable NPS survey templates or sign up for free to get started quickly.
NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter Score® are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.