Respondents answer on a nought to ten scale. Nines and tens are promoters, sevens and eights are passives, and everything from six down counts as a detractor. Subtracting detractors from promoters gives a number that can range from minus one hundred to plus one hundred, which is why NPS figures look nothing like percentages.
It is deliberately blunt. NPS tells you about the overall relationship rather than any single interaction, so it is useful as a long-run direction indicator and close to useless for diagnosing what went wrong last Tuesday. The free-text follow-up asking why is usually where the real value hides.
For a service business, word of mouth is often the main growth channel, so the sentiment NPS tries to capture genuinely matters. The lever you can actually pull is responsiveness: replying quickly and helpfully to the first enquiry sets the tone for everything that follows.
Related guides
Related terms
Browse all 104 terms- Customer satisfaction scoreCustomer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a metric that measures how satisfied a customer was with a specific interaction, collected by asking them to rate the experience immediately afterwards.
- Customer effort scoreCustomer effort score (CES) measures how much effort a customer had to expend to get their issue resolved, based on the idea that making things easy predicts loyalty better than delighting people does.
- Ticket deflectionTicket deflection is when a customer gets their answer through self-service or automation and therefore never opens a support ticket or contacts a human agent.
- EscalationEscalation is the process of passing a customer enquiry to someone with more expertise, seniority, or authority, because the person or system handling it first cannot resolve it.