Net Promoter Score (NPS): The Ultimate Guide - Qualtrics (2023)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) definition

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score which is a metric used in customer experience programs. NPS measures the loyalty of customers to a company. NPS scores are measured with a single-question survey and reported with a number from the range -100 to +100, a higher score is desirable.

NPS® is often held up as the gold standard customer experience metric. First developed in 2003 by Bain and Company, it’s now used by millions of businesses to measure and track how they’re perceived by their customers. NPS scores determine segmenting between poor and positive feedback.

It measures customer perception based on one simple question:

How likely is it that you would recommend [Organization X/Product Y/Service Z] to a friend or colleague?

Respondents give a rating between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely) and, depending on their response, customers fall into one of 3 categories to establish an NPS score:

  • Promoters respond with a score of 9 or 10 and are typically loyal and enthusiastic customers.
  • Passives respond with a score of 7 or 8. They are satisfied with your service but not happy enough to be considered promoters.
  • Detractors respond with a score of 0 to 6. These are unhappy customers who are unlikely to buy from you again, and may even discourage others from buying from you.

Get started with our free NPS survey template

(Video) What Is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

How do you calculate Net Promoter Score?

It’s simple to calculate your final NPS score – just subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

For example, if 10% of respondents are Detractors, 20% are Passives and 70% are Promoters, your NPS score would be 70-10 = 60.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): The Ultimate Guide - Qualtrics (1)

Detractors

(score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth

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Passives

(score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): The Ultimate Guide - Qualtrics (3)

Promoters

(score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and fuel growth by referring others.

(Video) Net Promoter Score in User Experience

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See how turning detractors into promoters can impact your NPS and improve loyalty to your brand.

Transactional vs relational NPS programs

Relational NPS surveys are deployed on a regular basis (i.e.- quarterly or annually). The goal is to get a periodic pulse on your customers and understand how they simply feel about your company overall. This data can be used to check the health of customer year-over-year and provide a benchmark for company success. Transactional NPS surveys are sent out after the customer interacts with your company (i.e.- a purchase or support call). It’s used to understand customer satisfaction on a granular level and provide feedback about a very specific topic. It’s best to use both types to understand your customer at macro and micro levels.

What can you measure using NPS?

You can measure almost anything using an NPS score. In addition to understanding the overall NPS for your organization, you can track scores for everything from individual products, stores, web pages, or even staff members. Consider implementing NPS into marketing or customer experience strategy because it can be used with industry NPS benchmarks to see how you’re doing compared to your competitors. It will help you understand your target market better and see how they respond to your product or service, social media campaigns, and customer service agents. The goal is to gain loyal customers who become brand evangelists instead of consumers. Get started by measuring your NPS score with this free template.

Using NPS to survey and measure employees (eNPS)

While most Net Promoter Score surveys are designed to collect customer feedback they can also be used to measure employee sentiment, or what is commonly referred to as employee net promoter score (eNPS). eNPS measures how likely your staff members are to recommend your company as a place to work. Qualtrics recommends against using eNPS to measure employee feedback in favor of other more comprehensive survey methodology such as employee engagement surveys. eNPS lacks the complexity an engagement survey has, as it’s only one question. It can be a good a starting place, but doesn’t give you a complete picture of employee health, and you won’t know where to make improvements once you get the data.

Get started with our free NPS survey template

How do you create an NPS Survey?

NPS surveys are relatively easy to create (in fact free templates like ours mean the work is done for you) but you must think about the long-term data use when deciding how you’ll administer them. You could use survey software, but that will limit your ability to take action on the results because it only measures one metric. We recommend using a Customer Experience Management Platform or NPS software to get a comprehensive view of your customers. Customer experience management platforms allow you to keep track of all the interactions your company has with your customers, both current and potential. You can then use NPS data to see which touchpoints have high NPS scores and which touchpoints have lower scores. For a guide to the questions to ask in your NPS survey, read on below.

(Video) How to Create a Net Promoter Score NPS Survey

Demographic questions

It’s not uncommon to start an NPS survey with demographic questions like age, gender, income, etc. This response data can be helpful when you are creating segmentation during your research and analysis. Try to avoid demographic questions in the survey if they are not needed, or you can get the answers from data you already have in other systems, like a CRM or customer database. Remember, the fewer survey questions the better.

The Net Promoter Score question

This is the core question that we mentioned earlier which will be the primary way you measure your score. The other questions mentioned are used to make the data easier to analyze and follow up with the respondent to address their feedback.

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Reason for your score?

In this open text question, you ask the customer what their primary reason for giving the numerical score in the previous question. This will help you discover the drivers for promoters and detractors in your responses. Going through the open text feedback can be a time-consuming process, so consider using a text analysis tool likeText iQ.If you are fielding more than a few dozen responses in your distribution a text analysis tool will save you a lot of time.

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How can we make your experience better?

In this question, you ask the respondent to suggest what you can do to improve their experience. This can be helpful if you are planning to do close loop followup and customer ticketing with your responses. If you know this answer you already have a headstart to resolving the issue directly with the customer. Keep in mind, that not all cases will need both the “reason for your score” and “how could we improve” questions as many times that will have the same answer. For example, if the reason they gave a bad score was, “long call waiting times”, the way to increase the experience will probably be to, “shorten wait times”.

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Permission to followup with the customer

It’s a good practice to ask the survey respondent if you can follow up with them if needed. Not all people will want to talk to someone about their issue. Depending on how your survey was distributed, you may or not have that customer’s email or phone number, so don’t forget to ask for it you need to. Don’t ask for this information if you can get their contact info with metadata from another system, similar to the demographic question mentioned earlier.

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(Video) Why Top Companies Are Choosing Qualtrics

Learn more about Net Promoter Score questions

What can you do with your NPS score?

Remember, NPS is an indicator. It provides an overall metric to track and it allows you to monitor improvements in a product, service or organization. But there is so much that influences NPS. Take call center agents, for example, one agent may have an NPS score of 78 while a colleague has an NPS of 32. Considered just on their scores, it’s almost impossible to understand why. If you understand the context that each agent is working in it might start to make sense. Perhaps the agent with the lower score is working with customers who are trying to cancel service where the other is working with brand new clients. Naturally, these two agents will have different scores due to the customer’s experience before they contact the agent.

You might also be tracking things like Average Handling Time (AHT) or First Call Resolution (FCR) or even asking for feedback on particular traits like was the agent polite or helpful. These are all data points that can help you understand what’s driving your NPS score. So when you analyze the data, you can understand what’s influencing and changing your scores.

By running a key driver analysis, you might find that AHT is the biggest driver of your NPS score, allowing you to prioritize improvements in that area. You might find too that key drivers are different for different segments like age groups or genders, so you can adapt your approach to different audiences in order to offer the experience they expect.

The more data you can collect and analyze alongside your NPS score, the more you’ll be able to understand what’s driving your customer experience, allowing you to prioritize your improvements to have the biggest impact on your customers.

Using NPS survey responses as an input into a customer churn model

Layering together customer churn data with customer experience metrics, such as NPS, can help you predict when a customer is likely to cancel your service. This can help you closer link your experience data (X-data) to operation data (O-data) such as renewal rates, and It can help you win CX champions with senior leaders. In the past, creating a customer churn model was the work of advanced statisticians, but with Qualtrics Predict iQ, you can set up a model and start identifying customers who are likely to leave and have a customer care team to follow up with them.

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Segmentation in your NPS survey responses

Segmenting your customer’s NPS scores is a powerful and great way to see if you notice patterns and find ways to improve certain touchpoints or experiences. Segmentation can be done by behavior, demographic, social class, or market. You can use NPS scores along the customer journey to ask for feedback through the customer’s preferred channel, at the right moment, and monitor metrics over time.

FAQs

What is a good NPS score qualtrics? ›

Based on this, the company's NPS score will be a number from -100 to +100. A higher score as close to +100 is desirable.

What is NPS Your Ultimate Guide to Net Promoter Score? ›

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score which is a metric used in customer experience programs. NPS measures the loyalty of customers to a company. NPS scores are measured with a single-question survey and reported with a number from the range -100 to +100, a higher score is desirable.

How do you interpret NPS scores? ›

How to interpret Net Promoter Score. Net Promoter Score is always expressed as a number from -100 to 100; the score is negative when a company has more detractors than promoters, and positive in the opposite situation.

How many responses do you need for a Net Promoter Score? ›

Assuming a 10% acceptable error rate and using the sample size equation in the “Numbers, numbers, numbers” section, you'll need about 250 customers to respond to your NPS survey.

What is a good response rate for NPS surveys? ›

Generally, NPS users usually aim for a response rate of 30–50 per cent, the average rate being somewhere around 15 – 30 per cent per cent. This tends to be a lot lower when you first start off.

Is a 70 NPS score good? ›

Any NPS score above 0 is "good". It means that your audience is more loyal than not. Anything above 20 is considered "favourable". Bain & Co, the source of the NPS system, suggests that above 50 is excellent, and above 80 is world class.

What does NPS mean in qualtrics? ›

NPS Software: Net Promoter Score Survey Tool - Qualtrics.

Why is NPS score important? ›

NPS is a benchmarking tool for customer satisfaction. The NPS method, which is based on a two-minute survey, gives insights about customer loyalty by measuring customers' willingness to recommend a business to a friend or acquaintance.

How does NPS work with example? ›

For example, if your current age is entered as 35 and the retirement age is 60, then the total investing period will be 25 years. Enter your monthly contribution towards NPS, it can be as low as Rs. 1,000. The interest earned is on monthly compounding basis.

How do you get a good NPS score? ›

7 Quick Tips on How to Improve NPS Score
  1. Reduce Response Time and AHT.
  2. Identify and Reassign NPS Champions.
  3. Listen to the Needs of Your Customers.
  4. Don't Be a Silo Call Center.
  5. Rethink or Remove NPS Killing- Tasks.
  6. Always Ask for Feedback.
  7. Communicate NPS Results at All Levels.

Is an NPS score of 60 good? ›

Some count a positive score (i.e. any score over 0) as good, since it shows some customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. That said, if an NPS survey is conducted by independent researchers—using strict, scientific sampling methods—a score of 60 or higher is generally a very good NPS in any industry.

What is average NPS score? ›

According to our global benchmark data, which accounts for the NPS of more than 150,000 organizations, the average score is +32. Here's a closer look at the global benchmark numbers: The lower quartile of organizations (or the bottom 25% of performers) have an NPS of 0 or lower.

What is a bad NPS score? ›

If your NPS score is between 30 to 40, you have a good NPS score. You may be far away from the leaders with scores such as 55, 60, etc. But if your score is 25 or even below, it's considered as bad NPS score.

How often should you run NPS survey? ›

If each order is totally unique, surveying folks every couple of months is reasonable. If your product does not change, you probably don't want to survey your customers more than once a quarter to 6 months, just frequent enough to make sure you're maintaining the experience you've been delivering.

How many questions should an NPS survey have? ›

Key Takeaways. NPS survey is a question-based technique that consists of two questions. The first one asks a customer to score your product or service on a scale of 0 to 10. The other, the follow-up question, aims to learn more about the reasons for a person's score.

Is 30 respondents enough for a survey? ›

We generally recommend a panel size of 30 respondents for in-depth interviews if the study includes similar segments within the population. We suggest a minimum sample size of 10, but in this case, population integrity in recruiting is critical.

How many survey responses is enough? ›

As a very rough rule of thumb, 200 responses will provide fairly good survey accuracy under most assumptions and parameters of a survey project. 100 responses are probably needed even for marginally acceptable accuracy.

Is NPS The best way to measure customer satisfaction? ›

The Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a new, important indicator of success. The NPS method is used by companies to measure how satisfied customers are with their products, services and business. High customer satisfaction correlates with successful business in most industries. Whoever has happy customers will succeed.

Which company has highest NPS score? ›

NPS Scores for Top Companies (Ranked Highest to Lowest)
  • First Direct, NPS score = 66. ...
  • PayPal, NPS score = 65. ...
  • Lloyds, NPS score = 62. ...
  • Apple, NPS score = 61. ...
  • Xfinity, NPS score = 59. ...
  • Google, NPS score = 58. ...
  • Chick-fil-a, NPS score = 58. ...
  • Zappos, NPS score = 57.

What is Amazon's NPS score? ›

Amazon's Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a 51 with 67% Promoters, 17% Passives, and 16% Detractors. Net Promoter Score tracks whether Amazon's customers would recommend using the product based on a scale of -100 to 100.

What is Tesla's NPS score? ›

Tesla NPS Trend
SummaryDateScore
Feb 2022 41Feb 202241
Mar 2022 41Mar 202241
Apr 2022 39Apr 202239
May 2022 38May 202238
8 more rows

What does an NPS score of 50 mean? ›

General NPS benchmark

Given the NPS range of -100 to +100, a positive score or NPS above 0 is considered “good,” +50 is considered “excellent,” and above 70 is considered “world-class.” Based on global NPS standards, any score above 0 is “good.” This means the majority of your customer base is more loyal.

How is NPS survey score calculated? ›

Calculating your NPS score is as simple as tallying up your responses and subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. For example, if 60% of respondents are promoters, 10% are detractors, and 30% are passives, your NPS would be 60-10=50.

How does NPS affect a company? ›

NPS provides insights into the chance of repeat customers, which allows you to forecast the potential growth, revenue, and health of your brand. NPS can be indicative of employee satisfaction, too. Employees generally do a better job when they feel happy and fulfilled, resulting in happier customers.

Why is NPS high risk? ›

Given the current investment restrictions, NPS equity portfolios across fund managers have a heavy large-cap bias. All NPS funds have more than 90% of the equity corpus in this segment. But as the fund size starts growing, fund managers may need to foray deeper into mid-cap territory in search of more investible ideas.

What is NPS in simple words? ›

National Pension System (NPS) is a voluntary, defined contribution retirement savings scheme designed to enable the subscribers to make optimum decisions regarding their future through systematic savings during their working life.

How NPS is calculated step by step? ›

To calculate your Net Promoter Score, subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. NPS = % promoters - % detractors. For example, if 50% of respondents are Promoters, 10% are Detractors, and 40% are passives, your NPS would be 50-10=40.

How do I make sure my NPS sample size is high enough? ›

This is the number of responses. You should divide this number by the expected response rate to figure out how many surveys to send out. If you plan on a 15% response rate, then you'll need to send 912/0.15 = 6,080 surveys for one product, category or dimension.

What is a good NPS score 2022? ›

A “good” NPS score is anything above 0.

Exceeding the score of 0 indicates overall customer loyalty to your brand, as you have more promoters than detractors. Per Doter, in 2022 on average, anything above 50 can be considered “Excellent” and anything above 75 “World-class”.

What is a good NPS score per industry? ›

A score between 0 and 30 is a good range to be in, however, there is still room for progress. If your NPS is higher than 30 that would indicate that your company is doing great and has far more happy customers than unhappy ones.

Can NPS be a KPI? ›

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A net promoter score is a KPI that indicates how customers view your company and whether your reputation is sound. The score looks at the percentage of your customers likely to recommend your company's products or services.

What are the three categories of respondents when calculating NPS? ›

Depending on the score that is given to the Net Promoter question, three categories of people can be distinguished: Promoters = respondents giving a 9 or 10 score. Passives = respondents giving a 7 or 8 score. Detractors = respondents giving a 0 to 6 score.

How many questions is a good amount for a survey? ›

The Ideal Number of Survey Questions for Most Surveys

Five minute surveys will see even higher completion rates, especially with customer satisfaction and feedback surveys. This means, you should aim for 10 survey questions (or fewer, if you are using multiple text and essay box question types).

Is NPS only one question? ›

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey consists of a single question that measures the likelihood of your customers referring your business to their others. It is an indicator of customer experience, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.

What is a reasonable number of questions for a survey? ›

So how many questions should you ask on a survey? There is no hard and fast answer. However, as a general rule, the survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete; less than five minutes is more than twice as good. Typically, this means about five to 10 questions.

What is considered a good employee NPS score? ›

An eNPS score can range anywhere from -100 to 100. However, any score above zero is acceptable. Different companies may have different standards. Generally, a score within the bracket of 10 to 30 is considered good and a score of 50 is excellent.

What is a good NPS score by industry? ›

What a good Net Promoter Score looks like
IndustryProfessional servicesConsumer goods and services
Average NPS+43+43
Median NPS+50+50
Top quartile+73 (or higher)+72 (or higher)
Bottom quartile+19 (or lower)+21 (or lower)

What is a good NPS score out of 5? ›

What is a good Net Promoter Score? Any score above 0 is considered good, whilst any NPS score over +50 is considered excellent. Organizations that score over the +70 mark will be providing the best customer experience.

Is 53 a good NPS score? ›

What's a good Net Promoter Score. Based on the global NPS standards, any score above 0 would be considered “good” (50 and above being excellent while 70 and above is considered “world class”).

What is a good eNPS score 2022? ›

If the scores are higher than +10, you can be proud of your company's level of employee engagement. An eNPS above +40 is excellent, and you should actively work towards keeping employee engagement at this level. Consult with promoters to determine what the company is doing right.

What is the lowest NPS score? ›

Respondents give a rating between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely) and, depending on their response, customers fall into one of three categories to establish a NPS score: 'Promoters' respond with a score of 9 or 10. 'Passives' respond with a score of 7 or 8. 'Detractors' respond with a score of 0 to 6.

Which company has the highest NPS score? ›

NPS Scores for Top Companies (Ranked Highest to Lowest)
  1. Princeton Mortgage, NPS score = 98. ...
  2. Tesla, NPS score = 97. ...
  3. Nutanix, NPS score = 92. ...
  4. Loanboox, NPS score = 90. ...
  5. Nimble, NPS score = 85. ...
  6. Metro Bank, NPS score = 82. ...
  7. T-Mobile, NPS score = 82. ...
  8. Warby, NPS score = 80.

Is NPS a good measure? ›

An NPS provides valuable information about your customers' satisfaction and loyalty levels, but it's not an all-inclusive metric for business improvement.

What companies use NPS scores? ›

The Net Promoter System helps companies in all industries build customer loyalty and achieve growth.
...
Media
  • Avid Technology.
  • BBC.
  • DirecTV.
  • E.W. Scripps Company.
  • LexisNexis.
  • PR Newswire.
  • Scripps.
  • Thomson Reuters.

What is the NPS of Apple? ›

Apple's Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a 52 with 67% Promoters, 18% Passives, and 15% Detractors. Net Promoter Score tracks whether Apple's customers would recommend using the product based on a scale of -100 to 100.

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