What is Net Promoter Score?
Net Promoter Score, usually shortened to NPS, is a measure of customer loyalty. It is built around a single question:
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [organisation] to a friend or colleague?”
The idea is that willingness to recommend reflects how a customer feels about the whole relationship, not just one transaction. NPS was introduced in the early 2000s and is now one of the most widely reported customer metrics in the world, used by boards and executives as a headline indicator of customer experience.
How NPS is calculated
Respondents are grouped by their score:
- Promoters (9 to 10): loyal, enthusiastic customers likely to recommend you.
- Passives (7 to 8): satisfied but not enthusiastic, and open to competitors.
- Detractors (0 to 6): unhappy customers who may criticise you to others.
Then:
NPS = % promoters - % detractors
Passives count towards the total number of responses but not towards either group. So if 200 people respond, with 90 promoters, 70 passives and 40 detractors, that’s 45% promoters and 20% detractors, giving an NPS of +25.
Relationship NPS vs transactional NPS
There are two common ways to use NPS:
- Relationship NPS is surveyed periodically (for example, quarterly) across the customer base. It measures overall sentiment towards the brand, including price, product and reputation.
- Transactional NPS is asked after a specific interaction, such as a call to the contact centre. It shows how service experiences shift loyalty.
Contact centres more often work with transactional NPS, usually alongside customer satisfaction score and customer effort score.
How the contact centre affects NPS
Customers usually contact you when something has gone wrong or they need something done. How that goes can strongly influence whether they become a promoter or a detractor. The contact centre drivers that matter most are:
- Resolution. Solving the issue on the first contact, measured as first contact resolution, protects loyalty far more than a fast but incomplete answer.
- Effort. Long queues, repeated explanations and transfers push scores down.
- Communication during problems. In utilities, clear and honest updates during an outage can protect NPS even when the outage itself is outside anyone’s control.
- Consistency across channels. A customer who gets one answer on webchat and a different one on the phone loses trust.
Limitations of NPS
NPS is simple and easy to communicate, but it has limits worth knowing:
- It’s an outcome, not a diagnosis. A score tells you loyalty has moved, not why. Follow-up questions and analysis of the conversations themselves, through speech analytics, fill the gap.
- It’s hard to attribute. A price rise or news story can move NPS more than any service change.
- It suits some sectors poorly. Customers of an electricity lines company or a government agency may not have a choice of provider, so “would you recommend” can feel odd. Some organisations prefer satisfaction or trust questions in these cases.
- Small samples swing. Because it subtracts two percentages, NPS can move several points by chance on a small number of responses.
Used with care and alongside other measures, NPS is a useful long-term signal of whether service is building or eroding loyalty.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.