What is an NPS Score? A Guide to The Net Promoter Score

When you have a digital product, it’s essential to know where it stands among users. By learning how consumers feel about your product, app, website, or company, you can iterate, keep a thumb on the pulse of user engagement, and better position yourself for product-market fit. And this is where your NPS Score comes into play.

So, what is an NPS score? Well, that’s exactly what we’re here to answer today.

Let’s get into it.

What is an NPS score?

The “NPS” in “NPS Score” stands for Net Promoter Score, a metric used in customer experience to measure customer loyalty. With it, you can measure customer satisfaction from everything to your overall brand reputation, customer support and staff members, products, services, and even particular web pages or app use cases—and more.

An NPS score is based on the answer to a single-questions survey: “How likely is it that you would recommend [X Product/Organization, Service] to a friend or colleague?”

The responses are given based on a scale of 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely), and the score is calculated on a scale of -100 to +100. You want to be on the upper end of that range—but we’ll get to that in a bit.

There are three categories of responses that qualify respondents to be:

• Promoters: rate the product as a 9 or 10. They’re considered loyal and enthusiastic users, likely to encourage others to adopt your product, service, or company.
  
• Passives: rate the product as a 7 or 8. They’re considered satisfied and happy but not yet promoters of the brand.
  
• Detractors: rate the product as a 0 to 6. They’re generally not very happy and unlikely to buy or turn to the product, service, or brand again. Moreover, they might actually discourage others from using or buying the product (hence the name “Detractors.”)

The Different Types of NPS Score Programs

There are different NPS programs based on the circumstances of survey distribution.

Relational NPS surveys are distributed regularly (i.e., monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.) So, by using a Relational NPS program, you’re looking to get time-based insights into customer perception. And this type of program is good for benchmarking customer health over time.

On the other hand, Transactional NPS surveys have an event-based distribution. Meaning they’re given out after a customer interacts with your company–be it a purchase, a support interaction, etc. This one is used to get more topic-specific and granular insights into customer satisfaction.

Lastly, you can also use an NPS Score to measure how employees feel about working at your company (eNPS Score). The question they’ll answer is something along the lines of, “How likely are you to recommend this company as a place of work to others?”

An eNPS Score is useful for understanding where you stand compared to other employers. It’s less comprehensive feedback than other ways of measuring employee sentiment, such as employee engagement surveys. But, an eNPS is a straightforward way of understanding how employees feel about working at your company.

Why is NPS Important?

The NPS Score is important because you can understand where you stand in the market with it.

Implementing an NPS Score program into your marketing, customer experience, or customer success and support strategies will help you better grasp how you’re doing compared to your industry and competitors.

If you see you’re lagging behind in customer service, that insight will help you be able to dig deeper into why that is—and how you can improve. Alternatively, if your feedback for your online store’s check-out process, your NPS Score can serve as a way to flag that—and fix the user flow.

Moreover, your NPS Score will allow you to measure engagement. Personal and word-of-mouth recommendations are among the most trusted ways of customer adoption. So, a bad NPS Score will tell that there’s something wrong with how you’re doing things; a good one is a confirmation that you’re doing things right.

How to Calculate an NPS Score

Calculating an NPS score is simple—once you’ve aggregated a statistically significant amount of responses, simply subtract the percentage of promoters from the detractors.

So, if you have 60% Promoters and 25% Detractors, your NPS score would be 35%.

What is a Good NPS score?

Good question. And the answer is that benchmarks depend on your industry.

In SurveyMonkey‘s benchmarking analysis of NPS Scores across industries, the stats look like this:

Well, this was a lot. We know.

Coincidentally, hi, we’re Goji Labs—a product and software development consultancy with experience in designing, “rescuing,” and deploying hundreds of products.

Looking to develop a new app or revamp an existing one? Need some product strategy or mobile app and software development help?

Have any general questions about who we are and our authority on the subject?

Reach us at GojiLabs.com or drop us a line.

– Goji Labs