The Net Promoter Score (NPS) was developed by Fred Reicheld at Bain & Company to measure customer loyalty (Kaufman, 2016; Reichheld & Markey, 2011).
A Single Question
"How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or a colleague?"
The NPS concept is unique in the sense that it is based on a single question, but it is often combined with an open-text question to gather additional information about what lies behind the customer's response. The NPS question is recommended to be placed first in the survey so as not to be influenced by responses to other survey questions. The text comments are analysed in relation to the NPS result, leading to a wealth of insights based on just two asked questions.
Response Scale
The response scale ranges from 0 to 10, thus being 11-point.
- 0 = Not at all likely
- 10 = Very likely
The answers are divided into 3 categories; ambassadors (green), passives (gray), and critics (red). Here is an example of the distribution of responses over the 11-point scale.
- Ambassadors (9–10) Customers who are your ambassadors and likely to recommend the organization to others
- Passives (7–8) Customers who are satisfied but not your ambassadors and may be more inclined to consider competitors
- Critics (0–6) Customers who are dissatisfied and have a high risk of leaving you, or that the customer spreads a bad reputation about you as a supplier
The Calculation Explained in text and numbers.
- Percentage of ambassadors, minus percentage of critics = NPS
- 47% ambassadors - 26% critics = NPS 21
Results are reported on a scale from -100 to 100.
In the example below, we see that the majority of customers are ambassadors (47%), which results in a positive result for NPS, 21. With a critical majority, the NPS result would instead show a negative value.
Good to know!
Sometimes the NPS result shows 0. This does not necessarily mean that there are no results, but it can occur if there is an equal proportion of critics and ambassadors, or if all responses are passive (answer options 7-8).