Net Promoter Score, for a business with one location
A private survey number that gets confused with a public rating about once a week, and does a completely different job.
No credit card required. 30-day free trial.
Net Promoter Score, in one sentence
Net Promoter Score is a loyalty measure computed as the percentage of customers who answer 9 or 10 to a single recommendation question, minus the percentage who answer 0 to 6.
The question is fixed: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague, on a scale of zero to ten. Answers of 9 and 10 are promoters, 7 and 8 are passives, and 0 through 6 are detractors. Passives sit in the denominator and are then ignored in the subtraction, which is the part that surprises people.
The two endpoints follow from the formula rather than from any convention. If every respondent answers 9 or 10 the sum is 100 minus 0, and if every one of them answers 6 or below it is 0 minus 100, so a score sits somewhere between minus 100 and plus 100. It is written as a whole number and conventionally without a percent sign, even though it is built by subtracting one percentage from another.
Net Promoter, NPS and Net Promoter System are registered trademarks held by Bain and Company, NICE Systems and Fred Reichheld. That rarely matters to a shop running its own survey, and it matters a great deal if you plan to put the score in your advertising.
Working out an NPS from 200 replies
Sort the answers into the three bands, turn each band into a percentage of everybody who replied, then subtract detractors from promoters.
- Promoters, answering 9 or 10
- 112 replies, 56 percent
- Passives, answering 7 or 8
- 54 replies, 27 percent
- Detractors, answering 0 to 6
- 34 replies, 17 percent
56 minus 17 is 39, so the score is 39. Watch what the 54 passives did: they dragged both percentages down by sitting in the denominator and then contributed nothing to the subtraction. Move twenty of them into the promoter band and the score jumps to 49 without a single detractor changing their mind.
That sensitivity is why a score computed from thirty replies bounces around and should not be reported to two decimal places, or reported at all. Under roughly a hundred responses, read the comments and skip the arithmetic.
What it is good for, and what it is not
NPS is a private number and a star rating is a public one, and mixing them up is the most common mistake made here. The score tells you something about the room. It does nothing for the stranger deciding where to eat tonight.
Its genuine use for a local business is timing and triage. A detractor is a specific person who told you something was wrong while they still remembered it, which is a conversation you can have this week. A promoter has effectively volunteered to be asked for a review, and there is nothing wrong with asking them provided the same ask goes to everybody who answered.
It is also cheap. One question at the bottom of a receipt or a follow up message costs nothing to run monthly, and a trend across four months is worth more than any single figure ever is.
The misconception: NPS measures satisfaction
It is routinely reported as though a high score means customers were happy with their last visit.
It measures stated willingness to recommend, which is a different thing and a slower one. Somebody can be irritated by today's wait and still recommend you warmly, and somebody can have a perfectly pleasant meal with no intention of mentioning it to anybody.
If what you want to know is how the last visit went, ask about the last visit. That is a customer satisfaction question, it is easier to interpret, and it carries no trademark.
Net Promoter Score questions
What owners ask before deciding whether to run the survey at all.
What is a good NPS?
Published benchmarks vary so widely by industry and by survey method that comparing yourself to one is close to meaningless. Compare it to your own previous score, on the same question, sent the same way.
How many responses do I need?
Enough that a handful of answers cannot swing it. In the worked example above, twenty answers changing band moved a two hundred response score by ten points, so a thirty response score is mostly noise.
Can I use NPS to decide who to ask for a review?
Not as a filter. Sending review requests only to promoters is selective solicitation, which Google's content policy prohibits. Use the score to decide who to telephone, not who to ask.
Should I put the NPS question in my review request?
You can, as long as the two outcomes stay separate. The survey answer is yours to read, and the review link goes to every recipient regardless of what they answered.
Is NPS free to use?
The method is widely published and the marks are registered to Bain and Company, NICE Systems and Fred Reichheld. Running the question internally is normal practice. Putting the registered term in your own advertising is a question for your lawyer rather than for us.
Survey scores and review numbers, side by side
From survey to listing
The public half of the same job
GetSetReply turns your review funnel into one public link, collects the answers in one inbox, and drafts your reply for you to post.