What is a Net Promoter Score?
A Net Promoter Score is a measure of how happy your customers are with your business. NPS is based on two core ideas.
The first is that the most reliable way to measure customer satisfaction is to is to ask how likely a customer is to recommend your business to a friend or colleague.
The second is that customers fall into three broad groups, Detractors, Passives, and Promoters.
How Net Promoter Scores work.
By asking your customers the question “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”, and asking them to give a value from 0 to 10.
What do Net Promoter Scores mean?
The breakdown of the NPS groups goes like this:
Score 0-6: Detractors
These are customers who aren’t happy with your business for one reason or another. These customers are most likely to spread bad messages about your business, either by word-of-mouth, or on social media.
Score 7-8: Passives
These customers are satisfied, but not enthused by your business. They represent indifferent users who could be swayed to move to your competition.
Score 9-10: Promoters
Customers who love your business, and want to spread the word on your behalf.
What are the advantages of NPS to my business?
Because Net Promoter Scores are a standardised measure based on a single question, it makes it easy to compare your performance both over time and to other businesses in your industry or sector.
For your customers, asking a simple and quick question means that they’re more likely to give you a response where a more involved survey may be off-putting.
For the people in your business, it introduces a quantifiable measure, based on simple terminology; it’s an easy-to-understand measure of customer satisfaction.
How do I use NPS with SmartSurvey?
We’ve introduced a pre-set question type to quickly and easily add the NPS question to any survey that you create.
How do I work out Net Promoter Score?
Once you’ve sent your survey, then you do a simple calculation to get your final score.
First of all, you need to identify the numbers for two of the three NPS groups, Detractors and Promoters.
Start with the number of Promoters and subtract the number of Detractors. Divide the answer by the number of responses in total. Then multiply your answer by 100. The number you get, rounded to the nearest whole number, is your NPS.
For large survey sets, that could be tricky, but you can work out NPS in excel in a single calculation:
=ROUNDUP((100*((COUNTIF([Data],">8")-COUNTIF([Data],"<7"))/COUNT([Data]))),0)
Just replace [Data] with the location of the NPS answer data range in your response spreadsheet.
If that still seems too tricky, then don’t worry. If you use the pre-set Net Promoter Score question when creating your survey in SmartSurvey, then we calculate it for you.
Interpreting NPS
The lowest possible Net Promoter Score is -100, and the highest possible is 100, with zero being in the middle.
Any given score isn’t necessarily good or bad, it has to be taken in context, either compared to your own business’s performance over time (is it going up? then that’s good), or benchmarked against other businesses in your sector. How do you get those benchmarks? Well, you can ask your customers how they feel about your competitors directly using SmartSurvey, or alternatively, benchmark reports for various industry sectors can be bought online.p>
With a simple focus, and a clear message to your business, tracking Net Promoter Scores can give you a clear idea on the challenges that face your business.
Get started
Use one of our pre-made templates to start tracking your Net Promoter Score with SmartSurvey today.
NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.