How to calculate your NPS® (Net Promoter Score®)

If you want to understand the true depth of your customer loyalty, the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is the industry standard. Use our NPS calculator to get a high-level view of how your brand is perceived and benchmark your score against our global standard.

Your score comes from the Net Promoter Score question, which typically takes the following form:

“How likely is it that you would recommend (name of organisation, service or product) to a friend or colleague?” 

The question prompt should be followed by a rating scale asking the respondent to select a number from 0 (least likely to recommend) to 10 (most likely to recommend). 

Depending on the number that each customer selects, we’d group them into one of three groups: 

Related: NPS surveys: Best practices for high response rates

The NPS is the world’s leading metric for measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

Here are three main benefits of using the NPS:

This is only a fraction of the benefits of using the score. To learn more, read our guide to using NPS surveys to create the best customer experience.

To calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS):

Here's an example:

If 50% of your respondents are promoters and 10% are detractors, your NPS would be 50 − 10 = 40. NPS scores range from -100 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater customer loyalty.

Once all your responses are in, you can work out your score using the following Net Promoter Score calculation:

To help you understand this formula, let’s walk through a brief example. Let’s suppose you’ve collected 150 responses to your NPS question. The distribution of the scores looks like this:

This means you have 80 promoters, 30 passives and 40 detractors. To calculate the percentage of promoters, use the following formula:

% of promoters = (No. of promoters / No. of respondents) x 100% 

To find the percentage of detractors, use the same formula. Just substitute the total number of promoters for the total number of detractors. 

This means you have 80 / 150 * 100% = 53% promoters, while your percentage of detractors is 40 / 150 * 100% = 27%.

Subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters gives you the Net Promoter Score: 

53% – 27% = 26%, i.e. an NPS of 26. 

You’ll notice that the score is positive. This isn’t always the case. Net Promoter Scores can range from -100 to 100, depending on the scores and distribution.

A ‘good’ score is hard to pin down. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. Scores can vary dramatically depending on factors such as industry and company size. This means that you’ll need to benchmark your score against competitors that are similar to your organisation to truly find out where you stand. 

SurveyMonkey Benchmarks can help you do just that. When you use SurveyMonkey to ask an NPS question, the platform automatically calculates your Net Promoter Score and allows you to compare it to other companies of your size in the same industry.

You can compare your NPS to industry averages or competitors to see how your company is doing.

NPS benchmarks vary according to the industry. Some sectors have a much higher proportion of happy customers, so you should expect inflated figures if you work in this industry.

Here are some business-to-consumer (B2C) NPS benchmarks by industry:

Here are some business-to-business (B2B) NPS benchmarks by industry:

If the NPS of your business falls below your industry average, you should aim to improve it. You know you’re doing something right if you’re above average!

A transactional NPS focuses on certain customer interactions, generating data immediately after a customer engages with a certain part of your business. For example, you could send out a tNPS survey straight after a customer does the following:

Automating these at various points in your customer journey will allow you to gather specific NPS data. Calculating and interpreting your NPS from tNPS surveys will generate feedback about what’s working and what you could improve. 

A higher tNPS suggests that a particular function or transaction is intuitive for customers. If you receive a low tNPS, you can highlight that your business needs to make a plan to work on this function or transaction.

A relational NPS is a more general style of NPS survey that aims to reveal overall customer sentiment. It will help your business measure customer loyalty and how customers feel about your company over time. 

For example, you could send out rNPS surveys to measure the following:

A relational NPS survey will help gather customer sentiment and is useful for tracking changes over time.

A higher rNPS suggests that customers are very satisfied with the aspect you’re exploring. On the contrary, a lower figure will help identify pain points in the customer journey.

Your NPS will be somewhere on a scale of -100 to +100. As scores go further down the scale towards -100, you will have more detractors. On the other hand, a high, positive number will suggest that you have more promoters than detractors.

The higher your number, the more of your customers love your brand. However, beyond this, you can also use different types of NPS surveys to generate even more information. 

Let’s explore the different types of NPS respondents so you can interpret your score more accurately.

NPS detractors are customers who have had a negative experience with your company. There are several reasons why someone may become a detractor, ranging from poor experiences with customer service to dissatisfaction with the quality of your products. 

Considering that 89% of customer experience pros believe that the customer experience (CX) is the leading cause of customer churn, understanding how to get in touch with detractors is vital. Sending a personalised message to a detractor can be a great way of changing how they feel about your business.

The best practice when getting in touch with NPS detractors is to:

This approach, although short and sweet, will show the detractor that you care about their feedback. While this won’t satisfy everyone, it could be a big step towards turning an NPS detractor into a promoter.

Related reading: How to follow up with NPS detractors, promoters and passives

NPS promoters are the direct opposite of detractors in that it’s likely that they’ve had one or more great experiences with your company. Having responded with either 9 or 10, it’s likely that they are loyal supporters of your business.

Thanking promoters for their support is always a great idea. Sending out a small, personalised message will show customers that they’re right to have confidence in your company. SurveyMonkey research reveals that 72% of customers believe personalised messaging is important when thinking of brands they love. You should make sure you address their comments directly and use their name.

When getting in touch with NPS promoters, you can also outline potential pathways that they could use to refer a friend, give public feedback or recommend your company to a colleague. As promoters already like and trust your brand, they are highly likely to recommend you to someone else.

Don’t overlook the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

NPS passives haven’t yet formed a strong opinion of your business. Maybe they haven’t had many interactions yet or they’re still undecided. Although many companies overlook passives, they can be a huge asset, as you can aim to turn them into promoters.

It’s much harder to change a detractor to a promoter, as you’ll have to undo their negative opinion of your business and convert it into a positive one. With NPS passives, you’re starting with a clean slate, where no customer has a previous strong opinion of your company.

Getting in touch with passives can help build rapport with this group and improve their opinion of your business. Respond to any feedback that they’ve left by outlining that you’re thankful for their support. If they’ve suggested an area where you could improve, carefully detail how you’re going to fix the problem.

The NPS survey is internationally renowned for its effectiveness. But to get the most out of this customer experience survey, make sure you follow our NPS best practices to improve response rates and generate more data:

By following these best practices, you’ll ensure that your NPS surveys collect useful data that you can convert into actionable insights, thus quickly improving CX. 

Calculating your NPS score will give your business insight into how your customers perceive you, your products and your support teams. But the story doesn’t end after using an NPS calculation and finding out your score.

Leveraging NPS, you can build an action plan to improve your processes and offer a winning customer experience across all touchpoints. Read more about how you can use NPS surveys to create the best customer experience, or get started with a free SurveyMonkey NPS template. 

NPS, Net Promoter and Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.