Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey

Want to automate your customer experience program? Learn how.

Want to know how loyal customers are? Curious to learn if your patients recommend you to others? Looking to make sure your clients are happy? Calculate your NPS score by asking “The Ultimate Question.” You’ll learn what your customers think—and a whole lot more.

This Net Promoter Score questionnaire gets you the data you need to quickly understand what customers feel about your organization—and to react to any negative feedback. An NPS score also makes it easy to set both internal performance benchmarks, as well as external benchmarks to compare against competitors in your industry.

Use the Net Promoter Score survey template

Now you can create your Net Promoter survey, calculate your score, and get context for your results—all in one place. How? SurveyMonkey calculates your Net Promoter Score for you! When you get results from your Net Promoter survey, go to the Analyze section, and you’ll see a gauge that shows your overall Net Promoter Score. You’ll also find a data table with the number (and percentage) of Detractors, Passives, and Promoters among your respondents who are recommending you—and those who aren’t—so you can get the detail around how your NPS was calculated.

What is the Net Promoter Score? The Net Promoter Score definition and formula is based on the following idea:

NPS is a highly regarded loyalty metric that people at companies like yours use to collect the customer feedback they need to inform their business strategy. It’s seen by many as a better indicator of customer loyalty than traditional customer satisfaction surveys.

Hoping to consistently measure your NPS using surveys? Learn how with “The ultimate guide to running a customer feedback program.”

The Net Promoter Score methodology is based on asking customers a single question that predicts the likelihood of both repurchase and referral: “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” Customers rate their answers on a scale from 0 to 10.

The answers customers provide are classified as follows:

Sending NPS surveys to your customers can be really easy if you make a habit of it. Choose important touchpoints (like when you complete a sale), or send surveys by email on an ongoing basis. You can even automate your NPS surveys. See how we can help.

Related: How the NPS varies across industries.

When you ask customers the Net Promoter Score question, you’re essentially asking them whether or not they’re taking the time to say positive things about your company or brand. Because when it comes right down to it, word of mouth is everything—especially today, as opinions spread faster via social channels and online forums and reviews.

Companies and organizations ranging from small start-ups to some of the world’s largest corporations also use the NPS to assess customer satisfaction and track performance because it’s:

Progressive Direct, an online automotive insurance company, was looking for a way to measure happiness at each part of the customer journey, so they turned to SurveyMonkey CX with a focus on customer feedback and their NPS. Nick Bell, head of Product and Services with Progressive Direct, found it helped them quickly and easily collect feedback and understand their customers’ pain points.

“The biggest upside that we’ve seen so far was … almost doubling the response rates over the previous survey we were used to seeing. I think that’s related to the easy interface, the ability for us to make the questions simple, and so it’s just a more inviting experience.”

With the insights obtained from SurveyMonkey CX, Progressive Direct reduced the time it takes to implement business-driving decisions from months to weeks.

Although there are pros and cons to using the NPS, getting your score helps you understand how you compare against the competition—and find out what the big brands in your industry are scoring.

While you’re continuously monitoring your customer loyalty ratings with NPS to make internal changes to your organization, you can also get external NPS benchmarks to understand if your Net Promoter Score is good or bad.

For example: If your Net Promoter Score is 36, what does that really mean? A score of 36 may not seem great to you. But an NPS of 36 could actually be a strong score when compared with the average Net Promoter Score for organizations in your industry.

With SurveyMonkey Benchmarks, you get context for your Net Promoter Score. Hundreds of companies use our NPS template to measure customer loyalty and improve business outcomes. Our data is diverse, covering everything from small organizations to large corporations and a broad range of industries.

You can also easily integrate data from your NPS surveys with popular apps like Salesforce to improve your customer outreach and support.

Here are 5 simple steps to calculate your Net Promoter Score:

If it makes it easier, the equation for calculating a Net Promoter Score looks like this:

Example: If you received 100 responses to your survey:

Calculating the percentages for each group gives you 10%, 20%, and 70% respectively.

Subtract 10% (Detractors) from 70% (Promoters), which equals 60%. Since a Net Promoter Score is always shown as just an integer and not a percentage, your NPS is simply 60.

Need your Net Promoter Score but want to avoid performing these calculations? Let our NPS calculator do all the heavy lifting. You’ll just need to put in the number of Detractors, Passives, and Promoters you’ve collected.

An NPS email is when you embed the NPS question into the body of the email. Once respondents select a rating in the email, a link to the survey opens in another window, allowing the respondent to complete the rest of your survey.  

An NPS email has proven to be effective for collecting more responses. Our research team found that simply embedding a question onto the body of the email invitation increases the survey’s response rate by 22% and its completion rate by 19%. So as you set out to collect your NPS on a consistent cadence—at least once every 6 months—, use an NPS email to get more quality data.

Pioneered by Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question, the NPS is a customer loyalty metric that predicts the likelihood of a customer repurchasing from you or referring your company to a friend. Introduced in 2003, Net Promoter Scores can range from as low as –100 (when every customer is a Detractor) to as high as 100 (when every customer is a Promoter).

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