The Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is the world’s leading metric for measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. But what’s your score?

Our handy NPS score calculator makes working it out a piece of cake. Simply enter in the number of times you received each score below. Your overall score will sit somewhere between 100 and -100.

Read on to find out what’s a good score and see how it’s calculated.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widely-used gauge of customer satisfaction. It’s a handy way of gathering large amounts of feedback, quickly.

You start by asking a NPS question, either on its own or incorporated into a larger survey. NPS questions look something like this:

“How likely would you be to recommend (this company/product/service) to a friend or colleague?”

People are asked to select a number from 0 (least likely to recommend) to 10 (most likely to recommend).

Answers are then sorted into one of three groups depending on the number they select.

Promoters: rating of 9 or 10.

These are your most satisfied customers with the highest chance of recommending you to others.

Passives: rating of 7 or 8 rating.

This group is relatively satisfied but can be swayed to a competitor based on factors like price, new features or customer service.

Detractors: rating between 0 to 6.

These are your least satisfied customers. They’re not only at risk of leaving, but also of sharing their negative experiences with others.

Once you receive all your responses, you can calculate your score. Either use the NPS calculator above, or apply the following NPS calculation.

NPS = % of Promoters – % of Detractors

In other words, subtract the percentage of respondents that are your detractors from the percentage of respondents that are your promoters.

Let’s put this into practice.

Say you’ve collected 150 responses to your NPS question, that look like:

You then calculate the percentage of respondents that were promoters and detractors. This works out to 53% promoters and 27% detractors.

Next you subtract the percentage of promoters from the percentage of detractors to get the NPS:

53% – 27% = 26.

So in this case, your NPS is 26. But what does that really mean? Read on to find out what constitutes a good score.

NPS scores range between 100 and -100, with negative numbers reflecting more unsatisfied customers, and positive numbers reflecting more satisfied customers.

But as for a “good” score, it’s hard to define, since scores can vary dramatically depending on your industry and company size.

Benchmarking is the only real way to answer this question. Compare your score to your competitors’ results to understand where you stand. SurveyMonkey Benchmarks is the perfect tool to do this. When you use SurveyMonkey to ask an NPS question, we not only calculate your NPS automatically, but we also allow you to compare your score to other companies in your industry and of a similar size.

It’s also a good idea to analyse changes in your score over time. Is it going up or down? Your NPS score can help you identify potential issues or show the impact of your work. And by understanding its trajectory and what factors influence it, you’ll be better placed to focus on the areas that matter most to your customers.

And that makes a difference. When we surveyed approximately 600 businesses, we found that more than 80% of those who use the score view themselves as either very or extremely successful.

Related: What a good NPS looks like across different industries.

Given how insightful your NPS score can be, it’s worth taking the time to prepare quality surveys that include it. SurveyMonkey has several survey templates, like our Net Promoter Score Survey Template and our NPS and Brand Loyalty Survey Template, that also include other customer experience questions to help you contextualise your NPS results.Ready to take your customer experience to the next level? Learn how our turn-key NPS solution, SurveyMonkey CX, can help.

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