With one simple question, you can better understand how happy your customers are with your products and services. That’s what the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is all about, it’s a way for businesses to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

What’s your Net Promoter Score? To find out, just  enter the number of times you received each score into the following blank spaces:

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

“How likely would you be to recommend (name of organization, service, or product) to a friend or colleague?” 

The question prompt should be followed with 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 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 NPS:

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

Sending out your NPS survey online lets you rapidly get responses and calculate your NPS score. Let’s say you’ve received 100 responses from your customers. We’ll turn this figure into an NPS percentage. You can compare this NPS to other companies, your industry benchmark, or the previous NPS figure you’ve generated.

The NPS system will provide a percentage based on the proportion of respondents that fall into the detractors, promoters, and passives categories. To calculate the percentage, follow these steps:

Your NPS score will be between -100 and 100. Once you have your NPS results, you can set targets to improve. 

Related: 10 tips to build stellar NPS surveys

Once all your responses come back, you can get your score using the following Net Promoter Score calculation:

To help you understand this formula, let’s walk through a brief example. Say 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 = (# of promoters / # of respondents) x 100 

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

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

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

53% – 27% = 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 like industry and company size. This means you’ll want to benchmark your score against competitors similar to your organization to truly know 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 in your size and industry.

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

NPS benchmarks change depending on 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-customer (B2C) NPS benchmarks by industry:

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

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

Transactional NPS focuses on certain customer interactions, generating data directly after a customer engages with a certain part of your business. For example, you could send out a tNPS survey right after a customer:

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

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

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 score suggests that customers are very satisfied with the aspect you are 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 of -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 customers you have that 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 better interpret your score.

NPS detractors are customers who have had a negative experience with your company. There are several reasons that 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 reach out to detractors is vital. Sending a personalized message to a detractor can be a great way of changing how they feel about your business.

The best practice for reaching out to 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 great step forward in 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 to detractors in that they’ve likely had one (or several) great experiences with your company. Having responded with either 9 or 10, they are likely loyal supporters of your business.

Thanking promoters for their support is always a great idea. Sending out a small, personalized message will show customers that they are right to trust in your company. SurveyMonkey research reveals that 72% of customers believe personalized messaging is important when thinking of brands they love. So, be sure to address their comments directly and use their name.

When reaching out to NPS promoters, you can also outline potential pathways 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 on your business. Maybe they haven’t had many interactions or are still undecided. While many companies overlook passives, they can be a huge asset as you can aim to make them into promoters.

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

Reaching out to passives can help build rapport with this group and increase their opinion of your business. Respond to any feedback they’ve left by outlining that you’re thankful for their support. If they have suggested an area that 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, be sure to 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, improving CX quickly. 

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 calculator and finding your score.

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

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