Net Promoter Score
Also known as: NPS
Single-question loyalty measure based on likelihood to recommend.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) was articulated by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article 'The One Number You Need to Grow' (subsequently expanded in The Ultimate Question, 2006, and The Ultimate Question 2.0, 2011). NPS is calculated from responses to a single question: 'How likely are you to recommend [Company/Product] to a friend or colleague?' on a 0-10 scale. Respondents are categorized as Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), or Detractors (0-6); NPS = %Promoters minus %Detractors, producing a score between -100 and +100. Reichheld's original claim was that NPS correlates strongly with company growth and is a single sufficient metric for customer loyalty, replacing complex multi-question satisfaction surveys. NPS has been enormously commercially successful — adopted by thousands of companies as a standard customer-experience metric, with NPS scores reported quarterly to boards and tied to executive compensation in many organizations. However, NPS has drawn substantial published critique on multiple grounds: the original NPS-growth correlation has not replicated as strongly in independent studies (Keiningham et al. 2007, Sharp 2008, etc.); the 0-10 scale with the specific cutoffs is psychometrically peculiar; cross-cultural variation in scale usage produces misleading cross-country comparisons; and the metric's simplicity, while pedagogically attractive, oversimplifies customer-experience reality. Despite these critiques, NPS remains the most widely-used customer-loyalty metric.
Core components
- Single question: 'How likely are you to recommend X to a friend or colleague?'
- 0-10 scale
- Categorization: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), Detractors (0-6)
- Calculation: %Promoters minus %Detractors
- Score range -100 to +100
- Application as single customer-loyalty metric
- Connection to follow-up question 'why did you give that score?'
- tNPS (transactional NPS) and rNPS (relationship NPS) variants
- Substantial commercial adoption (Bain consulting practice, Medallia, Qualtrics, others)
Primary use case
Customer-experience measurement across industries; foundation for many customer-experience management programs; reference metric in many B2C and B2B contexts; basis for executive-compensation tie-ins to customer-experience performance; integration with customer-experience platforms (Medallia, Qualtrics, etc.); widespread board-level reporting metric; pedagogical simplicity drives adoption in customer-experience education.
Common criticisms
- Substantial published critique: Keiningham, Cooil, Andreassen and Aksoy's 2007 'A Longitudinal Examination of Net Promoter and Firm Revenue Growth' found NPS-growth correlation weaker and less consistent than Reichheld's original claims
- Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass research challenges NPS's underlying loyalty-as-key-driver assumptions
- the specific 0-10 scale with the 9-10 Promoter cutoff is psychometrically peculiar — the categorization throws away information from neutral responses
- cross-cultural variation in scale-usage habits produces misleading cross-country NPS comparisons (US respondents tend to use higher numbers than European or Asian respondents)
- NPS optimization can produce gaming behaviors (employees pleading for high scores)
- single-metric simplicity obscures important customer-experience dimensions that multi-metric approaches capture
- despite the critiques, commercial adoption continues — the metric's pedagogical and reporting simplicity drives use even where validity is challenged
- Reichheld himself has acknowledged some critiques and refined the framework in subsequent work, with NPS3 introducing 'earned growth rate' as supplementary metric.
Lineage
- Siblings
- Customer Lifetime Value, RFM Analysis