Measuring Customer Satisfaction With NPS (Net Promoter Score): The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
2 July 2021
“How likely are you to recommend our product/service/company to a friend or colleague?”
That one question is at the heart of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a simple metric for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. Designed by Fred Reichheld, a management consultant at Bain & Company, in 2003, the NPS has one goal and one goal only: to give companies a way to score customer satisfaction in a straightforward, easy-to-interpret way.
How does it work?
Customers are asked the one magic question and given a 0–10 scale to choose from: 0 being not likely at all to recommend the product, service or company, and 10 being extremely likely to recommend. Based on the number they give, customers can then be categorised as “Detractors” (those who gave a rating of 0–6), “Passives” (rating 7 or 8) and “Promoters” (rating 9 or 10).
Calculating your NPS score then comes down to a simple equation:
NPS = % of Promoters – % of Detractors
NPS scores vary from industry to industry so there’s no one magic number to aim for. However, as a general rule of thumb, anything over 50 means you’re doing very well.
The good
The best thing about NPS is its simplicity. Asking one question is a quick, easy and affordable way to measure customer satisfaction. This makes NPS incredibly useful. Plus, NPS allows you to easily track your progress over time, which is especially powerful if you’ve introduced changes to your product or service and want to see how those changes are impacting customer satisfaction.
NPS is also better than most customer surveys because it can be benchmarked. Using industry NPS benchmarks, you can see how your NPS rating measures up against your competitors. This will give you a clear picture of your performance and customer satisfaction in relation to the rest of your industry.
Most large companies and brands are already using NPS and getting real value from it. Philips, for example, has embedded NPS right across the organisation, tying NPS performance to compensation packages, and using it to inform strategic decisions. And Airbnb has found NPS to be particularly useful, establishing a firm link between its NPS score and the likelihood that guests would book another stay and recommend the platform to others.
The bad
The main drawback of surveys of any kind is that they ask opinions instead of observing real-life behaviour. And the problem with asking opinions is that respondents can (intentionally or unintentionally) lie. Some people prefer to give undeserved positive answers because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Others want to please the person or company asking the questions so they tell them what they want to hear.
The bottom line is, your NPS score is not necessarily a true reflection of actual customer behaviour. Customers may say they’re very likely to recommend your service to a friend or colleague, but that doesn’t mean they actually will. Perhaps they really think your service is too expensive and will switch as soon as they come across a cheaper competitor.
Then there’s the issue that NPS isn’t always implemented correctly. With such a simple tool, you might be hard pressed to imagine how it could go wrong. But it can. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to not track changes in their NPS score over time, or only conducting the survey once a year. If you’re not measuring your NPS on a consistent and regular basis, how can you expect to spot trends in customer satisfaction? That’s not to say you should bombard customers with the same question over and over again. Once every two or three months should be enough to help you track changes.
The ugly
Companies like using the NPS because it provides clear numbers that can be easily interpreted, which is all well and good. But what your NPS won’t tell you is why your score is what it is. For me, that’s the biggest problem with NPS. It doesn’t tell you what customers like about your product or service, and what they don’t like. To understand the reasons behind your score (good or bad), you need to ask customers additional questions. The trick is to do this without sacrificing the beautiful simplicity of NPS.
Making the NPS survey more effective
When I use NPS with my clients, I expand it ever so slightly – from one question to three:
- How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
- What do you like about our product/service?
- And what can we do better?
Question one allows you to calculate an NPS score that can be tracked over time and benchmarked against the rest of your industry. And questions two and three allow space for free-form answers that can be analysed to glean valuable insights about what customers really value, and help you identify areas for improvement. Using what you learn, you can make changes that will boost your NPS rating in the future.
(Tip: when using these questions, it’s a good idea to alternate the order of questions two and three, just in case customers get bored and don’t answer all three questions!)
In conclusion, I’m certainly not against the NPS – it’s a fantastic indicator for measuring customer satisfaction. But this additional questioning makes the NPS much more powerful and delivers far richer insights that will help you improve your product or service offering.
Where to go from here
If you would like to know more about key performance indicators, check out my articles on:
- How Do You Measure Customer Experience?
- What is the Difference Between KPIs and Critical Success Factors (CSF)?
- Why eNPS is a Great Way of Measuring Staff Engagement
Or browse the KPI Library to find the metrics that matter most to you.
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Bernard Marr is a world-renowned futurist, influencer and thought leader in the fields of business and technology, with a passion for using technology for the good of humanity.
He is a best-selling author of over 20 books, writes a regular column for Forbes and advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations.
He has a combined following of 4 million people across his social media channels and newsletters and was ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world.
Bernard’s latest book is ‘Generative AI in Practice’.
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