NPS — Net Promoter Score
NPS measures how willing a customer is to recommend a company. It is asked on a zero-to-ten scale and calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors — zero to six — from the percentage of promoters — nine and ten. The result runs from −100 to 100, and the sevens and eights do not count.
What is Net Promoter Score?
NPS measures how willing a customer is to recommend a company. It is asked on a zero-to-ten scale and calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors — zero to six — from the percentage of promoters — nine and ten. The result runs from −100 to 100, and the sevens and eights do not count.
It is not a percentage
An NPS of 40 does not mean 40% of people are happy: it is the difference between two percentages. Which is why it cannot be averaged with other metrics or read as a mark out of a hundred, and why an NPS of 0 is not a disaster but a tie between promoters and detractors.
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
In a subscription business, the question NPS answers — whether the customer would speak well of you — is related to the one that actually matters, which is whether they will renew. The relationship is neither exact nor immediate, but it is the most widely used relationship metric and it catches deterioration before it shows up in churn.
Net Promoter Score in detail
How it is calculated
Percentage of nines and tens minus percentage of zeros to sixes. Sevens and eights are discarded on purpose: the metric is designed to separate enthusiasm from indifference, not to measure the average.
Why it gets criticised so much
Because it throws information away — the 30% of answers that land in the neutral zone — and because the resulting number is very sensitive to small changes when the sample is small. At a company with forty responses, three detractors move the result fifteen points.
Where support fits
Support does not control NPS, but it shapes it: a bad support experience turns a promoter into a detractor much faster than a good one does the reverse. For running support day to day, CSAT is the right metric; NPS belongs to the company.
Questions about Net Promoter Score
What is a good NPS?
Any positive figure means there are more promoters than detractors. Cross-industry comparisons are unreliable because they depend on how and when the question is asked; your own trend says far more than the absolute value.
How often is NPS measured?
Periodically, each quarter or each half year, and not after every interaction. Asking it after every support conversation mixes the rating of support with the rating of the company and ruins both.
Is NPS useful for companies selling to other companies?
It is, with two caveats: samples are small and whoever answers is not always whoever decides the renewal. It is worth storing the job title of the respondent and reading it alongside account usage.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
CSAT — Customer satisfaction
CSAT is the metric that measures how satisfied a customer was with one specific interaction. It is asked right after resolving — usually on a one-to-five scale or a thumbs up and down — and expressed as the percentage of positive answers over total answers.
CES — Customer effort
CES measures how much effort it took the customer to get their problem solved. It is asked with a statement along the lines of "the company made it easy for me" and an agreement scale, and it starts from a specific idea: reducing friction retains people better than trying to delight them.
Churn
Churn is the percentage of customers — or of revenue — lost in a period. It is the metric that decides whether a subscription business genuinely grows: with high churn, every new customer only fills the hole left by another.
CSM — Customer Success Manager
A Customer Success Manager (CSM) is the person responsible for making sure a customer gets the outcome they signed up for. They work proactively across a book of accounts, own adoption, retention and expansion, and their success is measured in renewals, not in closed tickets.
FRT — First response time
First response time is how long passes between a customer sending their question and receiving the first reply from a person. It measures the initial wait, not the resolution, and it is the metric that weighs most heavily on whether support feels good or not.
Resolution time
Resolution time is how long passes between a question arriving and it being resolved and closed. Unlike first response time, it measures the whole process, including waits on the customer and escalations to other teams.
