NPS — Net Promoter Score
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 is the difference between two percentages, not 40% of happy customers. That is why it cannot be averaged with other metrics or read as a score out of a hundred, and an NPS of 0 only means there are as many promoters as detractors.
Why it matters
What it means for a SaaS
In a subscription business, the question NPS asks, whether the customer would speak well of you, is related to the one that matters most: 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, because the metric is designed to separate enthusiasm from indifference.
Why it gets criticized so much
Because it throws information away (every answer in the neutral zone) and because, with a small sample, the result swings a lot on very little. 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 whole company.
Frequently asked questions
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
These usually 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 with a thumbs up or down, and expressed as the percentage of positive answers over the total.
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: making things easy for customers keeps them better than trying to wow them.
Churn
Churn is the percentage of customers, or of revenue, lost in a period. It is the metric that tells you whether a subscription business is growing or just standing still: 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 and it is the metric that weighs most when a customer judges whether support is good.
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 the time spent with other teams.
