What is Net Promoter Score?

The NPS calculation, step by step

The calculation has three steps and no weighting.

1. Ask the question on a 0 to 10 scale. How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague, where 0 is not at all likely and 10 is extremely likely.
2. Sort the answers into three bands. Scores of 9 and 10 are promoters. Scores of 7 and 8 are passives. Scores of 0 through 6 are detractors.
3. Subtract. The percentage of respondents who are promoters, minus the percentage who are detractors. Passives are counted in the denominator and then ignored.

The result is expressed as a whole number rather than as a percentage, even though it is derived from percentages, and it can run from negative 100, where every respondent is a detractor, to positive 100, where every respondent is a promoter.

Purely as arithmetic, take 100 responses split 50 promoters, 30 passives and 20 detractors. That is 50 percent promoters minus 20 percent detractors, so the score is 30. Those figures are an illustration of the method and not a measurement of anything.

Promoters, passives and detractors

Band	Answers	Counted as	What the band assumes
Promoters	9 and 10	Positive	Enthusiastic enough to recommend without prompting
Passives	7 and 8	Neither	Satisfied but not committed, and easily moved by a competitor
Detractors	0 through 6	Negative	Unhappy enough to discourage others

The band boundaries are the part people find surprising. A 6 out of 10, which most people would read as a mildly positive answer, is counted as a detractor and subtracts from the score. A 7 and an 8 count for nothing at all. Those cut points were chosen by the method's authors rather than derived, and they are where much of the criticism of NPS begins.

Where Net Promoter Score came from

NPS was introduced in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article by Fred Reichheld, developed with Bain and Company and Satmetrix. The Harvard Business Review article that introduced Net Promoter Score argued that a single question predicted growth better than long satisfaction surveys, and that the simplicity was the point: one number that an executive team could act on.

The appeal is real. Long customer satisfaction instruments were producing reports nobody read, and a single comparable figure changed that. NPS spread quickly because it solved an organisational problem as much as a measurement one.

Benchmark ranges, and why none appear here

The mechanical facts are these: the score runs from negative 100 to positive 100, and a score above zero means more promoters than detractors in the sample you collected.

Beyond that, published benchmarks are vendor-collected and not comparable. They vary by industry, by how the question was worded, by whether it was asked in an app or by email or by phone, by which customers were sampled, and by which vendor's panel produced them. Cultural differences in how people use numeric scales move national averages independently of any actual difference in satisfaction. This page does not publish an industry benchmark for that reason. Any specific number quoted to you as the standard for your sector comes from someone's sample, and the honest use of NPS is against your own previous reading, collected the same way.

NPS limitations, stated honestly

The criticism of NPS is technical rather than ideological, and it is worth knowing before the number reaches a board pack. Nielsen Norman Group's critique of Net Promoter Score sets out the usability research view, and the core objections are these.

• It throws away information. Eleven scale points are collapsed into three buckets, then two. Very different response distributions produce identical scores.
• The cut points are arbitrary. There is no measurement reason a 6 is a detractor and a 7 is not.
• Stated intent is not behaviour. The question asks how likely you are to recommend, not whether you did. The gap between the two is large and varies by category.
• It is unstable at low volume. With a small number of responses, a handful of answers swings the score by double digits, which is exactly the situation most small businesses are in.
• Collection method changes the result. Who is asked, when, and through what channel move the score more than the underlying experience often does.
• Tying it to compensation corrupts it. When a team's bonus depends on the number, the ask itself starts getting managed, and the score stops measuring customers.

None of that makes NPS useless. It makes it a trend line for one narrow construct, measured consistently, rather than a verdict.

NPS vs reviews: why only one is visible to a stranger

NPS is a private survey of people you already have a relationship with. Reputation is what people who have no relationship with you can find. Those are different objects and only one of them is visible to a stranger.

A public review has a permanent address, appears in search results, and is read by people who will never fill in your survey. Review count and review score are also named inputs in Google's guidance on local ranking factors, so public reviews do work that no survey score can. An NPS of 60 sits in your reporting. It does not appear when someone searches your name.

The honest relationship between the two is that NPS is a leading indicator and reviews are the public record. A falling NPS often shows up before the review average moves, which is genuinely useful. It is not a substitute for the record itself.

Where NPS earns its place in reputation work

Three uses hold up.

The verbatim comment is worth more than the score. The follow-up question, asking why someone chose their number, produces the specific operational detail that actually changes anything. Many teams collect it and then report only the number.

The trend matters and the level does not. Measured the same way, quarter over quarter, a moving score tells you something happened. Compared against a competitor's published figure, it tells you nothing.

Detractor follow-up is service recovery, and it works. Contacting people who scored low, to fix the problem rather than to discuss the score, is the part of the NPS programme with the clearest return.

There is one thing you must not do with it. Using the survey answer to decide who gets asked for a public review is review gating, which platform policy prohibits and which the Federal Trade Commission's review rule addresses when the effect is to suppress negative reviews. Survey everyone, invite everyone to review, and keep the two apart.

Working out which measures actually describe your situation, and which are being sold to you, is part of what a reputation audit sorts out.