What it means
Scores of nine and ten make someone a promoter, seven and eight make them a passive, and anything from nought to six makes them a detractor. The passives are counted in the total number of responses but are excluded from the score itself, which is why the measure reacts so sharply to changes at either extreme.
That deliberate harshness is the point: lukewarm customers are treated as neutral rather than as a success. Businesses adopt it because it is quick to run, easy to explain and can be tracked over time without a research budget.
It also travels well between departments, since marketing, operations and customer service can all see how their work moves one shared number. The score is most useful when paired with the free text follow up question asking why the customer gave that rating.
The number alone tells you the temperature; the comments tell you what to fix, and companies that skip this step usually end up with a metric nobody can act on. Two common variants exist.
Relationship surveys ask about the overall experience at set intervals, while transactional surveys ask immediately after a specific event such as a delivery or a support call, and the two typically produce different scores for the same business. The main weakness is sampling.
If only delighted or furious customers respond, the score reflects that group rather than the customer base, so response rate and consistency of method matter more than the precise figure. Comparing your score with a competitor's published number is usually unwise unless both were collected the same way.
In practice
Real-world examples.
Example
A broadband provider runs a transactional survey after every engineer visit and scores 62, while its annual relationship survey scores 11. The gap tells management that individual service is good but pricing and reliability shape the overall relationship.
Example
A boutique hotel group ties 10% of each general manager's bonus to the property level score. Within a year the weakest property has moved from 24 to 47, driven mostly by fixing a slow check in process the comments kept mentioning.
Example
A software company sees its score fall from 45 to 31 after a redesign of its main screen. The written responses point to three removed shortcuts, and reinstating them recovers most of the score within a quarter.
Think of it
“NPS shows whether customers would recommend you to friends-a single number capturing loyalty.
Formula
Calculation
Net Promoter Score = % promoters - % detractors, where promoters score 9 to 10 and detractors score 0 to 6
Halloway Home Insurance surveys its customers and receives 500 usable responses. Of these, 320 people score 9 or 10, 110 score 7 or 8, and 70 score between 0 and 6, and 320 + 110 + 70 = 500 responses in total.
Promoters are 320 / 500 = 0.64, or 64% of responses. Detractors are 70 / 500 = 0.14, or 14% of responses.
The Net Promoter Score is 64 - 14 = 50. Note that the 110 passives affect the score only by increasing the denominator; if 40 of them had been promoters instead, promoters would be 360 / 500 = 72% and the score would rise to 72 - 14 = 58.Case study
Seen in the real world.
This is an illustrative and clearly fictional example. Verity Meal Kits, an invented subscription food company, reported a Net Promoter Score of 58 and used it in investor updates as evidence of strong customer loyalty. Meanwhile, monthly cancellations were rising, which made no obvious sense.
The pattern became clear when the fictional team looked at who was answering. Surveys were sent only to customers with an active subscription and an open account, and response rates were highest among people in their first two months, when the novelty was strongest. Long standing customers, who were the ones actually leaving, were barely represented in the sample.
Verity changed its approach, surveying a random sample across all tenure bands and adding a short survey to the cancellation flow. The reported score dropped to 34, which was uncomfortable, but the comments identified repetitive recipes as the main driver of churn. In this illustrative case the lower and more honest number proved far more valuable than the flattering one.
Watch out
Common mistakes.
- Treating the score as a percentage, when it is a net figure that can range from -100 to +100 and has no percentage sign.
- Surveying only happy or recently acquired customers, which produces a comfortable number that hides the reasons people leave.
- Tracking the score without reading the free text comments, leaving the business with a metric it cannot act on.
Questions
People also ask.
Why are the sevens and eights ignored?
Passives are treated as neither loyal nor damaging, so they dilute the score through the denominator but do not add to or subtract from it directly.
What counts as a good score?
Anything above zero means promoters outnumber detractors, scores above 50 are generally considered strong, but norms differ sharply between industries.
Can the score be linked to financial results?
Often yes, since rising scores tend to precede better retention and more referrals, though the connection should be tested against your own churn and revenue data rather than assumed.
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