Everything you need to know about this classic metric
An old-school option still stands out in a world flooded with social media metrics.
It's been around for a long time, but your Net Promoter Score (NPS) remains a great choice for judging customer loyalty and satisfaction.
First introduced over two decades ago, NPS is still widely used today. Why? Because NPS distills customer sentiment into a single, powerful number that companies find easy to track and act on. You can use it to compare your performance to industry benchmarks, gauge loyalty, and get a feel for customer satisfaction levels.
A high NPS is a great sign of strong customer loyalty and positive word-of-mouth, and that's brilliant for company growth and business success. On the flip side, a low NPS can mean that customers are likely to shop elsewhere.
In this article, we'll dig a little deeper into the finer details of NPS and how you calculate your score. We'll also examine the pros and cons of using NPS as a metric and how Brandwatch helps brands gather deeper NPS insights by analyzing customer sentiment and feedback across social platforms.
In this guide:
- What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
- How to calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- How NPS surveys work
- The pros of NPS
- The cons of NPS
- How Brandwatch helps with NPS insights
- Time to discover your Net Promoter Score
>> Explore our guide to social and NPS
What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your company to others.
The concept of the NPS score (and the overall Net Promoter System) was developed by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, and introduced in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article titled “The One Number You Need to Grow.”
Reichheld’s research found that responses to a single question – essentially, “How likely is it that you would recommend [Company/Product] to a friend or colleague?” – correlated strongly with customer repeat business and growth.
This question became the basis of NPS, and it’s typically answered on a 0 to 10 scale, where 0 means “Not at all likely” and 10 means “Extremely likely.”
From the responses, customers are grouped into three categories:
- Promoters (score 9-10): Loyal enthusiasts who are highly likely to recommend your business. They love your product or service, will buy again, and often fuel growth and bring in new customers through positive word-of-mouth.
- Passives (score 7-8): Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers. They received what they expected, but they aren’t eager to recommend you. Passives are vulnerable to competitive offers and could churn if a better deal comes along.
- Detractors (score 0-6): Unhappy and dissatisfied customers. They are unlikely to buy from you again and may even discourage others from doing business with you, spreading negative word-of-mouth about your brand.
How to calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Calculating Net Promoter Score is pretty straightforward once you get your head around the basics.
To calculate NPS, take the percentage of respondents who are Promoters and subtract the percentage who are Detractors. Ignore the Passives in this calculation. The result is your NPS, which can range from -100 to +100.
For example, if 50% of respondents are Promoters and 10% are Detractors, your NPS would be 40.
The higher the score, the better. In general, a score above 20 is good, a score above 50 is excellent, and anything above 80 is really hitting it out of the park. This can vary slightly depending on the industry (for example, healthcare insurance providers tend to have lower NPS scores).
Additionally, you can also combine social feedback with your NPS data to get a more holistic view of customer advocacy – read more in our social NPS guide.
How NPS works
You'll typically just need to conduct a short survey to calculate your NPS score. This will include the standard NPS question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our [product/service/company] to a friend or colleague?”
You've probably seen these surveys delivered in various ways, such as via email after purchase or support interaction. It's easy and quick to get your respondents' answers.
Most Net Promoter Score surveys include a follow-up question (or two) to add qualitative insight. This could be an open-ended question such as, “Could you tell us why you gave that score?” or “What’s the main reason for your rating?”. These comments help you understand what drives loyalty or dissatisfaction. Without them, NPS alone only tells you your score, not why it’s high or low.
Ideally, you should pair this survey with social listening tactics to dig deeper into opinions about your company and customer experiences. In terms of tools that will help, Brandwatch Consumer Research can help you do the heavy lifting here.
The pros of NPS
Like any metric, NPS has strengths that make it useful and weaknesses that warrant caution. Let’s break down the pros first.
Simple and intuitive
NPS boils down customer loyalty to one simple data point. This beautiful simplicity makes it easy for everyone in the organization to understand.
Customers find the single-question format quick and easy to answer, and companies find it straightforward to calculate and track.
You don’t need a PhD in statistics to interpret NPS – if your score goes up, things are improving; if it goes down, there’s cause for concern.
Good indicator of growth
A good net promoter score is often seen as a sign of future growth.
Over the years, many have observed a correlation between improving NPS and increasing revenue or market share. While not a guarantee, a strong NPS suggests you’re delighting customers enough that they’ll stick around and bring others along (which drives growth).
In other words, NPS is known as a good indicator of customer loyalty and, in turn, business growth.
Easy to implement and benchmark
Setting up NPS surveys and integrating them into various touchpoints is easy.
There are many tools (from simple survey apps to full customer experience (CX) platforms) that offer Net Promoter Score survey templates. You can ask the question via email, website pop-ups, SMS, at events – anywhere you interact with customers.
The standardized nature of NPS means results are comparable. You can benchmark your NPS against industry data or competitors if available, and you can track your score over time with confidence that you’re consistently measuring the same thing.
Adaptable to different contexts
NPS is a flexible metric. You can ask the “How likely to recommend?” question about different aspects of your business. We even did it at Brandwatch to discover what features our customers are happiest with. (If you’re curious, the winner was Iris, our integrated AI tool.)
You might use NPS to evaluate a specific product (“How likely are you to recommend our Product X?”), a specific interaction (“...recommend our customer support?”), or the brand overall.
This adaptability lets you pinpoint where you excel or fall short. You might find your overall brand NPS is high, but the NPS for your technical support experience is much lower, indicating an area for improvement.
Widely understood
NPS has achieved universal recognition in the business world.
It’s a metric that often makes it into company dashboards and board meetings. Executives are measured on it, and entire teams rally to improve it.
Because it’s so widely used, NPS carries weight. There’s power in having a metric that everyone, from the CEO to front-line employees, can relate to. NPS has become a common language of customer experience.
The cons of NPS
While closely tracking your NPS can have loads of benefits, there are also some drawbacks.
Lacks context
Perhaps the biggest drawback of NPS is that the score alone doesn’t tell you why customers are promoting or detracting.
It’s a single number. If your NPS score was sitting at the industry average but then drops 10 points, you need further analysis to understand what happened – did a product issue annoy your customers? Was there a pricing change?
The basic NPS survey provides limited context, and that's why those follow-up questions are so important. Without that, NPS can’t tell the full story.
Small sample sizes
NPS surveys, especially for smaller businesses or low-traffic products, can suffer from low response rates and small sample sizes.
If only a tiny fraction of your customers respond, the score might not be representative. Additionally, conducting large-scale NPS surveys can be time-consuming and costly, so this problem is hard to overcome.
A few outliers in a small sample could also skew the results. In short, NPS results might sometimes be statistically shaky if the sample isn’t large enough.
Time lag
Traditional NPS surveying can be slow. Companies might run NPS surveys monthly or quarterly and then take time to analyze the results. By the time you get the NPS report, weeks or months may have passed since the customers gave their feedback.
This lag means NPS isn’t always actionable in the moment. If a customer became a detractor a month ago, they might have already vented on social media by the time you see the NPS report.
This means you can't rely solely on periodic NPS surveys to flag emerging issues. You'll need to use more up-to-date methods, like social listening, to catch a brewing crisis.
Liable to “gaming” and bias
Because NPS is often tied to executive bonuses or team KPIs, there can be a temptation to game the system.
There’s also response bias – extremely happy or unhappy customers are more likely to respond than moderately content customers. Moreover, how you ask the question matters; phrasing and timing can influence results.
The Wall Street Journal reported on how NPS has developed a “cult-like following” but can be misleading due to such biases, noting cases where companies manipulated survey methods to boost scores.
Moreover, overemphasizing a single metric can lead to perverse incentives (“get the score up at any cost”) rather than genuinely improving customer experience.
Potential blind spots
NPS surveys gather solicited feedback – you’re asking the customer for their opinion. The very act of asking can introduce some bias (customers might answer differently knowing the company is listening).
More importantly, not all unhappy customers will bother to fill out your survey. In fact, one study found that only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers will actually complain or provide feedback – the rest just silently leave. That means if you rely only on NPS survey responses, you could be missing a lot of detractors who didn’t even respond.
In short, NPS surveys might not hear from those very upset customers who have given up on you, which can give a false sense of security.
Doesn’t account for individual influence
All NPS survey respondents are treated equally in the score, but in reality, not all promoters or detractors are equal in influence.
For example, imagine one of your detractors is a highly influential social media content creator or a celebrity. That single person could amplify their negative opinion to thousands of others, doing far more damage than an “average” detractor.
NPS alone won’t highlight that difference – nine promoters and one detractor yields the same NPS whether that detractor is a nobody or Oprah.
How Brandwatch helps with NPS insights
While NPS is excellent as a simple barometer of loyalty, you should know its limitations. Think of it as a great starting point.
The best approach is to use NPS as one lever in your toolkit – supplementing it with follow-up questions, qualitative research, and other metrics. Thankfully, you can use Brandwatch to fill in some of those blind spots.
For example, Brandwatch Consumer Research sends alerts on emerging customer issues that NPS might not flag. If negative chatter about your brand is on the rise, you can respond before it spirals. This kind of unsolicited, real-time feedback complements NPS surveys by highlighting problems (and their causes) as they happen.
Brandwatch’s suite of tools can also help you go beyond the basic NPS question and tap into more nuanced customer feedback data, especially from social and online sources, to get a fuller picture of sentiment.
By using Brandwatch Consumer Research in tandem with your NPS program, you can analyze customer sentiment and conversations across millions of unsolicited online posts, reviews, and social media mentions.
On the engagement side of things, using Brandwatch Social Media Management is a great way to ensure no customer comments or questions slip through the cracks. Nurturing customer relationships is key when it comes to protecting (and boosting) your NPS score.
By following engagement across multiple social media platforms in one single dashboard, you'll be better placed to catch and address issues quickly and continue to improve that all-important customer loyalty score.
Time to discover your Net Promoter Score
Your Net Promoter Score can give you real insight into customer experience, and it's a genuinely great predictor of growth.
If you've got a strong NPS, that's brilliant. It's a sign that your efforts in product quality, customer service, and customer experience are paying off in the form of enthusiastic, loyal customers who will recommend you to others and make repeat purchases.
At the same time, a good NPS score on its own is not a silver bullet. The smartest companies use NPS alongside other methods to get a multi-dimensional view of customer health.
They also complement survey data with social listening and analytics to get a proper feel for the customer journey. This is where tools like Brandwatch can make a huge difference – by filling in the “why” behind the score and enabling rapid, targeted action on customer feedback.
If you pair NPS data with tools like Brandwatch’s Consumer Research (for deep dives into customer sentiment) and Social Media Management (for engaging with customers and managing their journey), you can transform raw scores into actionable insights and real improvements.
The trick is using NPS alongside other strategies to identify strengths to build on and weaknesses to fix.
By tracking the right metrics and using the right tools, you’ll be well on your way to turning more of your customers into loyal promoters – and seeing the business growth that comes with it.
