Definition
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty from a single question: how likely are you to recommend us, on a 0–10 scale. Respondents scoring 9–10 are promoters, 7–8 passives, and 0–6 detractors. NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, yielding a number from −100 to +100.
Key takeaways
- NPS comes from one question — likelihood to recommend on 0–10 — scored as %promoters (9–10) minus %detractors (0–6), ranging −100 to +100.
- It deliberately ignores passives (7–8) so lukewarm satisfaction can't masquerade as loyalty.
- The open-text 'why' follow-up is the real payoff, turning the score into a prioritized list of what to fix and amplify.
- Read NPS for trend with its comments; used as a number to game, it degrades into a vanity metric.
NPS earned its popularity by being one comparable number that, in the original research, correlated with growth across many industries. Its simplicity is also its discipline: by ignoring passives entirely and weighting only enthusiasts against critics, it deliberately refuses to let lukewarm satisfaction look like success.
The score's real value is rarely the headline number — it is the open-text follow-up asking why. The verbatim reasons turn a metric into a backlog of what to fix and what to amplify. Transactional NPS, surveyed right after a specific interaction, diagnoses individual touchpoints, while relational NPS, surveyed periodically, tracks overall sentiment over time.
NPS is widely critiqued: response bias, cultural differences in how people use scales, and small samples can swing it wildly, and a single number flattens a complex relationship. Treated as one input among many — read for trend and paired with its comments — it remains useful; treated as a target to game, it becomes a vanity metric.
In Planoda, qualitative loyalty signals like NPS sit alongside the behavioral health metrics on the same dashboards, so sentiment can be cross-checked against what customers actually do.
Related terms
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, product, or service, usually by asking them to rate it on a short scale. CSAT is the percentage of respondents who chose a satisfied rating (commonly the top one or two of a five-point scale), making it a direct, transactional gauge of a single moment.
- Customer Health ScoreA customer health score is a composite metric that blends behavioral and relationship signals — product usage, support history, engagement, sentiment, and payment status — into a single indicator of how likely an account is to renew, expand, or churn. It gives customer success teams an early, prioritized view of which accounts need attention.
- Vanity MetricA vanity metric is a number that looks impressive but does not inform decisions or correlate with real success — total registered users, page views, or app downloads. It tends to only go up, lacks context for action, and flatters rather than informs, making it a poor basis for strategy compared to actionable, comparable metrics.
- Churn RateChurn rate is the percentage of customers (or revenue) lost over a period, calculated as customers lost divided by customers at the start of the period. It is the inverse of retention and the single most-watched health metric for subscription businesses, because small monthly losses compound into large annual ones.
- Retention RateRetention rate is the percentage of customers (or users) who remain active over a period — the mirror image of churn. Calculated as customers retained divided by customers at the period's start, it measures whether a product delivers durable, repeated value rather than a one-time hit, and underpins almost every other growth metric.