What is NPS?

What a Net Promoter Score is, and how to gather your (or a competitor's) NPS using Attest.

Liam Leahy avatar
Written by Liam Leahy
Updated over a week ago

Net Promoter Score (often simply referred to as NPS) is a widely used measure of the loyalty and satisfaction of a brand’s customers. NPS can also be used to track business growth if updated over time. 

It is measured on an 11-point scale, in response to the following question:

‘How likely are you to recommend [brand/product/service] to a friend or colleague?’

The responses are then pooled into 3 segments:

0-6 = Detractors - unlikely to purchase the product again, and may actually damage the brand’s reputation.

7-8 = Passives - not so dissatisfied as to bad-mouth the brand, but not satisfied enough to actually recommend it.

9-10 = Promoters - brand evangelists who repeatedly buy the product or service, and are extremely likely to recommend it to people.

To get the NPS, you must subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. (Passives are left out of the calculation.)

You then have an NPS: an index ranging from -100 to 100. 

Calculating NPS with Attest

With Attest, this calculation is done for you automatically. All you need to do is select the NPS question type, and enter the question: "How likely are you to recommend [brand/product/service] to a friend or colleague?". 

You can choose to collect your own brand's NPS - and, crucially, track changes to this over time with multiple surveys or a regular brand tracker - as well as collecting the NPS of competitors, so that you can see how each brand in your market compares. 

However, NPS alone doesn’t direct you to areas for improvement, and that is why we recommend using a variation of questions when conducting a survey. You can follow an NPS question with a free text option for respondents to explain why they selected the number they did. This helps add context to the figure, and will indicate where your brand needs to improve in order to increase NPS. 

The results page will show the overall Net Promoter Score, which will update as you select demographic filters or answer filters, so that you can see which consumers are most and least satisfied with each brand. The results will also show you the numerical breakdown into detractors, passive consumers and promoters. If your NPS score is high, or at least above the industry average, this means that you have a healthy relationship with your customers and they are likely to actively recommend your brand. 

A word of caution here is that you want to be mindful of the sample size used for NPS calculation, especially when applying filters. If the sample size of a specific group gets small (e.g. less than 100 respondents), the NPS should be considered more as a directional indication. It will require more contextual information (e.g. open text feedback) to interpret the result and compare to benchmarks.

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