Glossary
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A single-question survey score that gauges customer loyalty by asking how likely someone is to recommend a company.
Also called: NPS
Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric built from one question: "How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?", answered on a 0-to-10 scale. Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks associated with Bain & Company, Fred Reichheld, and NICE Satmetrix, and the method has since become a widely used industry-neutral survey format.
Respondents scoring 9 or 10 are counted as promoters, 7 or 8 as passives, and 0 through 6 as detractors. The score itself is NPS = % promoters − % detractors, which produces a number between -100 and 100. Some organizations track a relationship NPS, surveyed periodically across the whole customer base, alongside a transactional NPS sent right after a specific interaction such as a support ticket.
NPS matters because it is cheap to run, easy to track over time, and correlates in many businesses with churn rate and future spending, and a commonly cited rule of thumb treats any positive score as decent and scores above the 50s as strong, though what counts as good varies a great deal by industry. The main pitfalls are treating the single number as a full explanation rather than pairing it with open-ended follow-up, low or biased response rates, and comparing scores across industries or survey vendors that are not directly comparable.
Last reviewed September 19, 2026