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Businesses run on happy customers. Happy customers generate repeat business, share positive reviews, and refer others to your brand. Plus, happy customers are cost-effective. Getting a new customer typically costs more than keeping your current ones around.
Net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to someone else. This metric was invented by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company in 2003 and is a surprisingly good indicator of a company’s success. Companies with high NPS for their industry grow revenue 2.5 faster than their competition, according to research from Rob Markey, founder of Bain & Company’s Customer & Marketing practice.
Want to evaluate the success of your customer experience, product, and overall business? You should measure NPS. Here is a closer look at NPS, including how to calculate and benchmark your score.
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Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric to calculate the quality of your customer experience across every channel based on whether or not your existing customers are likely to recommend your business to someone else.
The net promoter score for your business is essential because it directly reflects how well your business satisfies your customers. It also shows the number of promoters you are creating through your company. It allows you to quantify the sentiment of your customers so you can better serve and satisfy them.
So what, exactly, is NPS measuring? Most directly, it indicates how much of your customer base would recommend your product to others. However, people treat NPS as a metric for brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, overall customer service, and happy customers.
NPS is one of the most common metrics to measure your brand’s customer experience and growth potential. Lumoa, a customer survey company, surveyed customer experience directors. Of the respondents, two-thirds said they prioritize and track NPS.
Calculating your NPS score isn’t difficult once you understand the three types of responses:
The formula for net promoter score is: Total % of promoters - the total % of detractors = NPS
NPS scores are significant for measuring the overall quality of your customer support and interactions. Fortunately, collecting NPS is relatively straightforward — it all boils down to one simple question:
"On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to someone else?"
On this scale, 10 is the highest response: Customers who choose 10 are “extremely likely” to recommend your brand. And 0 is the lowest “not likely at all” response.
Let’s walk through how to calculate net promoter score step-by-step:
Here’s an example: You have a survey that comes back with 60% of the respondents being promoters, 10% of the respondents being detractors, and 30% of the respondents being passives. This is what your NPS calculation would look like:
60% promoters - 10% detractors = 50 NPS
In this scenario, the NPS score is 50. The NPS is always an integer, never a percent.
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A perfect NPS would be 100, but you can score as low as -100. A score below zero is considered poor because it means you have more detractors than promoters. Negative scores indicate your business may have a high churn rate and will struggle to grow. A score of 0 to 30 is acceptable, but anything above 30 is best.
Also, your overall NPS is only one piece of the puzzle. Once you know how to collect survey responses and calculate your score, you can drill down to determine which factors impact your score most.
For example, NPS may vary across your products. If so, you can start investigating whether the low-scoring products are low-quality, have misleading marketing, or something else entirely. Likewise, NPS may vary depending on the customer service channel customers use. If so, you may want to bolster your omnichannel customer service offering.
This is a tricky question to answer. NPS scores range from -100 to 100, so any NPS above zero technically means you have more promoters than detractors. The traditional score breakdown looks like this:
In practice, looking at others in your industry is usually better to determine what is good and what isn’t. Pay particular attention to whether or not your business is B2B or B2C, as B2C scores tend to vary much more widely based on the nature of the consumer products industry.
ClearlyRated’s 2022 NPS Benchmarks for B2B Service Industries illustrates this well, with most B2B service NPS ranging from 23 to 60. In the B2C market, on the other hand, the average NPS ranges from 5 to 62 for 2022.
With NPS, the goal is always to have more promoters than detractors. So, like any score above zero is technically positive, any NPS of zero or lower is a negative score regardless of your industry because it means you have more detractors than promoters.
Whether you want to improve a good score or bring a lousy score up to par, it’s usually about providing a better customer experience. If your score is lower than you’d like, it’s time to analyze the customer experience you’re providing to find weak areas that could improve.
Of course, your score doesn’t mean much without context. Retently’s 2023 NPS benchmark provides excellent data on the average NPS across industries:
Don’t lose hope if your NPS is lower than the numbers above. Every brand is different, and every brand starts somewhere. The most important project is to continuously improve your NPS, regardless of where you stack up against competitors.
The formula is simple enough, but you might want to create a system to process your score continually. We have three recommendations:
If you’re comfortable with Excel or Google Sheets, you can set up a spreadsheet to perform your net promoter score calculation. To do this, you will need to follow these steps with the COUNTIF function:
Plugging these formulas into your spreadsheet allows you to keep tabs on your NPS in real time, updating it as you need to when new survey responses come in.
If you're not great at using Excel, you can also use free NPS calculator tools online. To use one of these, you only need to count up the customer responses on their surveys and put them in the NPS calculator platform. Many survey tools allow you to export the scores easily.
Some good options for free NPS calculation include:
Before calculating your score, you’ll have to send a survey to customers to collect their responses. Some survey tools have NPS calculations built in.
If you use Gorgias as your customer service platform, you can easily integrate a survey automation tool to collect and calculate responses like:
We love and recommend all these tools, but as an example, let’s look at how Delighted and Gorgias work together. Delighted helps you spin up an automated NPS survey — one of many survey templates they offer. Then, you can automatically send out the survey to customer segments on multiple channels via Gorgias:
Source: Delighted
An accurate NPS score helps you grow your business, overall customer retention, and referrals. An inaccurate NPS may point you in the wrong direction. Accuracy doesn’t just mean you used the formula correctly — it also means you’re measuring the full breadth of your customer base and customer journey.
Below are some best practices to implement to make your NPS as accurate and helpful as possible.
First, the type of survey you use is important. There are two main types to choose between: relationship surveys and transactional surveys.
Relationship surveys try to measure a customer's brand or company loyalty. They ask questions about the overall customer experience and how satisfied the customer is with your company. You will send these to your customer base at specific intervals to help you evaluate the quality of your customer experience and support.
Transactional surveys focus on a particular transaction — for ecommerce, this is usually a purchase. The survey questions focus on that transaction, not the overall customer experience. This type of survey might give you better information about the specific product purchased, though it can also skew up or down if the customer contacted customer support.
Most of the time, you’ll start with relationship surveys. Before you drill down to specific products and transactions, it’s helpful to benchmark your customers’ overall sentiment, loyalty, and promoter status.
If you don’t have a helpdesk, you can use standalone NPS software to collect contact information and send surveys. But suppose you have a helpdesk like Gorgias. In that case, you’ll have an easier time automating your NPS surveys with one of the NPS survey tools listed above because your helpdesk already has customer contact information and can automatically send surveys after purchases or customer service interactions.
When you decide to contact, you may be tempted to ask as many questions as possible to maximize the insights you receive. We get it; we love customer insight, too. However, response rates for NPS surveys are low, and customers are even less likely to respond to longer surveys.
You’ll have higher response rates if you focus your NPS surveys on two questions:
As we said above, you should follow up after a respondent gives you their score to understand why they answered that way. Leaving the question as optional won't impact the number of NPS questions you get back, but you may get some critical qualitative data from customers who choose to fill out the open-ended question.
Open-ended questions require more than a "yes" or "no" response. Here are some examples of open-ended questions that work well:
Make this question about the customer, using plenty of second-person pronouns, and let them have an open forum to add a response. Use the information you gather to help you improve your customer satisfaction in future interactions.
It's easy to get caught up in details and never actually launch your NPS survey. While you want an effective survey, don’t let perfect get in the way of done. Even if you only have a small amount of data initially, you will have some. NPS surveys are not one-and-done; you can optimize your next survey to get more responses.
Start with the relationship survey and send it to your current customers. Then, after receiving responses, tweak your survey and send it to different customer base segments. Continue tweaking the frequency, wording, and targeting until you get a statistically significant number of survey responses.
Don't wait to start until you have a perfect system — you'll lose valuable data if you do.
Experiment with the timing of your survey to maximize the total number of respondents. We’re unaware of any universal best practice for the time and day of the week to send out NPS surveys. The timing will depend on your specific customer base, so experiment until you find the sweet spot.
Some survey automation tools, like those mentioned above, will send surveys in response to customer actions. For example, a customer could get a survey a few hours (or days) after purchasing or contacting customer support. This is a great way to ensure you target customers who are actively engaged with your brand.
Want to improve your survey response rates? Check out our list of best practices for improving your NPS response rate.
Finally, ensure you test your survey in-house before sending it to actual customers. There is nothing worse than a poorly worded, poorly functioning survey. Send a test survey to people within your organization first, and make sure it gets to their inbox and not the spam folder.
What might trigger a spam flag in the invitation email for your survey? Here are some things to avoid:
Send the invitation email to people in-house and make sure everything works. The email should open, be easy to read, work on multiple browsers and email programs, and make sense to the reader. Take feedback from your team to tweak the email and ensure the survey has the best chance of getting read and responded to once it reaches your customer.
The primary purpose of NPS is to give you an overall impression of brand loyalty. Another benefit is to identify — and fix — low-NPS interactions as they happen.
We recommend identifying some of the top reasons for low scores and implementing a system to respond to incoming low scores quickly. In Gorgias, for example, you can set up an automated Rule to automatically create a ticket for incoming NPS scores and assign low NPS scores to a dedicated agent.
As your team grows, you can even dedicate agents to each common issue: damaged products, delayed shipping, etc. Gorgias’ intent detection automatically analyzes tickets to identify the root cause of the problem and, combined with Rules, can send each issue to a specialized agent:
Source: Gorgias
Treat those flagged low scores as priority tickets and establish a suitable solution for each reason. For example, you could send a gift card to customers who receive a late or damaged product.
These conversations may be sensitive and challenging, especially among VIP customers. So, we recommend activating phone support as a last line of defense for customers with a negative experience.
Raising your NPS is one of the revenue-generating tactics from our CX-Driven Growth Playbook, which is based on research of over 10,000+ top ecommerce brands. Check out the playbook for 17 more actionable tips to drive revenue by improving your CX.
Net promoter score is a rich metric, but it’s not the only — nor necessarily the best — way to gauge customer loyalty. One issue is the premise of the survey itself: Just because a customer might promote your brand doesn’t mean they’ll stay loyal. A customer might recommend your product to a friend but choose not to purchase it again because your product is too expensive for them.
We recommend complimenting your NPS efforts by measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT), mainly to gauge the performance of your customer support team. Whereas NPS helps you understand the potential for referral-based growth, CSAT asks about customer loyalty more directly: How satisfied are you with the help you received today?
If you use Gorgias, you can automatically send customer satisfaction surveys after closing a conversation with a customer:
Source: Gorgias
This information will be displayed in future discussions to give the next agent context about this customer’s past experiences with your brand. Plus, you can zoom out to get a sense of CSAT across your entire customer base with the platform’s customer satisfaction dashboard:
Source: Gorgias
Data from our CX-Driven Growth Playbook indicates your CSAT and revenue are linked. For example, raising your CSAT from 4/5 to 4.9/5 can raise your overall revenue by 4%.
Want to better understand your ecommerce business’s overall performance with metrics like conversion rate, acquisition costs, and lifetime value? Check out our guide to ecommerce KPIs.
Want to zoom in on your customer service department’s performance with metrics like NPS, CSAT, and support performance score? Check out our guide to evaluating customer service.
A good NPS score means your customers are happy and they are spreading the news about your product via word of mouth. Gorgias helps ecommerce brands improve customer experience to drive customer loyalty, referrals, and revenue.
One of our customers, Bagallery, saw their NPS go from 19 to 41 after partnering with Gorgias. Another client, Comme Avant, now maintains a nearly perfect NPS after switching to Gorgias.
And with Gorgias, NPS is only the tip of the iceberg for reporting and analytics. You have access to reporting dashboards like our Support Performance dashboard, which combines many key customer service metrics, and our Live Statistics dashboard, which shows up-to-date information about each agent's performance.
Sign up for a free trial to see Gorgias' powerful tools for reporting, analytics, and omnichannel customer support.
Net promoter score or NPS is a metric that measures customer loyalty and gauges how likely a customer will recommend a business to others. To gather NPS data, businesses typically share surveys that contain a form of the question: “How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” Customers respond on a scale of 1-10.
To calculate net promoter score (NPS), subtract the percentage of detractors (people who respond with 0-6) from the percentage of promoters (people who respond with 9-10). For example, if you have 60% promoters and 10% detractors, your NPS is 50. Average NPS scores are between 31 and 50 and scores above 50 are excellent.
To increase NPS scores, determine fixed times to send an NPS survey to customers and limit the survey to one question. As a general guideline, send an NPS survey after a customer signs up with you, 30 days after sign-up, and after certain onboarding steps.
A bad NPS score is below 1 and as low as -100.
NPS results are more than a measure of customer satisfaction. They tell you how many people are happy enough to promote your product — and how many are unhappy enough to speak ill of your product.