Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty with a single question: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" answered on a 0 to 10 scale. Respondents are bucketed into promoters (9 to 10), passives (7 to 8), and detractors (0 to 6). NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, producing a score from -100 to +100.
What NPS is good and bad at
NPS is simple, comparable across companies, and easy to trend over time, which is why it is nearly universal. Its weaknesses are equally well known: it is a lagging, self-selected snapshot, it is collected infrequently, and a single number per account hides which specific relationships are at risk. It tells you the temperature of the base, not which accounts are about to leave.
- NPS measures stated loyalty; CSAT measures satisfaction with a specific interaction.
- Both are survey-based and complement continuous sentiment analysis, which reads the messages customers send anyway.
- A detractor response is a strong signal to investigate, and often an early marker of an at-risk account.
In a modern customer intelligence stack, NPS is one input among many. It is most useful folded into a health score alongside behavioral and conversational signals, rather than treated as the headline number it is too coarse to be.