What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a single-number measure of how likely your customers are to recommend you to a friend or colleague. It was created in 2003 by Fred Reichheld at Bain & Company and is now used by tens of thousands of companies as a headline customer-loyalty metric.

It comes from a single question, asked on an 11-point scale (0 to 10):

"How likely are you to recommend [your company / product] to a friend or colleague?"

How the score is calculated

Respondents are bucketed into three groups based on their answer:

| Score | Group | What they mean | |-------|-------|----------------| | 9–10 | Promoters | Loyal enthusiasts. Will refer others and stay with you. | | 7–8 | Passives | Satisfied but unenthusiastic. Easily lured by competitors. | | 0–6 | Detractors | Unhappy customers who can damage your brand through negative word-of-mouth. |

The score is then:

NPS = % Promoters − % Detractors

It always falls between −100 and +100. Passives are intentionally ignored — they don't count for or against.

Example

  • 100 responses: 60 promoters, 30 passives, 10 detractors
  • 60% promoters − 10% detractors = NPS of +50

How to read your score

There's no single "good" NPS — it varies by industry — but these bands are widely used:

| NPS | Band | What it suggests | |-----|------|------------------| | Below 0 | Needs attention | More detractors than promoters. Focus on root causes urgently. | | 0–30 | Good | Most customers are happy. Solid baseline. | | 30–70 | Great | Strong loyalty and word-of-mouth. | | 70+ | Excellent | Top-tier — rare and worth protecting. |

Why it works

  • Easy to ask — one question, takes seconds.
  • Predictive — strongly correlated with retention and growth in many studies.
  • Comparable — same formula across companies and industries, so you can benchmark.

Common pitfalls

  • Sample size: small samples (under 50) swing wildly — be careful drawing conclusions.
  • Selection bias: surveying only your happiest users (e.g. recent successful purchases) inflates the score.
  • Single-metric blindness: NPS tells you what but not why. Always pair it with an open-text follow-up like "What's the main reason for your score?".
  • Forced cadence: surveying the same people every month leads to "survey fatigue" — quarterly or post-event is usually plenty.

In Form Wizard

When you add a rating question with a 0–10 or 1–10 scale, Form Wizard automatically:

  • Tags it as an NPS question
  • Buckets responses into promoters / passives / detractors
  • Calculates and displays your score on the Smart scoring tab
  • Shows the band (Good / Great / Excellent) so you don't have to interpret the number cold

See the Smart scoring article for how this fits with our CSAT and top-box methodologies.