Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a loyalty metric from a single survey question about how likely someone is to recommend a product, scored from -100 to +100.

What is Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a way to measure customer loyalty with one question: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" People answer on a scale from 0 to 10. The result is a single number between -100 and +100 that shows how loyal your users are. Fred Reichheld introduced NPS in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article.^[1]

How is NPS Calculated?

Responses split into three groups:

Promoters (9-10) — Loyal users who will stay and tell others about you.
Passives (7-8) — Satisfied but not excited. They might switch to a competitor.
Detractors (0-6) — Unhappy users who may share negative experiences.

The formula is simple:

NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors

A score above 0 is acceptable. Above 50 is excellent. Above 70 is world-class.^[2] Passives are not included in the math.

Why Does NPS Matter for Large Websites?

NPS helps organizations track loyalty over time. For a bank, a drop in NPS after a website redesign signals that customers are less happy with the new experience. For a government service, a rising NPS shows that recent improvements are working.

Content teams use NPS trends to spot pages or flows that frustrate users. If the NPS for your online claims process drops, your insurance portal likely has a usability problem worth investigating.

IT teams care about NPS because technical issues directly affect it. Slow pages, broken forms, and poor mobile performance all push scores down.

Legal and compliance teams track NPS alongside accessibility work. A site that excludes users with disabilities will naturally score lower among those groups, and may face regulatory risk under the European Accessibility Act.

Two Ways to Use NPS

Relational NPS measures overall loyalty at regular intervals. You might survey users once per quarter. This shows the big picture.

Transactional NPS measures feelings right after a specific event. For example, asking for a score after a customer completes an e-commerce purchase or finishes a support chat. This shows how individual touchpoints perform.^[3]

Both use the same 0-10 scale and the same formula.

How to Read NPS Results

A single score means little on its own. You need context.

Compare within your industry. Software companies average 30 to 45. Industries with mandatory relationships, like insurance and utilities, tend to score lower.^[4] A score of 25 may be strong for a government portal but weak for a retail site.

Track trends, not snapshots. A declining score over three quarters matters more than any single number. It tells you the experience is getting worse, even if the absolute score looks fine.

Read the follow-up comments. Most NPS surveys include an open text question: "What is the main reason for your score?" These comments tell you what to fix. The number alone does not.

What Are the Limits of NPS?

NPS has real weaknesses. A 2019 study in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science found that NPS is not always the best predictor of growth. Other metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) performed equally well or better in some cases.^[5]

Key limits include:

Cultural bias — A score of 8 means enthusiasm in some countries and indifference in others. Global organizations should be cautious comparing NPS across regions.
Response bias — People with strong feelings are more likely to respond. The silent middle gets underrepresented.
No built-in action plan — The score tells you something is wrong but not what. You need follow-up research to find the cause.

How Does NPS Relate to Other Metrics?

NPS works best alongside other measures. CSAT tells you about a single interaction. Customer Effort Score (CES) tells you how easy a task was. NPS tells you about overall loyalty. Collecting ongoing user feedback at the page level complements NPS with more granular signals. Together, they give a complete view of the user experience.

How Askem Helps

While NPS gives a site-wide loyalty signal, page-level feedback tools offer something more actionable. Reaction buttons on individual pages collect continuous satisfaction data without running quarterly surveys. Tools like Askem place "Yes", "No", and "I need more info" widgets on every page, so content teams see which specific pages help users and which do not. For regulated organizations, this page-specific signal means you can act on user satisfaction problems as they appear rather than waiting for your next NPS cycle.

Sources

Reichheld, F. — "The One Number You Need to Grow." Harvard Business Review, December 2003: https://hbr.org/2003/12/the-one-number-you-need-to-grow
Bain & Company — Net Promoter System: https://www.netpromotersystem.com/about/what-is-net-promoter/
Satmetrix — Net Promoter Score Benchmarks: https://www.satmetrix.com/
CustomerGauge — B2B NPS Benchmarks: https://customergauge.com/benchmarks
Keiningham, T. et al. — "Customer satisfaction and loyalty: Is Net Promoter the best metric?" Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2019: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-018-0598-5