1. 10 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT NET
PROMOTER SCORES AND THE USER
EXPERIENCE
Compiled by Edward Smith

2. 1. The Net Promoter Score is a
measure of customer loyalty and
is based on a single question:
How likely is it that you'll recommend this
product to a friend or colleague? The
response options range from 0 (Not at all
likely) to 10 (Extremely likely). Responses
are then bucketed into the following
segments.
Promoters: Responses from 9-10
Passives: Responses from 7-8
Detractors: Responses from 0 to 6
Subtracting the proportion of detractors
from the proportion of promoters and
converting it to a percent gets you the Net
Promoter Score. For example, 100
promoters and 30 passive and 80
detractors gets you a Net Promoter Score
(NPS) of 9.5% (20 divided by 210). This
mean there are 9.5% more promoters
than detractors. A NPS of -10% means
you have 10% more detractors than
promoters.

3. 2. The Net Promoter Score is
appealing because of its
simplicity
(easy to score and a single question) and
it's expressed as a percentage which can
be more digestible to executives and non-
math types than interpreting a mean (e.g.
70% Net Promoters vs 7.9 out of 10). It
can be confusing to have a negative
percentage and some companies prefer
to just call it a "score" and not percentage
for this reason. Think of it like net income
(which we all know can be negative).

4. 3. The main advantage of the Net
Promoter Score is that it gets
companies thinking about metrics
that come from the customer.
Yes, revenue is the ultimate metric but
revenue is both a lagging indicator and
not necessarily a good indicator of future
growth--especially when you're pissing off
customers to get short term revenue
(think of the latest fee from your phone
company, cable company or rental-car
company). What's more, you can't do
anything about last quarter's numbers. If
you have a reasonable proxy for
measuring future growth and revenue
then you might be able to improve next
year's revenue. In the processes you also
will likely make your customers happier
and more loyal!

5. 4. The main disadvantage of the
Net Promoter Score is that it
reduces an 11 point scale into a 3
point scale
(Detractors, Passives and Promoters).
This has two major consequences. First it
increases the sample size you need in
order to achieve the same level of
precision as using the mean. The margin
of error is usually around twice as wide
compared to using the more conventional
approach (mean and standard deviation).
Secondly, it is harder to detect differences
between scores, either over time or
compared to a competitor. For this
reason I use the raw responses and use
means and standard deviations in t-tests
and regression analysis.

6. 5. Despite the popularity and
enthusiasm for it being the
"Ultimate" question, there might
be better questions for your
company or industry:
Many measures of customer satisfaction
and customer loyalty correlate. Reicheld
in his 2006 book "The Ultimate Question"
pg 28 points out that the “likelihood to
recommend” question was the best or
second best predictor of repeat
purchases or referrals in 11 out of 14
industries (79%). Likelihood to revisit,
repurchase or reuse might be a better
indicator of customer loyalty for your
product or industry. I often saw this with
business-to-business products I worked
on. How likely is it that you'd recommend
this non-profit accounting software to your
friend? Despite the somewhat irrelevance
of the question it still correlated highly with
other questions and we were still able to
focus on changes over time. So don't
throw the baby out with the bathwater.

7. 6. Don't just collect NPS:
The Net Promoter Score might be a good
number to track but it's usually the
symptom of high or low customer loyalty,
not the cause. People are or are not
recommending the product, website or
service because of something—you need
to have a few good candidate questions in
your short surveys so you can identify the
root causes and improve. Usually
questions about value, quality, usability
and a few key features will get you down
the right track. You can then conduct a
key-driver analysis to determine
statistically which features or attitudes are
having the biggest impact on Net
Promoter Scores. In one key-driver
analysis I conducted for a client, I found
the biggest driver of detractors was that
emails were being sent too often to
customers!

8. 7. Compare to Benchmarks:
The NPS by itself might seem more
intuitive than an average score because it
is expressed as a percentage, but what
makes good, average or poor scores
varies a lot by industry (think cable
companies versus luxury hotel
chains). For example, the average NPS
for consumer software products is 21%
compared with about a 6% for cable
providers.

9. 8. Ask "why" for detractors:
If I could ask only one open-ended
question on a survey it would be for
detractors to briefly explain why they
gave a 0-6 response. You can
usually categorize these responses
pretty quickly into major
groupings. Often, many of the
detractors will say things you can't
do much about like "I just don't
recommend products to friends" or "I
really like the product" and there is
almost always some quick fixes and
patters in what you can fix.

10. 9. Ease of Use explains between
30% and 50% of users' likelihood
to recommend in software and
websites.
A large analysis of System Usability
Scale (SUS) scores taken along with
Net Promoter Scores found that a
good chunk of why people
recommend is based on their
perception of the ease of use.
Improving ease of use then should
improve loyalty. How do you improve
ease of use? A quick usability test
with just a handful of participants will
often reveal the most obvious
issues.
This could reflect on ease of
ordering / ease of payments etc

11. 10. Not all promoters are created
equal.
Just because a respondent gives a 9
or 10 on the likelihood to
recommend question doesn't mean
they will actually recommend. To
measure what I call promoter
efficiency you ideally track
customers over time to see if they
actually recommended to a friend.
As an alternative, ask respondents
in the same survey if they actually
have recommended to anyone in the
last year and use that as a proxy for
their future behavior. I've included
this figure in the NPS benchmark
report and on average 68% of
promoters report having
recommended in the last year
(ranging from 43% to 96%).

12. Calculating the Net Promoter
Score:
Reichheld developed the NPS
methodology, which is based on asking
customers a single question that is
predictive of both repurchase and referral:
"On a scale of zero to 10, how likely are
you to refer to a friend or colleague?“
The answers customers provide are
classified as follows:
0 - 6 = "Detractors"
7 - 8 = "Passives"
9 - 10 = "Promoters"
The NPS is calculated by subtracting the
percentage of respondents that are
labeled "Detractors" from the percentage
of respondents that are labeled
"Promoters":
% of Promoters - % of Detractors = NPS
Net Promoter Score can range
anywhere from -100 to 100.
Example questions for NPS
surveys:
"How likely is it that you would
recommend [your company] to a friend or
colleague?“
"How likely are you to recommend this
product to others?“
"How likely is it that you would
recommend others to work with <Bord Na
Móna>?“
"How likely are you to share this website
with a friend or colleague?“
“Name three areas that we do well in.”
“Name three areas that we have not done
well in.”
“How could we improve?”
“Why would you recommend us?”