How to measure customer satisfaction with NPS surveys

Apr 4, 2019 | 3 min

NPS is the abbreviation for Net Promoter Score. It's a metric for assessing loyalty to a company, brand, product, or service, but it can also be used as an indicator of customer satisfaction. NPS surveys are easy to implement, and the results are easy to calculate. In this article, I'll glance at how it works.

NPS

A net promoter score survey is based on a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” Zero means 'not at all likely', and 10 means 'extremely likely'.

Answers are assigned a score from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most positive.

Customers are then divided into three categories:

Score 9-10 - Promoters, your most loyal respondents.
Score 7-9 - Passives, satisfied but enthusiastic.
Score 0-6 - Detractors, who are unhappy.

Once the survey concludes, we calculate the results by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. This gives you a figure between -100 and +100, your new net promoter score.

NPS is very straightforward, allowing you to benchmark your company’s results against others in your industry. When Zooma and our friends use NPS, we always add one additional question where the respondent can briefly write the reason for their score. The result indicates their satisfaction and usually lets us know where and how we need to improve.

Sometimes, our friends ask for advice on how to get customers to fill out NPS surveys. Therefore, I've put together a presentation (.pptx) that offers some tips on raising your survey response rate. Hopefully, it'll be helpful as you try to boost your customer satisfaction.

For more information about the role NPS plays in customer satisfaction, take a look at our customer satisfaction guide. It expands on this article and mentions a few other ways you can measure and improve your customer satisfaction rate.