What is a good NPS score?

Customers often ask, "What is considered a good NPS score?" The score is irrelevant; focus on how to improve it. Nevertheless, customers naturally want to compare and contrast their scores and benchmark where they stand in their specific competitive environment. This article will guide you in analysing your Net Promoter Score and determining whether it's good or bad.

In B2B industries, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most widely used metric for measuring customer loyalty. Here’s a brief reminder about how it works.

How Net Promoter Score (NPS) is calculated

NPS is based on a simple question: "How likely is it that you would recommend [insert company] to a friend or colleague?" Respondents answer on a scale from 0 to 10, and the answers are then divided into three groups: promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6). To calculate your NPS score, you add up your responses and subtract the share of detractors from the share of promoters. 

Analysing your NPS score

Once you have your final NPS results, it’s time to analyse and decipher the data. There are two main ways to interpret whether your score is good or bad: an internal benchmark or a comparative benchmark. 

Internal benchmark

We advise making your NPS an internal measure you continually seek to improve. Yet you shouldn’t hide your NPS results from potential customers – quite the opposite; we recommend being fully transparent about your NPS results and what you are doing to improve them. 

If your score is negative, it implies that customers are more likely to warn others against working with you than to recommend you as a partner. It would be best if you used your NPS score (regardless of what it is) to set your baseline for customer experience and start working on improving it.

Comparative benchmarking

While we recommend using NPS as an internal measure to improve the customer experience, it’s natural for customers to compare themselves with competitors. From a comparative perspective, you can contrast your score against peers by looking at industry benchmarks. However, finding examples for your competitors or even your particular industry is often challenging. 

To understand how your customer experience differentiates your brand, a rough rule of thumb is that most B2B companies have scores between +20 and +50, but these scores differ significantly across industries. Generally, anything above +50 is considered very good, and +75 and above is considered world-class.

How to improve your customer satisfaction

Your customer satisfaction continuously changes – both because of internal factors you can control and external factors, such as customers changing behaviour and expectations for a good experience. If you keep monitoring your customer sentiment and take action to address their critique quickly, you are more likely to gain and retain happy, loyal customers. 

Every touchpoint and interaction forms the customer’s impression of your brand. A single instance of poor customer experience can make them switch to a competitor. Invest in training to build a world-class customer-facing team to keep this from happening.

Furthermore, by investing in an all-in-one digital platform, such as HubSpot, you can create a 360-degree view of your customers and ensure a consistent experience for each customer, regardless of when and how they interact with you.

Do you want to know more about customer satisfaction? Download our ebook on the importance of customer satisfaction below, or take a look at our in-depth customer satisfaction guide.