What is a good NPS score?

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

For measuring customer loyalty in B2B industries, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most widely used metric. Here's a quick reminder about how it works.

How Net Promotor 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 answers 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 for interpreting if your score is good or bad; internal benchmark or comparative benchmark. 

Internal benchmark - we advise making your NPS an internal measure you constantly seek to improve. Yet, you shouldn't hide the results from your would-be customers - quite the opposite; we recommend that you are fully transparent with your NPS results and what you are doing to improve them. 

If your score is less than 0, it implies that customers are more likely to warn others from working with you than 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 benchmark - while we recommend using NPS as an internal measure for improving customer experience, it's only natural that customers want 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 broad rule of thumb is that most B2B companies have scores between +20 and +50 but differ significantly between 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 that you can control and external factors such as customers changing behaviour and expectations of 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, e.g. HubSpot, you can create a 360-degree view of your customers and facilitate a consistent experience where each customer gets a seamless experience 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.