An easy way to measure if your customers love you in 21 minutes – use the Net Promoter Score (NPS). And it’s FREE.

This is a simple and quick tool to gauge whether your customers love you or not. You get tremendous bang-for-your-buck implementing the NPS (Net Promoter Score) customer loyalty metric.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Bill Gates

It can be put in place in under an hour and take very little time each week or month to compile the results – for tremendous intelligence.

I first read about NPS in the handy book ‘Marketer’s Toolkit: The 10 Strategies You Need To Succeed (Harvard Business Essentials)‘.

NPS was developed by Fred Reichheld and Bain & Company – who has a registered trademark for the NPS. Listen to Fred's excellent 2022 book on NPS, "Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers" (free on Spotify). There are some phenomenal stats in the book on the financial return customer-led businesses achieve, and NPS is at the heart.

Some organisations that use NPS include American Express, Intuit (who own Quicken bookkeeping software), eBay, Allianz, General Electric and Procter & Gamble. But small businesses can use to very effectively too.

This is how it works.

The NPS question

You ask your customer’s one simple question:

“How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague, between 0 and 10 – 0 being extremely unlikely and 10 being extremely likely?”

Now, it is extremely important it is between 0 and 10, not 1 and 10. We need an 11 point scale to do the next bit.

The NPS metric

If someone rates you between 0 and 6 they are called a Detractor, they are actually working against you in word-of-mouth marketing. They only say bad things about you, the closer to zero the worse their words!

A score of 7 or 8 is known as a Passive customer. They are not going to say negative or glowing things about you.

And a 9 or 10 means they are a Promoter. They love your business and sing your praises at any opportunity. Some even stop people in the street to tell others about your business (yes, this has happened to one of my businesses…)

Let’s say we had 17 responses, and they spread like this:

3 Detractors (18%)
2 Passives (12%)
12 Promoters (70%)

To calculate your NPS just minus the Detractor percentage (18%) from the Promoters (70%), so in this example it is +52.

You ignore the Passive percentage because they are ambivalent and won’t actively talk about your business in a positive or negative way.

Also, notice the result is not shown as a percentage, but a ‘+’ 52. This helps us communicate and understand the metric better, because the score isn’t actually a percentage.

Getting the most from your NPS

To rate how well you are doing, use this rule-of-thumb:

0-50 Good
51-75 Great
76+ Excellent

As you can see, attaining above 75 is very very difficult, especially on a consistent basis. If you are getting a negative score, a -100 is possible, it means everyone surveyed gave a score between 0-6!

This question can be coupled with the usual “How satisfied were you with the job we just completed?”

You may think it’s the same question, but it’s not. This one is asking for the customers’ opinion on a job, whereas NPS talks about the relationship – how are they feeling about your business overall. They may have had a great experience with the most recent job but if the seven interactions before that were all poor, their overall satisfaction and therefore loyalty will be low.

If you use either or both questions it is recommended you ask why or for more information if anyone rates your business below Passive, or seven. If the score is 0 to 4 we escalate the complaint to someone more senior to call the customer back and ask for more information, understand the issue and try and resolve it.

Listen to this 10 minute cast where our Founder explains NPS and when to use it.

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