Is NPS Still the Right Metric for Customer Experience? – ��ԭ��

Is NPS Still the Right Metric for Customer Experience?

Samantha Finken Rayner — Tue, 20 May 2025 14:03:35 +0000

Even the founder of Net Promoter Score agrees: it’s time to stop overrelying on NPS surveys and start being smarter about how we listen to customers and evaluate loyalty.

“I’m sick of surveys. I don’t fill them out anymore,” said Fred Reichheld — the founder of Net Promoter Score^℠, or NPS^® — . “They’ve been abused so horribly and called ‘Net Promoter.’ It’s the worst misbranding.”

A collective gasp was heard in the crowd. It was a big moment for the CX industry, witnessing this public admission from the famous grandfather of NPS.

NPS was once the answer to a complex business problem. Brands used to struggle to link customer satisfaction with loyalty and future growth. Their surveys were overly complicated and failed to tie responses to actual customer behavior, using questions like “How satisfied are you with our overall performance?” and “How likely are you to purchase from us again?”

That all changed in December 2003. That was when Harvard Business Review published by Bain & Company consultant “Frederick F.” Reichheld. He revealed how asking just one simple question was the best indicator of business success: Would you recommend this company to a friend? The psychology behind it was clear, grouping respondents into three categories that correlated repeat purchases and referrals with business growth.

After that, CX fundamentally changed. Over the next twenty years, NPS became the golden metric for customer experience teams across the globe.

Today, however, the world looks a little different. Sure, Net Promoter Score still gives CX and EX teams useful insight, and it can be used in some industries as a general benchmark…But it’s limited. With smarter AI filtering now included in major email clients, survey response rates are in a free fall. Plus, consumers have higher expectations now, and their frustration is more often expressed immediately and indirectly — through an abandoned cart, rage clicks, a bad review, or even their tone when contacting customer service.

Brands, and their CX leaders, have to move beyond NPS and capture feedback signals from many, many other sources to get the complete picture of the health of their business.

It’s time. Some even say .

What Net Promoter Score Gets Wrong

“Net Promoter is about the simple idea that with every life you touch, you either enrich it or diminish it, and it would be really good to keep track of that,” Reichheld explained during . “I think Net Promoter early on made it clear that when you measure that thoughtfully through surveys in a way that’s not biased and gamed, and that really is apples to apples, it explains who’s growing prosperously and generating cashflow, and who’s not.”

Unfortunately, the game isn’t apples to apples anymore. The unbiased, “non-gamed” heyday of tracking promoters and detractors is over.

Here are three ways that NPS has become a failed promise to predict future profitability:

1. Perfect scores have become virtually meaningless

If you have worked in retail or any form of customer service over the last decade, you know that anything less than a 10 on a survey . “It used to mean something when my son worked in an Apple store and he got a 10 from a customer and a really nice verbatim. It made him feel wonderful,” said Reichheld during the panel. “Now the world has been trained by car dealers and retailers all over the place that only a 10 is a passing grade, so increasingly there are ‘courtesy tens’ out there. I don’t want to get anybody in trouble — I’m not going to refer you to a friend and I might not even buy more, but I’m going to give you a 10.”

(Conversely, some people glibly give a 0 because they take the question too literally, : “I’m a loyal JetBlue customer. The airline sends me a NPS survey after every flight and I give them a zero every time. I’m not dissatisfied — and I have no intention to bad mouth them — I just don’t talk to my family and friends about airlines.”)

In short, consumers don’t consider and respond to NPS surveys the way they were originally designed, which throws the first wrench into making them a genuine indicator of future growth.

2. Low survey participation = low sample size

Statistics 101 tells us that survey responses are, let’s say, questionable without a certain sample size threshold. A small sample size gives us a wide margin of error, and increases the likelihood of false negatives.

, or ever-prevalent survey fatigue, most brands today are not getting enough NPS survey responses to gamble their entire CX program on, especially when these initiatives can be tied to real business results.

“[Companies send] survey after survey until response rates are one, two, three percent maybe. The super star says, oh, I get 10%, and you say, wait a minute, that’s a 90% failure rate,” said Reichheld.

The math doesn’t math with NPS — and that’s pretty risky if it’s still the sole metric in your CX strategy.

3. Teams fail to take action on surfaced problems

For the insights that an NPS survey does uncover — if respondents do go deeper into the survey to add their text or video comments — often, CX leaders do not have a plan in place to take action on them.

Consumers notice when companies don’t do anything about their feedback (there are entire forums dedicated to this, as yours truly has witnessed many times when evaluating purchasing everything from smart birdfeeders to new vehicles) which ultimately erodes trust, loyalty, and any hope of getting any helpful insight from your customer base in the future.

So, here we are. Net Promoter Scores are now debatable and often poorly applied across CX teams. So why not take the stress and guesswork out of this for everyone — Your customers! CX teams! Detractors on internet forums! — and move on to a much easier, much better approach?

It’s Time for AI & Omnichannel Insights

In the near future, customer feedback won’t be found only in a survey — it will be in a thousand tiny, loud actions and emoji-filled messages across every channel they can find.

This might sound daunting. That’s a lot of data. But with the right tools in place, your frontline teams, who will be unburdened with low-effort tasks, will be able to head off customer complaints before they even think they have a problem. (This is not science fiction. ).��

To start paving the way to this brighter future, companies need to rethink their current systems and processes. Besides relying on surveys and NPS as the only way to understand and measure the customer experience, the first step is to reframe how you view your contact centers. Then, get your employees on board with smarter AI. Next up: pure customer experience serenity.

From One Number to Every Signal

NPS served its purpose, and changed the game while it did. It gave CX teams clarity, purpose, and a common language. But customer experience has evolved, and so must the ways in which we measure it.

There is a very exciting future ahead of us, but we have to let go of the past to get there.

Stay tuned for our upcoming blog about how embracing omnichannel insights will look in practice in the largest global service industries. In the meantime, check out our infographic, , which contains real-world examples and hard numbers.

Net Promoter Score 101: How to Determine an NPS Benchmark

Noël — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 12:21:00 +0000

Promoters, passives, and detractors say a lot about the experiences you offer — here’s how to determine a net promoter score (NPS) benchmark.

Net promoter score (NPS®) helps you understand where you stand with your customers. How do they perceive you? How do they feel about their experience with your product or customer service? Regularly measuring your NPS allows you to keep a pulse on your relationships with customers and make informed decisions regarding improvements to what you offer and how you engage customers at every touchpoint.

Knowing the general benchmarks across various industries can help you understand how you measure up in terms of customer or employee experience.

How Net Promoter Score Formulas Measure Customer Loyalty

Net promoter scores deliver insights into how many customers are likely to not only continue buying from your company but also recommend it to others. Upon surveying customers on their general experience across various segments like product features, satisfaction, or customer service, you can parse these elements into promoters, passives, and detractors.

Promoters vs Detractors

Promoters are individuals who are likely to recommend your product or company to others. When taking a net promoter survey, these individuals give your product or company scores from 9 to 10.

Detractors, on the other hand, are customers who are unlikely to recommend your product or company to others. These individuals will give you a score between 0 and 6.

Right in the middle of your promoters and detractors are the passives. On the surface, these individuals deliver a seemingly good score of 7 to 8. While generally satisfied with their experience with your product or service, they aren’t as motivated to recommend your company to others as promoters are.

Absolute & Relative NPS

There are two ways to look at your net promoter score, and this will change the way you view what a “good” score is: absolute and relative.

Absolute NPS: Your net promoter score, calculated using the NPS formula, is measured up against scores from all industries. Generally, absolute NPS is broken down as follows:

Good: Above 0
Favorable: Above 20
Excellent: Above 50
World Class: Above 80

Relative NPS: Your net promoter score is measured up against competitors within your specific industry.

Understanding the lens through which you are analyzing your NPS is important, as absolute and relative NPS can have dramatically different outcomes. You may not have a ‘good’ net promoter score across the average for all industries, but you might be doing exceptionally well against immediate competitors.

Common Approaches for Determining an NPS Benchmark

Once a net promoter score is gathered, companies can use benchmarking as a comparative tool to see how they are performing against other competitors within their same industry. It can also provide a backbone to conversations centering on company and product improvements, and new experience strategies.

Benchmarking can help achieve the following:

Identify top performers in the industry
Understand what competitors are doing to drive results
New strategies for an enhanced customer experience
Identifying new best practices to incorporate into operations

The key lies in the approach to measuring performance — and actually taking action on the results. This can be done through metric-driven benchmarks and practice-driven benchmarks.

Metrics-Driven Benchmarking	Practice-Driven Benchmarking
– Quantitative – Leverages tools like NPS surveys – Can create a clear measurement of success	– Qualitative – Actionable – Leads to bigger ideas

Metrics-driven benchmarking

Companies use metrics-based benchmarking strategies to compare customer experience performance across different departments (or even regions!) of their organization. This can help them identify what areas of the company need improvement, and drive brainstorming around how to make these improvements. The data resulting from metrics-driven benchmarking can help provide prioritization of what to improve first and creates a clear measurement of success.

The downside of this approach to benchmarking, however, is that oftentimes companies can pull in a lot of numbers but not know what to do with them. If the team gathering information doesn’t understand how to translate data into action, then this approach can seem expensive and time-consuming with little actionable outcomes.

Additionally, there may be difficulty in interpreting data as different departments or teams across a single organization might use different variations of the approach, such as:

Using variations of survey questions asking the same thing
Using different response scales to measure customer satisfaction
Surveying customers at different frequencies or points along the customer journey
Applying different weighting strategies

Practice-driven benchmarking

Practice-driven benchmarking is a more qualitative approach than metric-driven benchmarking. This approach involves looking beyond scores and focusing attention on behaviors or management practices. Focusing on qualitative behavioral data can help direct companies to new solutions that can stimulate greater change.

This approach can expand the amount of companies a single organization can turn to as inspiration, which can provide more actionable things that can be done to improve operations. However, this can also lead to selective-bias. Companies might ignore smaller, less notable companies and aspire to be the bigger giants within the industry. While aspiring for a lofty goal can provide inspiration and motivation, it can also discourage the greater operation should they not meet the same success in a certain span of time.

What is a Good Net Promoter Score Benchmark?

Tech protection and service company, , was able to double responses to NPS surveys using a selection of best practices, including:

Setting expectations upfront: What will be done with this information?
Limiting the amount of questions: Keep the survey to one page, and five questions if possible.
Rotating who gets the survey: Prevent survey fatigue by giving responders a break.

When gathering responses to surveys, consider similar benchmarks to those used by Likewize to set expectations with your team:

B2B surveys result in lower response rates than B2C surveys by about 10 points
SMS surveys garner a higher survey response rate than email — text messaging-based surveys generate a response rate of around 35% to 40%, compared to nearly 10% less than email; those rates drop by up to 15 points for service surveys, to 25% to 30% for SMS and 15% to 25% for email
Sales surveys receive a stronger response rate and higher net promoter score compared to service surveys, and this is most likely due to people being happier immediately after they make a purchase

Determine a Net Promoter Score (NPS) Benchmark to Build Better Experiences

NPS provides the opportunity to understand the experiences that are creating promoters, passives, and detractors. Once you obtain a net promoter score benchmark, you can analyze the ‘why’ behind it and make improvements that engage customers effectively and improve their overall experiences with your brand.

Is NPS Still the Right Metric for Customer Experience? – ����ԭ��