A definition of NPS: the 0–10 question, the promoter/passive/detractor bands, the formula, and what NPS can and cannot tell you. Full disclosure: unitQ publishes this guide and analyzes the verbatims behind survey scores.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a loyalty metric built on one question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” answered on a 0 to 10 scale. Respondents scoring 9 or 10 are promoters, 7 or 8 are passives, and 0 through 6 are detractors. The score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, giving a number between -100 and +100. 1
How the score is calculated
Take a survey wave of 200 responses: 90 promoters, 70 passives, 40 detractors. Promoters are 45% of respondents, detractors 20%. NPS is 45 minus 20, so 25. Passives count in the denominator but add nothing to either side, which is deliberate; a 7 is treated as polite indifference rather than loyalty. 1
Two flavors exist:
- Relational NPS surveys a sample of the customer base on a recurring cycle and tracks the health of the overall relationship. Most of the well-known benchmark figures refer to this kind.
- Transactional NPS fires after a specific event, blurring into CSAT territory.
The follow-up question matters as much as the scale. Nearly every NPS survey asks “Why did you give that score?” and the open-text answers are where the diagnostic value lives. A score without its verbatims is a thermometer reading with no patient chart.
Why NPS matters, and where it is criticized
NPS became the boardroom loyalty number because it is one figure, comparable across quarters, and framed around growth: promoters presumably refer new customers, detractors presumably warn people off. It gives executives a shared shorthand and gives teams a target.
The criticisms are worth knowing. The metric is a lagging indicator; by the time detractors accumulate, the experiences that made them detractors are weeks or months old. It is coarse, compressing every feeling about a company into one digit. Response rates are low and self-selected. And a score can move for reasons that have nothing to do with product quality, like a pricing change or a survey redesign. Peer-reviewed work has also questioned how well NPS actually predicts revenue growth relative to older satisfaction metrics. 2 None of this makes NPS useless. It makes NPS a headline that always needs a story underneath it, and that story comes from analyzing the verbatims and the operational feedback channels around the survey.
A worked example
A B2B software company runs quarterly relational NPS and watches the score fall from 38 to 24. Leadership wants a cause. The insights team segments detractor verbatims by theme and finds the drop concentrated in one cohort: customers onboarded in the last six months, repeatedly citing confusing billing. Cross-checking support tickets shows a matching rise in invoice-related contacts. The remedy is an invoicing redesign plus proactive outreach to the affected cohort, and the next two waves recover most of the decline. The score raised the alarm; the words explained it.
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FAQ
The number changed. Find out why.
The number tells you something changed; the verbatims tell you what. See how teams analyze the open-text behind the score in the best NPS, CSAT, and verbatim analysis tools, or look up any app’s free unitQ scorecard.
Sources 2 references
Reichheld, Frederick F., "The One Number You Need to Grow." Harvard Business Review, 2003. hbr.org/2003/12/the-one-number-you-need-to-grow. Accessed August 2026.
Keiningham, Timothy L., Bruce Cooil, Tor Wallin Andreassen, and Lerzan Aksoy, "A Longitudinal Examination of Net Promoter and Firm Revenue Growth." Journal of Marketing, 71(3), 2007. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1509/jmkg.71.3.039. Accessed August 2026.