NPS: The Golden Question

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple measure of customer loyalty that is used within a business to monitor performance and to benchmark themselves against other businesses in the same industry.

Are your guests satisfied?

The question asked of guests is very simple:

How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?

The guest is presented with a scale of 0 to 10 to answer – where 0 means ‘not at all likely’ and 10 means ‘extremely likely’. (The scale starts at 0 instead of 1 to avoid any confusion over whether 1 or 10 is best.) As a follow-up question the guest should be asked why they gave this score – to celebrate success and identify shortfalls.

Depending on the score given by the guest, they are marked as a Promoter (scored 9 or 10), Passive (scored 7 or 8) or Detractor (scored between 0 and 6):

Promoters are the guests who had a great time and are likely to both return, and go and tell others about their experience: they are passionate enthusiasts. Passives had an OK experience, they may come back but are unlikely to sing your praises. On the other hand, detractors had a less than positive experience and will share this with their friends. They will actively and passively encourage people not to visit.

It should be the focus of the team responsible for customer satisfaction to turn detractors into passives, and passives into promoters – and making sure that all promoters continue to be so!

How do we report NPS?

There is a simple calculation we can run to combine all the answers to the NPS question to create an overall score. We don’t just work out the average, but instead do a little math to work out a score between -100 and +100.

We start by working out the number of Promoters (people who have scored 9 or 10), the number of Detractors (people who have scored between 0 and 6) and the total number of people who have answered the question. You’ll notice that Passives aren’t included separately here, but are included in the total number of responses.

As an example, imagine you have 1000 responses. Within that, 600 are Promoters, 250 are Passives, and 150 are Detractors. Our calculation would be:

The combined NPS score should be presented as a whole number (integer) and not as a percentage. The range of the score is between -100 and +100. Anything less that zero (i.e. a minus number) means you have more people who had a terrible experience than good.

Now you have your NPS score you’re better equipped to monitor progress. Changes won’t happen over night, but by setting customer-focused objectives which are ingrained within the whole organisation (from serving staff to board level) you should start to see an uplift in scores, leading to more, happier customers, and a improved bottom line.