Calculating your net promoter score is simple: you take the percentage of Promoters and subtract the percentage of Detractors to get a number between -100 and 100. NPS is used to understand your level of customer satisfaction on a broad level and helps you identify underlying issues to reduce churn and increase brand loyalty.
We break down the equation for you below so you can learn exactly how the NPS calculator works. We’ve also included industry benchmarking data so you can understand how your company compares to others in the space along with an explanation of our “net sentiment” metric and its value alongside NPS.
What Is The NPS Calculation?
The NPS calculation is a way of understanding your level of customer satisfaction on a broad level. Using a specific survey template, net promoter score is calculated by asking customers to answer the question “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend on a score of 0-10?”. From here, customers can be grouped into three distinct buckets depending on their response.
Detractors are customers who responded in the 0-6 range, Passives are customers who responded in the 7-8 range, and Promoters are customers who responded in the 9-10 range. These responses are used to get an overall understanding of your company’s level of customer satisfaction. By using personalized follow-ups, companies can work to close the customer feedback loop and increase their net promoter score over time.
How To Calculate NPS Manually
Once you have your responses from Detractors, Passives, and Promoters, you can use them to calculate your overall NPS score. Though using an NPS calculator is the fastest way to do this, especially if you have a lot of data, it’s a simple calculation you can do on your own as well.
How it Works:
- Take the total number of Promoters and subtract the total number of Detractors
- Divide this number by the total number of responses overall
- Multiply this number by 100 to get an answer between -100 and 100
Example: Let’s say you had 500 responses, with 200 Promoters, 100 Detractors, and 200 Passives. The equation would be 200-100 = 100. 100/500 = 0.2. 0.2 x 100 = an NPS of 20.
What Is A Good NPS? Industry Benchmarks
The first thing to understand about NPS is that there is no one “good” score. As a standalone metric, it isn’t worth much. Instead, you should think of NPS as a way to get a ballpark figure for how the rest of your customer satisfaction initiatives are paying off. In general, you will want an NPS score that is in the positive range as this means more customers are happy with your product than not.
NPS is most useful when used as a “relative” metric, meaning it is compared to similar competitors in your industry and location, as opposed to a “fixed” metric where you try to meet a certain set score. This is because certain industries and locations will have higher or lower scores than others based on customer interaction level and politeness standards in that area.
Below is a table with data from Retently on NPS benchmarks by industry so you can understand where your score fits in with the competition:
How To Improve Your Net Promoter Score
The most important thing to understand about net promoter score is that it is a representation of the success of the rest of your CX programs and business model at large. In order to improve your net promoter score, you have to address the underlying themes and sentiments that are causing customers to be Passives or Detractors. There are several things you should do to discover what the issues really are:
- Follow up fast: When you receive a negative NPS rating from a customer, especially after a transactional net promoter score (TNPS) survey, follow up with them quickly to see if there is anything you can do immediately to address their issue. You should also be sure to personalize your response so that they know you truly care about helping them.
- Ask for unstructured feedback: Although its brevity is one of the most appealing factors about the NPS survey, you need qualitative feedback in order to understand what exactly you can do about a negative rating. Along with the NPS survey, consider also leaving room for customers to leave open-ended feedback so you can understand what caused their issue.
- Pull in other data sources: In addition to surveys, there are plenty of other sources for customer feedback including reviews, customer service calls, website behavior, and more. Unifying these data sources will allow you access to more accurate information and see where the most impactful changes can be made.
Once you are able to understand where customer issues are stemming from, you can work to begin improving these features. And as you improve these specifics, the general NPS rating will improve along with them.
How Does Net Sentiment Play Into This?
Net sentiment is Chattermill’s proprietary metric for understanding customer feedback. It gives deeper insight into responses and behavior by allowing you to gauge sentiment across all of your different feedback sources and touchpoints to get a more holistic view of sentiment. Net sentiment is best used in combination with NPS as both are invaluable sources of information about your customer experience.
While NPS is limited to surveys, net sentiment incorporates all feedback channels. It works by tagging each piece of customer feedback with multiple themes (examples for a mobile app company could be app security, ease of use, and app speed), and then each of these themes are categorized as either positive or negative.
Net sentiment is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of negative themes from the percentage of positive themes to get a score between -100 and 100, much like NPS. From here, Chattermill users can also get an in-depth look at their sentiment distribution, or the ratio of positive, neutral, and negative theme mentions for a given number of responses. Users can also view the positivity or negativity index (# of mentions per 100 responses) for a specific theme or category to see how customer feelings have changed over time.
We’ve linked net sentiment to hard business metrics like customer churn, retention, and new customer acquisition, so you can see why it’s an important factor to consider along with NPS!
NPS Calculation + Net Sentiment: The Benefits Of Using Both For Your Business
Take a look at the infographic below to learn more about why a combination of these two metrics is the best way to understand customer experience at your company and build your brand.
While NPS is an undoubtedly useful metric for understanding customer satisfaction, it’s best used alongside a predictive metric like net sentiment for deeper analysis. We hope you find the NPS calculator useful, and you can always check out our product tour to see how tracking net sentiment will benefit your business as well.
