What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Think about the last time a friend asked you to recommend a product or service. You probably did not run through a feature list in your head. You remembered how the company made you feel. Did they solve your problem quickly? Did support treat you like a person or a ticket number? That gut feeling is close to what Net Promoter Score tries to measure.

Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a customer loyalty metric based on one question. How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague? Customers answer on a scale from zero to ten. Here is how the score works and why support teams pay close attention to it.

What is Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score is a single-number measurement of customer loyalty. The core question asks customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your brand on a scale of zero to ten, where zero means not at all likely and ten means extremely likely.

Responses fall into three groups. Promoters score nine or ten. They are enthusiastic and likely to refer others. Passives score seven or eight. They are satisfied but not passionate. Detractors score zero through six. They are unhappy and may share negative opinions. Your NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.

Why does NPS matter for customer support?

Support interactions often happen at emotional moments. A customer reaches out because something went wrong or because they need help making a purchase decision. How your team handles those moments directly shapes whether someone becomes a promoter or a detractor.

NPS also looks at the big picture rather than one chat or one email. That makes it useful for spotting trends in overall customer sentiment. A strong support team can lift NPS over time even when product issues pop up, because customers remember how you treated them when things got hard.

How is NPS different from CSAT?

CSAT asks about a specific interaction. NPS asks about the entire relationship. A customer might rate a single support chat highly on CSAT but give a low NPS if they are frustrated with pricing or product bugs that keep coming back.

Both metrics belong in your toolkit. Use CSAT to evaluate individual conversations and NPS to gauge long-term loyalty. When you are ready to work with the numbers directly, the chapter on how to calculate NPS walks through the formula step by step. You can also review what CSAT measures to see how the two compare side by side.

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