What is a good NPS Score?

The Net Promoter System is meant to fuel continuous improvement. Before we get into what is a “good score” or evaluating your company’s NPS versus the competition it is important to note that — regardless of your score — your focus should be on increasing it.

NPS score can range from -100 to 100.

At -100 everybody is  a detractor, and a negative score means that your product or service as more detractors than promoters. So a negative score can’t be good.

At 0 NPS everybody is either passive (neither a promoter or a detractor), or your product or service has as many detractors as it as promoters. So intuitively, one should at least aim for a positive NPS meaning your product or service offering has more promoters than detractors.

A +50 NPS, would mean that the company has more than 50% promoters and less than 50% detractors.  Here a combination of promoters and detractors percentages that would lead to a +50 NPS

% Promoters	% Detractors
50%	0%
60%	10%
70%	20%
80%	30%
90%	40%
100%	50%

Any score above 50 is then probably good.

Attaining +100 is probably impossible it would mean no detractors, and 100% promoters.

Beyond looking at NPS as an absolute number, one might want to look at in  on a relative basis: relative number over time, or over the competition, or over different products across your company, or different customer segments etc.  In summary: aim for a score above +50, and then benchmark. The Net Promoter System is meant to fuel continuous improvement.

In his original paper published in 2003, The One Number You Need to Grow, Fred Reichheld found the median Net Promoter Score of 400 companies across 28 industries to be just 16!

NPS Benchmarks

Some firms like the Temkin Group conduct their own NPS survey across thousands of companies and consumers,  and aggregate the data per industry vertical. You can access 2016 data here and compare your NPS to these benchmarks. Now the survey method used by these benchmarking firms will be different than the one you collected your own data, so it might be  a little bit like comparing apple and oranges, but can still be a good starting point, and less time consuming and labor intensive than conducting your own market research.

In Fred Reichheld’s 2003 paper he mapped out the NPS of major airlines, car rentals, internet service provides.

So again, aim for a score above +50, and then benchmark.