Net Promoter Score (Wikipedia)
An encyclopedia article on the Net Promoter Score (NPS): its single-question methodology, promoter/passive/detractor scoring, origin in Fred Reichheld’s 2003 Harvard Business Review article, and the academic criticism it has attracted. Wikipedia articles are continuously edited, so year above reflects the access date (2026-07-13), not a fixed publication year. See Usability Evaluation Methods for NPS’s place alongside SUS among usability-evaluation methods.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- NPS is based on a single survey question — how likely a respondent is to recommend a company, product, or service to a friend or colleague — scored 0–10.
- Respondents are grouped into promoters (9–10), passives (7–8), and detractors (0–6 or lower); the score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, reported as a plain integer rather than a percentage.
- Developed by Bain & Company consultant Fred Reichheld, popularized in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “The One Number You Need to Grow”; Reichheld found the “would you recommend” question outperformed alternatives like “how satisfied are you?” as a predictor of repeat business and word of mouth. Reichheld holds the registered NPS trademark jointly with Bain & Company and Satmetrix.
- As of 2020, cited as used by two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies; a workplace variant, Employee NPS (eNPS), measures staff sentiment the same way.
- Criticism: academic research disputes whether “likelihood to recommend” is actually a better predictor of business growth than other loyalty questions (e.g. overall satisfaction, intent to repurchase); NPS scores vary substantially by industry; the method doesn’t diagnose specific problems, only tracks an aggregate trend; and the promoter/detractor cutoffs discard information from passive respondents. Reichheld himself has criticized over-use of recommend-me surveys as a “tragedy of the commons” and recommended against tying NPS to employee compensation.