A customer loyalty and satisfaction metric based on a single survey question — "how likely are you to recommend this to a friend or colleague," scored 0–10 — with respondents grouped into promoters (9–10), passives (7–8), and detractors (0–6), and the final score calculated as the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
Why it matters
NPS is one of the most widely adopted, simplest customer sentiment metrics precisely because it's a single question, easy to track consistently over time and benchmark against industry norms — though its simplicity is also a limitation, since it doesn't explain *why* a customer scored the way they did without follow-up.
In a sentence
"Our NPS climbed 15 points after the onboarding redesign, though we still send a follow-up question asking detractors specifically what went wrong."
Related terms
- Often confused with: CSAT (NPS measures overall relationship loyalty and likelihood to recommend; CSAT measures satisfaction with one specific interaction or transaction, and the two often diverge — a customer can be satisfied with a single support ticket resolution and still be an NPS detractor overall).