Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most widely used measure of customer loyalty: one question, a score from -100 to +100, and a common language that everyone from a site manager to a board understands. This guide covers what it is, how it works, what a good score looks like, and, most importantly, how to move it.
How NPS Works
NPS is built on a single question: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague, on a scale of 0 to 10?
Respondents fall into three groups:
- Promoters (9 or 10). Loyal enthusiasts who come back and bring others.
- Passives (7 or 8). Satisfied but unenthusiastic, and open to a competitor’s offer.
- Detractors (0 to 6). Unhappy customers who can damage the brand through word of mouth and reviews.
Your score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. One hundred responses with 45 promoters, 35 passives, and 20 detractors gives an NPS of +25.
What a Good Score Looks Like
Sector context is everything, so treat published benchmarks with care. A useful rule of thumb: above 0 means more promoters than detractors, above 50 is excellent, and above 70 is rare. In hospitality and leisure, where the experience is emotional and personal, well-run operators can achieve scores that would be unthinkable in, say, utilities. We have clients who regularly achieve 70 and above, but that is the product of their industry, the standard of their competitors, and sustained work on the feedback, not a target to import into a different context.
The comparison that actually drives improvement is internal: your trend over time, and the spread across your estate. If your best site runs at +60 and your weakest at +5, the interesting question is not “what is our average” but “what is happening at the bottom that isn’t happening at the top?”
How to Improve NPS
The score moves when the experience moves, so the work is everything that sits underneath it:
Capture the why, not just the number. A score without a reason is unactionable. Surveys should follow the NPS question with the detail behind it, which is what our Active Insight platform does automatically, asking smarter follow-up questions when a score needs explaining.
Close the loop on detractors. A detractor who requests contact and hears nothing has been disappointed twice. Contact requests should reach the right person immediately through instant alerts, and be tracked to resolution.
Find the operational causes. If scores dip at a site, something happened there. Mystery visits show what the customer experienced; review monitoring shows what they say publicly. Reading them together turns a falling score into a specific, fixable problem.
Feed it back to teams as coaching, not blame. The programmes that move scores are the ones where site teams see their own results, understand what drives them, and are coached on the behaviours that change them. It is never about the score itself; it is about what the score lets you improve.
NPS in Practice
We design and run NPS programmes as part of wider feedback measurement for hospitality, leisure, retail, and contract catering operators, with no response limits, estate-level dashboards, and AI-powered comment analysis that explains the score. Contact us if you want to track NPS properly, or start with our guide to how mystery shopping complements survey data.
Frequently Asked Questions
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer loyalty based on one question: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague, on a scale of 0 to 10? Customers scoring 9 or 10 are promoters, 7 or 8 are passives, and 0 to 6 are detractors. Your NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, giving a score between -100 and +100.
It depends on the sector, and comparisons only mean something within it. As a rough rule, anything above 0 means you have more promoters than detractors, above 50 is excellent, and above 70 is exceptional. We do have clients who consistently achieve scores of 70 and above, but that reflects their industry, their competition, and years of acting on the feedback. The more useful comparison is your own trend: whether this month is better than last month, and whether the sites at the bottom of your estate are closing the gap on the sites at the top.
Subtract the percentage of detractors (scores 0 to 6) from the percentage of promoters (scores 9 or 10). Passives (7 or 8) count towards the total number of responses but not towards either side. For example: 100 responses, 45 promoters, 35 passives, and 20 detractors gives an NPS of 45 minus 20, which is +25.
No. NPS tells you the level of loyalty; it does not tell you why. A falling score with no supporting detail is an alarm with no address. The score becomes useful when the survey behind it captures the reasons, which is why we pair the NPS question with adaptive follow-up questions and comment analysis, and read it alongside mystery shopping and review data.
Most customer-facing businesses benefit from it, because it is simple, comparable over time, and understood at board level. The caution is against tracking it in isolation or chasing the number itself. The score is a thermometer, not a treatment: the value is in what you do about the feedback underneath it.