On a zero-to-ten scale, how likely is it that you would recommend us (or this product/service/brand) to a friend or colleague?
I also instructed companies to ask at least one follow-up question:
What is the primary reason for your score?
The simplicity of the zero-to-ten scale allows companies to take a quick measurement of customers’ feelings and attitudes. The open-ended follow-up question enables them to hear the reasons for these attitudes in the customers’ own words. It avoids the distortions imposed by the preconceived response categories of traditional customer-satisfaction questionnaires.
When my colleagues and I studied the use of these questions, we found that customers typically fall into three well-defined groups. Each group of customers exhibits a distinct pattern of behavior as well as a distinct set of attitudes. And each calls for a different set of actions from the company.
Promoters. People who respond with a nine or a ten are signaling that their lives have been enriched by their relationship with the company. They behave like loyal customers, typically making repeat purchases and giving the company a larger share of their spending. They talk up the company to their friends and colleagues, just as their answer to the question implies. They take the time to respond to surveys, and they offer constructive feedback and suggestions. We called this group promoters, because in their energy and enthusiasm that’s exactly how they act. Any company should want to maintain the promoters’ enthusiasm, to learn economical ways to create even more customers who feel and act that way, and to provide recognition and rewards to the teams or individual employees who do so.
Passives. People who give the company a seven or an eight got what they paid for, nothing more. They are passively satisfied customers, not loyal ones, and they exhibit a markedly different set of attitudes and behaviors. They make few referrals—and when they do make one, it’s likely to be qualified and unenthusiastic. If a competitor’s discount or glitzy ad catches their eye, they are likely to defect. We called this group passives, because they bring little energy to the company and cannot be counted on as long-term assets. A company’s goal for this category is to improve its services, products, or processes, where possible, to the point where it can delight these customers and turn some of them into promoters.
Detractors. And then there are the people who give a rating of six or below. Their score indicates that their lives have been diminished by their dealings with the company. They are not a happy crew. They are dissatisfied, disaffected, even dismayed by how they are treated. They bad-mouth the company to their friends and colleagues. If they can’t easily switch providers—for instance, if they have long-term contracts or if there aren’t any competitors with similar offerings—they make nuisances of themselves, registering complaint after complaint and driving up costs. Their surly behavior destroys employee motivation and pride. Companies confronted with detractors have to probe for the root cause of their disappointment, then apologize and determine ways to solve the problem. If there is no economically rational solution to the detractors’ discontent, then the company must learn not to acquire this type of customer in the first place.
If one central goal of a company is to enrich the lives of its customers, these three categories are a measure of how well it’s doing. Promoters represent successes. Customers don’t give a nine or ten score unless the company delivers something very special—unless it truly has a positive effect on their lives. Passives are just satisfied. They can’t be considered successes unless the company’s goal is to achieve mediocre results. Detractors, of course, represent serious failures. Something has gone badly wrong, and an interaction that should have had a positive effect instead has had a negative one.
But categorization was just the first step. We then wanted one simple number that could be tracked week in and week out to gauge a company’s progress and focus its improvement efforts. We wanted a metric that was simple, powerful, and easy to understand, a bottom-line number akin to net profit or net worth. So we decided to take the percentage of customers who are promoters and subtract the percentage who are detractors. The result is Net Promoter score (exhibit I-1).
EXHIBIT I-1
Net Promoter score: tracking lives enriched minus lives diminished
The Evolution of NPS
When The Ultimate Question was originally published, we very much wanted to put Net Promoter in the title. But that was a nonstarter: back then, hardly anyone had ever heard of NPS. The whole idea was in its infancy, just moving from theory to practice. The theory was backed up by some compelling research, and it had given rise to promising experiments by early adopters such as Intuit and General Electric. But it was a theory, nonetheless. The book highlighted companies that we had found to have high NPS relative to their competitors. (We had learned to measure NPS across an industry with what we now call the top-down market benchmark approach, which assesses companies’ overall relationships with their customers rather than rating individual transactions.) But the exemplary firms did not themselves utilize the NPS framework and tools to achieve their success for the very good reason that, in 2006, these tools and processes did not yet exist. NPS had just been invented.
The situation has changed dramatically as this edition goes to press. Thousands of companies have adopted NPS. Many have achieved extraordinary results. Firms like Apple, Intuit, Philips, Rackspace, and the others mentioned earlier have put NPS at the center of their management processes. They have fleshed out the microeconomics that support the theory—for example, they can put a dollar value on the conversion of a passive to a promoter. They have developed metrics, tools, and processes that now underpin the standard Net Promoter system of management. This system has helped them discover better methods to hire, train, and reward their people. It has led them to reexamine policies, redesign products, and improve business processes. In short, they have discovered that the Net Promoter system holds the power to transform a company. They have also seen that, though the concept is simple, the journey toward building an army of promoters is both more challenging and more rewarding than they initially expected.
My colleagues and I have had the privilege of working with many of these companies as they pursued their NPS journey. We created forums, conferences, Web sites, and online communities to accelerate the learning and encourage the sharing of best practices. The centerpiece of this burgeoning business movement is the NPS Loyalty Forum, a membership organization sponsored by Bain & Company, the global consulting firm that has been my professional home for the past thirty-two years. Forum companies meet several times a year, usually at the headquarters of a member (see the box “NPS Loyalty Forum” for a partial list of attendees). The meetings allow the group to interact with a broad range of the host organization’s team, from CEOs and finance chiefs to operations managers, marketing execs, and frontline customer-service reps. This cross-fertilization turns out to be particularly valuable because NPS has significant implications for every function and level of an organization.
NPS Loyalty Forum
The following is a partial list of companies that have participated in at least one meeting of the NPS Loyalty Forum:
| 24 Hour Fitness | FranklinCovey | Rackspace |
| Advance Auto Parts | GE Healthcare | RSC Equipment Rental |
| Aggreko | General Electric Company | Safelite |
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