What is NPS (Net Promoter Score)?
NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures customer loyalty with one question — "how likely are you to recommend us?" — on a 0–10 scale. Respondents scoring 9–10 are promoters, 7–8 passives, 0–6 detractors; the score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, ranging from −100 to +100.
The math, and its surprise
The bucketing is stricter than intuition expects: a 7 counts for nothing and a 6 counts against you. A team celebrating a "7.4 average" may be looking at a negative NPS once bucketed — which is why the distribution always deserves a look before the headline number. Forty respondents split 20 promoters, 12 passives, 8 detractors yields (50% − 20%) = +30.
What it's genuinely good for
Trend and segmentation, not absolutes. A score moving from +18 to +31 over two quarters is signal; a one-off +42 means little without context. Cut by plan, tenure, or feature usage and NPS becomes a locator — which cohort is souring, which is thriving. The open-text follow-up ("what's the main reason for your score?") is where the actionable content lives; the number mostly earns the verbatims a reading.
The honest criticisms
NPS is a stated intention, not observed behavior; culture skews scoring norms across regions; and gaming it (surveying only happy moments) is trivially easy. Treat it as a thermometer, not a steering wheel — paired with retention data, which is what recommending actually looks like. Delivered as an in-app survey at the right moment, response rates and honesty both improve — the mechanics Wakeline ships no-code.
See the concepts running live.
Wakeline puts the whole vocabulary to work — tours, checklists, targeting, funnels — no-code on your app, free for 1,000 monthly active users.