How To Calculate Your Score
- Ask Just One Simple Question
- The Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- The Link To Long-Term Corporate Growth
- Analyze Your Company's Score
The Net Promoter Score Calculation
To calculate your company's Net Promoter Score (NPS), take the percentage of customers who are promoters (those who are highly likely to recommend your company or products), and subtract the percentage who are detractors (those who are less likely to recommend your company or products). The equation below is how to calculate a company's NPS.
% of Promoters - % of Detractors = Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Power of the NPS
The NPS provides the means for gauging performance, establishing accountability, and
prioritizing investments because it connects to growth. If a company's "growth engine"
were running at perfect efficiency, it would convert 100% of its customers into promoters.
The worst possible engine would convert 100% of its customers into detractors. The best way
to gauge the efficiency of the growth engine is to calculate a company's NPS.
How Do Companies Stack Up on This Measurement?
Those with the most efficient growth engines - companies such as Amazon.com, eBay, Costco,
Vanguard, and Dell - operate at NPS efficiency ratings of 50 to 80%. So even they have room
for improvement. But the average firm sputters along at an NPS efficiency of only 5 to 10%.
In other words, promoters barely outnumber detractors. Many firms - and some entire industries
- have negative Net Promoter Scores, which means that they are creating more detractors than
promoters day in and day out. These low scores explain why so many companies can't deliver
profitable, sustainable growth, no matter how aggressively they spend to acquire new business.
Select NPS Stars
| USAA | 82% |
| HomeBanc* | 81% |
| Harley-Davidson | 81% |
| Costco | 79% |
| Amazon | 73% |
| Chick-Fil-A* | 72% |
| Ebay | 71% |
| Vanguard | 70% |
| SAS | 66% |
| Apple | 66% |
| Intuit | 58% |
| Cisco | 57% |
| Federal Express | 56% |
| Southwest Airlines | 51% |
| American Express | 50% |
| Commerce Bank | 50% |
| Dell | 50% |
| Adobe | 48% |
| Electronic Arts | 48% |
* All NPS statistics are based on Bain or Satmetrix surveys with the exceptions of Intuit, Chick-fil-A, and HomeBanc. For these firms, we used data that they provided. Their data was gathered in a reasonable (but not perfectly equivalent) fashion.
Source: The Ultimate Question, Reichheld, 2006
