What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely users are to recommend your product to others. It's based on a single question: 'On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [Product] to a friend or colleague?' Responses are grouped into Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6). NPS = %Promoters - %Detractors. Scores range from -100 to +100.

Step 1: Survey users with the 0-10 recommendation question. Step 2: Group responses — Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), Detractors (0-6). Step 3: Calculate percentages of each group. Step 4: NPS = %Promoters - %Detractors. Example: 100 responses — 60 Promoters, 25 Passives, 15 Detractors. NPS = 60% - 15% = 45. Passives don't factor into the calculation directly.

For SaaS: above 30 is good, above 50 is excellent, above 70 is world-class. But context matters — compare against your industry benchmark, not arbitrary targets. A score of 20 in telecom (where the average is negative) is better than 20 in e-commerce (where the average is 40+). The most valuable use of NPS is tracking your own trend over time, not comparing against other companies.

Quarterly for most SaaS companies. This gives you enough time between surveys to act on feedback and see if changes move the score. Some companies run continuous 'rolling NPS' where a subset of users is surveyed each week — this smooths out seasonal variation but requires larger user bases (1,000+ active users). Never survey the same user more than once per quarter — that's the fastest path to survey fatigue.

Three actions: (1) Follow up with Detractors within 48 hours — understand what went wrong and try to recover them. (2) Analyze the open-ended follow-up question — cluster responses by theme to identify systemic issues. (3) Connect NPS to product action — if 'missing feature X' is a top Detractor theme, that's your signal to build it. The biggest mistake: tracking NPS without acting on the feedback behind it.

NPS measures overall loyalty and likelihood to recommend — it's a relationship metric. CSAT measures satisfaction with a specific interaction — it's a transactional metric. Use NPS quarterly to track the big picture. Use CSAT after specific touchpoints (support tickets, onboarding, purchases) to measure individual experiences. Both are lagging indicators — they tell you how users feel, not what to build. You need qualitative feedback (feature requests, voting boards) for that.