What Is a Good Net Promoter Score?

The results are in: your NPS is 20!

Is this a cause for celebration, or should you panic and double down on improving experiences with your brand?

The short answer: any Net Promoter Score above 0 means you have more promoters than detractors, but no single number is good for every business. A score of 20 can be strong in one industry and weak in another. To know whether your NPS is good, compare it with four references: your own past scores, your industry average, your direct competitors and the customer segments behind the number.

This article covers how NPS measures loyalty, how to read your score in absolute and relative terms, why benchmarks matter, and how to improve a score that falls short. Keep reading and discover whether your scores reflect stellar customer service or opportunities for improvement.

How does NPS measure customer loyalty?

Whether you call it the Net Promoter Score, NPS, or just another satisfaction survey, NPS is a useful tool to measure how customers feel about your brand. It gives you a glimpse into the sentiment of your customers:

• Did they love you so much that they can't wait to recommend you to their communities?
• Or were they so unsatisfied with the experience that they will not only churn but also bad-mouth you to their peers?

With one question, your customer experience management teams get the answer to: will my customers recommend this brand, or not? The answers divide customers into three groups (see promoters, passives and detractors for a closer look at each):

• Promoters (9–10): loyal fans who are likely to recommend you.
• Passives (7–8): satisfied, but not enthusiastic enough to promote you.
• Detractors (0–6): unhappy customers who may churn and warn others away.

Worked example

You survey 200 customers. 90 answer 9 or 10, 70 answer 7 or 8, and 40 answer 0 to 6. Promoters are 45 percent of respondents and detractors are 20 percent. Passives count toward the total, but not toward the score.

45 − 20 = an NPS of 25.

To avoid errors, use an NPS calculator or NPS software to run the survey and calculate the result. Unlike many other satisfaction surveys, NPS also tells you how much you can rely on word-of-mouth in your marketing, because it counts the customers who are likely to promote or criticize you. The happier your customers, the more loyal they stay, coming back to you each time they need to restock your products.

What is a good Net Promoter Score?

As with most marketing KPIs, good and bad Net Promoter Scores vary from industry to industry. The first reading is simple:

• Positive score (above 0): you have more promoters than detractors. The higher the score, the larger that lead.
• Negative score (below 0): detractors outnumber promoters. Customers are unhappy with your brand and unlikely to recommend you.

A negative score was always a cause for alarm. It matters even more when acquisition costs are high and you need to rely on retention.

Yet the positive/negative classification is just one side of the story. Your business does not exist in a void, so you should benchmark your score against other companies in your industry. Bain & Company, which created the Net Promoter System, puts the weight on the competitive comparison: in its research, the Net Promoter leader in a market grows, on average, more than two times faster than its competitors.

The bottom line: NPS is not just another vanity metric. It is a business diagnosis you should analyze and use as a growth opportunity. The only reason to measure it is to track, analyze and improve the relationships customers have with your brand.

How do you read your NPS: absolute or relative?

Absolute NPS

With absolute NPS, a positive score is "good" and a negative score is "bad." The reading is more nuanced than this, but it is a quick first check:

• Negative score: customers have poor experiences with your brand. They are unhappy with your products, experience or employees, and some actively advise their peers to avoid you.
• Barely positive score: promoters only just outnumber detractors. There are many areas to improve, and your survey tools can help you find them.
• Clearly positive score: a large share of customers are willing to recommend you. Start thinking about loyalty: give promoters benefits or perks and encourage them to spread the word.
• Scores near the top of the scale: few businesses reach them, because almost every customer would have to be a promoter. Brands that do are usually among the most loved in their market.

A positive NPS does not automatically mean you deliver a stellar customer experience. That is where relative NPS comes in.

Relative NPS

Relative NPS compares your score with a standard that fits your business. It is harder to analyze, because you need a reliable reference, but it shows where you stand in your market. The table below shows the references to use and what each one tells you.

Interestingly, some industries with low NPS still thrive. This happens when customers have few options and must use the service even when the experience is poor, as with some cable, energy and gas providers. Where competition is fierce and customers have plenty of alternatives, businesses ride or die by their NPS. If you sell in a hyper-competitive industry such as beauty, fashion or consumer goods, the experience you provide is how you stand out in the eyes of online shoppers.

Some competitors post their NPS publicly for shareholders (and bragging rights), but you risk getting a biased view, because the method and sample are rarely disclosed. For industry averages, use research sources such as Statista or Gartner reports, or start with our NPS benchmarks by industry, which lists average scores by sector with the source and year.

Why are NPS benchmarks important?

If you measure relative NPS, benchmarks are what make the comparison accurate. As you saw, some industries thrive despite low scores, while others need outstanding efforts to survive despite high ones.

Many factors influence customer loyalty and satisfaction: website performance, emotional attachment to a brand, competitors' performance, product quality, price and more. How likely a customer is to recommend you depends on these factors, and they vary from industry to industry. So compare your score with players in your industry, not with an average across all industries. Comparing your NPS with a benchmark from an industry that is poles apart from yours, such as a cable company against consumer goods, is like comparing apples to oranges. For the actual industry averages, see Net Promoter Score benchmarks; the NPS analysis guide shows how to break the score down once you have it.

Other factors can move your numbers too:

• Location and culture: customers in different countries and cultures use rating scales differently, and some are harsher with 9s and 10s than others. Compare scores from the same market where you can.
• Demographics and values: customers who share a brand's values may rate it more generously.
• Survey channel and timing: the way you ask (email, on-site, phone) and when you ask can change who answers and how they score. Keep the method stable when you track the trend.

Because it is based on sentiment and individual experiences, NPS is subjective. Take these factors into account when you benchmark yourself against competitors. Absolute NPS is a good place to start, but relative NPS shows how you stand against the competition.

Bonus: when you follow industry benchmarks over time, you also see changes in the industry. What was a good NPS this time last year may now only be average, which means the standards are higher and you may need to double down on customer experience.

Which customers are behind your score?

A score at or above your industry average is good news only if it holds for the customers who matter most to your business. If your frequent, high-spending customers are passives or detractors, a good average is covering a real risk to revenue. If most detractors are first-time buyers, the problem may sit in onboarding, delivery or first-purchase expectations rather than with your core customers.

Nexus by Omniconvert gives you this view. It scores customers by recency, frequency and monetary value, tracks Customer Lifetime Value, and pushes RFM segments directly to Meta Ads, Google Ads and Klaviyo, so you can act on what NPS tells you about each segment. To see how NPS relates to other feedback metrics, read NPS vs. CSAT vs. CES.

How can I improve my NPS?

So you measured your NPS and realized there is room for improvement? Excellent: this is where the growth of your business starts. Do not make random changes to how you do business. Map the improvements, just as you would map the customer journey.

1. Discover the source of low scores. Ask detractors why they gave their score and what you could improve. Do it long enough and you start to see patterns: some departments, products or locations collect more detractors than others. Narrow it down as much as possible and focus on the problem most people point to.
2. Address the root cause. You do not need to uproot your whole business model. When detractors reveal a systematic problem, act quickly to fix it. Pair the fix with targeted NPS surveys to monitor whether it worked. If scores improve, amazing. If not, go back to brainstorming and try again.
3. Involve your whole team. Significant changes are much easier when everybody is on the same page. Make sure everyone in your eCommerce business understands the goal: a better NPS, and the free word-of-mouth that comes with it. Explain how you measure NPS, include it in company KPIs, and ask department managers to carry it into their teams. Regular huddles about NPS let teams share ideas and find solutions to common complaints.
4. Keep improving the customer experience. The first steps are company-centric, but the real rockstar in your business is the customer. People recommend or bad-mouth you based on their experience. Make it a priority to identify your customers' needs and expectations, then build solutions that genuinely help them. People are not walking wallets; they are humans with needs and emotions.

Happy customers are loyal and spread the word about your brand and your products. For question ideas to use in follow-up surveys, see our NPS survey template, and for the full basics of the metric, the Net Promoter Score guide.

Frequently Asked Questions