Definition

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

A customer loyalty metric calculated from a single survey question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” scored 0-10.

NPS asks customers a single question — “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” — on a 0–10 scale. Respondents are bucketed into Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6). The score is the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors, ranging from -100 to +100.

NPS was popularized in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article by Fred Reichheld. It's used widely as an internal customer-satisfaction benchmark, but it's not a substitute for public reviews — NPS lives in your CRM, not in Google search results.

Some review platforms (GatherUp, Reputology) include NPS surveys alongside review collection. Whether NPS is useful depends on what you do with the data: a low NPS score that doesn't change anything in the business is just a vanity metric.

Related terms

Online reputation management

The practice of monitoring, influencing, and responding to what's said about a business across review sites, social media, and search results.

Review routing

A review collection method where customers are invited to leave a public review on the platform of their choice (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.) — and unhappy customers are also offered a private feedback channel as an alternative they can opt into.

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