Net promoter score (NPS): how to calculate and use it

The net promoter score (NPS) is a one-question measure of customer loyalty. You ask, in Bain & Company's wording, "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?", and customers answer on a scale from 0 to 10. Then you sort them into three groups (Bain: measuring your Net Promoter Score).

• Promoters, 9 or 10: loyal fans. Bain says they account for more than 80% of referrals in most businesses.
• Passives, 7 or 8: satisfied for now, and easy to lose to a competitor.
• Detractors, 0 to 6: unhappy customers, who Bain says account for more than 80% of negative word of mouth.
• NPS = % of promoters minus % of detractors. It runs from -100 (everyone a detractor) to +100 (everyone a promoter).

NPS was developed at Bain & Company and introduced in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article. The research used customer data from Satmetrix, now part of NICE. In Bain's history of the method, the team tested many questions against what customers later did. The recommend question was the best predictor in 11 of 14 industry case studies.

Bain also notes the score was not enough on its own. The question that turns it into action is "Why?". Net Promoter, NPS and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Bain & Company, NICE Systems and the method's creator, but anyone can ask the question and calculate the score.

Say a salon branch got 120 answers last month: 66 gave 9 or 10, 30 gave 7 or 8, and 24 gave 0 to 6.

• Promoters: 66 ÷ 120 = 55%.
• Detractors: 24 ÷ 120 = 20%.
• NPS = 55 − 20 = 35.
• In Google Sheets or Excel, with scores in B2:B121: =(COUNTIF(B2:B121,">=9")-COUNTIF(B2:B121,"<=6"))/COUNT(B2:B121)*100
• Passives don't appear in the subtraction, but they do count in the total. Leave them out of the 120 and the score is wrong.
• Don't average the 0 to 10 answers. An average of 7.8 is not an NPS.
• Keep the 0 to 10 scale. Bain uses it partly because on a 1 to 10 scale people sometimes pick 1 thinking it is the top.

Keep it to two questions, three at most. Fill in the branch and the visit date yourself, from the receipt or the booking, so the customer doesn't have to.

• Question 1: How likely are you to recommend [BRAND] [BRANCH] to a friend or family member? (0 = not at all likely, 10 = extremely likely)
• Question 2: What is the main reason for your score?
• Optional question 3: What one thing should we do better next time?
• Taglish version, Q1: Gaano po kayo ka-likely na i-recommend ang [BRAND] [BRANCH] sa kaibigan o kapamilya? (0 = hindi talaga, 10 = sigurado)
• Taglish version, Q2: Ano po ang pinakamalaking dahilan ng score ninyo?
• Text or email invite: "Hi [NAME], salamat sa visit sa [BRANCH] kahapon. One question lang po, 30 seconds: [LINK]"

Bain separates two everyday kinds of NPS (three types of Net Promoter Scores). Relationship NPS is asked without a trigger, often once or twice a year, to get a general read. Experience NPS is triggered by a visit, an order or a call, and it lets you fix a bad experience while it is fresh. For a branch business, experience NPS is the useful one. Bain's guidance is not to over-survey: ask about the experiences that matter most and contact each customer at most once every three months.

How to collect it depends on what you know about the customer.

• Salons, clinics, spas: send a text or email the day after the appointment. You already have the contact.
• Restaurants and coffee: a QR code on the receipt or the table tent, leading to a two-question form. A short customer satisfaction survey slip works too.
• Avoid a tablet at the counter with the crew watching. People give 10s to the person in front of them, and the score stops meaning anything.
• Call every detractor who left a contact, within 2 days. Bain calls this closing the loop: hear the problem, fix it if you can, and learn from it.
• Read the comments with the crew once a week, five minutes at the huddle. Pick one thing to change.
• Send repeated causes up. If detractors at five branches mention the same drink or the same booking problem, the fix belongs to head office, not the branch.
• Report each branch monthly once it has about 30 answers, otherwise use the last three months. At 30 answers, one customer moving from detractor to promoter shifts the score by almost 7 points.
• Compare a branch with its own trend before comparing it with other branches. Put NPS next to rating and complaints on the weekly branch scorecard.

Any score above 0 means more promoters than detractors. Beyond that, there is no single good number, because scores differ by industry, by country and by how the survey was run. A score collected by the crew at the counter will always look better than one collected by text the next day.

Bain warns against reading too much into high scores that companies publicise. It says to check first what kind of score it is. Use your own first three months as the baseline and aim to beat it. If you want to compare yourself with competitors, that needs a survey run by a third party across the market, which Bain calls competitive benchmark NPS.

Both measure what customers think of a branch. They differ in who answers, who sees it and what you can do with it.

• Who answers: NPS goes to the customers you choose to ask. Google reviews come from whoever decides to write one, often the very happy or the very unhappy.
• Who sees it: NPS is private. A Google rating is public and is one of the first things a new customer sees.
• What it tells you: NPS tells you whether customers would send friends. Google reviews tell the next customer what to expect.
• How fast: NPS arrives when you send it. Reviews arrive any day, on their own.
• Small branches: NPS can give a small branch enough answers to read. In a Mapkita sample of 1,646 Metro Manila branches of 35 chain brands on Google Maps (October 2026), 36% of branches had fewer than 10 reviews, so their star rating rests on a handful of people (our study of branch ratings).
• Don't convert one into the other. A 9 is not "4.5 stars". Track both, side by side.

The tempting shortcut is to send a Google review link only to customers who scored 9 or 10. That is review gating, and Google bans it. Google's policy says merchants may not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers".

So run the two side by side. Ask everyone for the NPS score. Separately, ask everyone for a Google review, whatever they scored, with each branch's own Google review link, and never offer anything for it. How to ask customers for Google reviews has wording that works at the counter and by text. Our guide to Google profiles for several locations covers giving each branch its own profile and link.