Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) reminds me of the apricot tree on the side of our house. It sometimes disappoints us, like it did this year when it carried exactly one (!) fruit. But we’ve had it for a while, we don’t know if another tree would do better, and it’s a rental home so our landlords have the final say. The question is not “Can we rip it out and replace it?” It is: “What can we do to make the apricot tree perform better?”

NPS also disappoints you and your firms sometimes. But it’s been around for a while — in the industry and in many companies. And your executives — like our landlords — often have the final say. And let’s face it, replacing NPS is a huge effort with an uncertain outcome.

That’s why you should ask yourself the pragmatic question, “If we have NPS, how do we use it optimally as a CX KPI?” (rather than the soul-searching question, “Is it the right KPI?”).

To help you answer that question, my colleague Pete Jacques and I used insights from two decades of research and updated our report Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) Essentials (client access).

This blog summarizes our answers from the report to these three questions:

  1. Why Is NPS So Controversial?
  2. Should NPS Be Your CX Beacon Metric?
  3. What Are Alternatives To NPS As A Beacon Metric?

For more insights, also check our second blog, NPS Q&A Part 2: Financial Linkage, Targets, And Benchmarking, which summarizes our answers to these questions:

  1. How Do Companies Tie NPS To Financial Success?
  2. How Should We Benchmark NPS?
  3. How Do We Set NPS Targets?
  4. Should We Pay Employees For Achieving NPS Targets?

For a long list of Forrester resources, check out the end of this blog.

Why Is NPS So Controversial?

A key to the traction of NPS was the publicity it got, coupled with the fact that executives who were keen to have one “customer” metric championed it in their firms. Fred Reichheld quotes former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt telling his senior leaders in 2005, “This is the best customer-relationship metric I’ve seen — I can’t understand why any of you wouldn’t want to try it!”

The controversy surrounding Net Promoter Score stems mostly from how it’s implemented, not from the metric itself (even though, as a metric, it also has pros and cons).

NPS was introduced as “the one number you need to grow.” Fred Reichheld later corrected this and said NPS should be part of a Net Promoter System with an “inner” loop — getting back to customers who gave feedback and coaching individual employees — and an “outer” loop — identifying, prioritizing, and addressing systemic issues.

But firms often implement NPS badly. They:

What’s more, while some studies show that NPS links to financials, others don’t, yet firms often start using NPS without checking whether NPS is a predictor of business results in their firm. Some firms tie compensation to the metric, creating pressure to perform better. All of this means that employees and executives are left wondering how to change the number and why.

Should NPS Be Your CX Beacon Metric?

Sixty-seven percent of VoC and CX measurement leaders we asked say their executives use NPS as one of their primary metrics to judge CX success (client access).

NPS can be a fit as your CX beacon metric, if you implement it with the system and the underlying measurement architecture and if you communicate internally that it’s a loyalty metric, not a CX quality metric (see above).

To check fit, use this rule of thumb — NPS is not a good fit if one of three things is true:

  • NPS is inversely correlated to financial success at your firm.
  • Your employees dislike NPS intensely (maybe because they have suffered through prior implementations).
  • Customers feel offended or misunderstood by the survey questions (e.g., because they don’t have a choice of providers).

Below is a checklist, or use our tool, How To Select The Right CX Beacon Metric (client access).

A word on B2B vs. B2C: NPS can be harder to use in B2B because of the typically smaller sample sizes. But it can work.

Do you have the right CX KPI or Beacon metric? Check these criteria

What Are Alternatives To NPS As A Beacon Metric?

There are many alternatives.

  • In surveys: The most common alternatives are customer satisfaction and ease (both perception metrics). Other alternative survey metrics include an index that measures how well you perform against your CX promise, like Virgin Money’s Smile score, or an index across key journeys (like what truck manufacturer MAN does [client access]).
  • Beyond surveys: Some companies experiment with measuring or predicting behavioral loyalty (like retention) or financial value (like customer lifetime value). And a final interesting alternative is a customer health score, something B2B software companies started as part of the customer success movement. A health score for a customer combines survey metrics on loyalty and CX or satisfaction with behavioral metrics. You can aggregate those health scores at the company level.

But keep in mind, NPS has a wicked gravity. Not choosing NPS will require a big burden of proof that the other metric performs better on the criteria I mentioned above.

That’s probably why some opt to supplement NPS rather than replace it, like Delta Dental and Blue KC who use ease alongside NPS (client access), and Virgin Money, which says in its annual report from 2023 about its Smile score: “It’s a score that is used to supplement NPS, however we use the Smile scores as our key customer experience metric given its ability to capture the role of emotion in customer advocacy.”

Resources For Your NPS “Apricot Tree” Moment

If you feel an apricot tree moment coming on with regard to NPS, I hope the above was useful for you. Please be in touch with any questions through the usual means (guidance session or inquiry call), and check out the resources below if you are a client.

The role of NPS in a CX measurement framework:

Case studies of firms that use NPS in their CX efforts:

Information on tying NPS to business outcomes: