What is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), and how is it calculated?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric based on a single question: "How likely are you to recommend [product/company] to a friend or colleague?", answered on a 0-to-10 scale. Fred Reichheld proposed it in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article, and it has since become the standard loyalty metric across most software and services companies.
The three response categories
Every response from 0 to 10 falls into one of three categories: detractors (0 to 6), passives (7 and 8), and promoters (9 and 10). Detractors are unhappy customers who may speak negatively about the brand; promoters are loyal and tend to actively recommend it; passives are satisfied but not enthusiastic enough to promote it, and are vulnerable to switching to a competitor.
The formula
The score is calculated as the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, excluding passives from the final calculation (though they still count toward the total number of responses). With 100 responses where 60 are promoters, 22 passives, and 18 detractors, the NPS is 60% − 18% = 42. The result is always a whole number between -100 (if everyone is a detractor) and 100 (if everyone is a promoter), never a percentage.
How to set up an NPS question in SurvIQ
When adding a new question, "NPS" is one of the types available in the question-type menu. The editor already shows the 0-to-10 scale color-coded by category (red for detractors, amber for passives, green for promoters) as a live preview, and lets you customize the labels on each end ("Not at all likely" / "Extremely likely" by default).
What the result looks like
In the results section, SurvIQ calculates the score automatically using the standard formula and displays it on a -100-to-100 gauge with the same color bands, along with the exact breakdown of what percentage of responses fell into each category. There's no need to build the formula by hand in a separate spreadsheet.
What counts as a "good" NPS
Any positive score (more promoters than detractors) is considered acceptable, above 30 is considered good, and above 70 is exceptional and rare. But the absolute number matters less than the comparison: NPS varies a lot by industry (B2B software tends to run higher than telecom or airlines, for example), so the most useful comparison is your own score against its historical trend, not a generic benchmark from a different industry.
What NPS doesn't tell you
A single numeric question doesn't explain why someone scored the way they did. Standard practice is to add an open-ended follow-up question right after it ("What's the main reason for your score?"), which turns a cold number into actionable information about what's working and what isn't. Without that follow-up, NPS on its own tells you whether something changed, but not what to do about it.