What is Net Promoter Score (NPS) and what impact does AI have on your results?

What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction based on the question: “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend?” Customers give a rating between 0-10, where ‘0’ is not at all likely and ’10’ is extremely likely, showing how they feel about your organisation.

How do you calculate NPS?

To calculate NPS, you first need to segment your survey respondents into three categories, depending on the rating they gave your organisation in answer to the question “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend?”

1. Promoters (rating you 9 or 10/10)

These are enthusiastic, loyal, and satisfied customers who rate your company, product or service highly. They’re likely to continue buying from you and using your products or services, and will happily recommend your company to others. Promoters can help drive growth by spreading positive word-of-mouth publicity.

2. Passives (rating you 7 or 8/10)

These customers are neutral or indifferent towards your company. They might be satisfied with your product or service, but aren’t as enthusiastic as your promoters. Passive customers aren’t likely to spread negative messages about your company, but they’re also not vocal advocates. If a competitor offers a better product, service or price, they’re just as likely to switch as they are to stay.

3. Detractors (rating you 0-6/10)

These are unhappy customers who aren’t pleased with your product, service or overall customer experience. They have the potential to damage your brand and hinder growth through negative word-of-mouth commentary. Paying close attention to detractors can help you identify areas where you can improve your offer and increase your overall customer satisfaction score.

After you’ve segmented your audience, you’ll follow a formula to work out your NPS score as a percentage.

What's the formula to calculate NPS?

To work out NPS, subtract the percentage of detractors (D) ― people who tear down your brand, from the percentage of promoters (P) ― people who build up your brand, to get your overall score:

P – D = NPS

For example, if 70% of your audience are promoters rating you 9 or 10 and 15% are detractors rating you 0-6, your NPS will be 55%:

70% – 15% = 55% 

In this instance, the remaining 15% of your audience are passive (rating you 7 or 8 out of 10) and so have no influence on NPS, since they’re unlikely to either recommend or criticise your organisation to others.

What's a good NPS benchmark?

According to SurveyMonkey’s study of 150,000 organisations, the average NPS is 32%.

• Scores below 32% show there’s room for improvement, signalling the need for strategic changes to better your overall customer experience
• Scores between 44% and 72% are good, showing you have satisfied customers and plenty of potential for growth
• Scores above 72% are excellent, reflecting a high degree of customer loyalty and satisfaction

Striving for a high NPS and maintaining a customer focused mindset can help build longer-lasting business relationships and encourage loyalty to flourish.

Why does NPS matter?

A high NPS means customer retention is likely to be good, which often goes hand in hand with higher profitability and sustained business success.

Equally, monitoring NPS over time can help you identify any dips in customer feeling, so you can address customer dissatisfaction if it crops up. In recent years, AI has become a strong ally for business leaders keen to gather detailed feedback, since it can help you improve customer engagement, getting more feedback in the moment, more often, and in greater detail to reinforce NPS ratings.

Gathering NPS feedback in the age of AI

Gathering NPS feedback has traditionally involved actively sending out surveys to customers, manually collating the results and then pulling together reports by hand. Now, you can easily and affordably launch an AI assistant to do this for you.

Companies like Mytime Active leisure providers are already using an AI assistant to answer 97% of their customer queries. When you add an AI assistant to your team you can train it to ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to others as often as you want it to as an instant, efficient way to easily gather customer ratings for NPS. Human agents then spend less time acquiring customer feedback and have more time to take action on everything they learn, ready to improve NPS overall. For Barking & Dagenham Council, customer satisfaction went up by 67% just six months after the launch of their AI assistant.

• AI assistants can handle an extraordinarily vast amount of data, so it doesn’t matter how many tens of thousands of customers you have or how many millions of transactions are handled
• You can use just one AI assistant across multiple channels, from your website or mobile app to social media and messenger platforms, but all your results sit in one central place for easy viewing
• No human agent, no matter how experienced or smart they are can handle data at the speed of AI, so calculations are made faster than lightning, saving your teams the time it takes to manually pull together reports, plus there’s no risk of human error in the calculations
• Your NPS data is constantly being topped up whether your teams are online or not, since an AI assistant works for you through the day and night
• You can also control when your AI assistant does or doesn’t ask customers for their rating, so if you’re already working on an escalation for a disgruntled customer, they won’t be left feeling more irritated by a request for NPS feedback

Gather qualitative data too

Possibly the best part of using an AI assistant to ask for feedback from customers is you can follow up to ask why they give the rating they do ― instantly, at the end of every request for an NPS rating. Since this is real time engagement with customers in a conversational setting, you can get the truest sense of their feeling right there in the moment to help you make sense of the NPS rating they give.

Launch an AI assistant today

Using our advanced platform, AI Studio, it’s easy to set up question and answer sequences (we call these flows) and include a request for an NPS rating at the end of the exchange.

In the video below, you see the AI assistant answering a question about which laptop to use for gaming and the request for an NPS rating at the end.

How to create this flow in AI Studio:

1. Sign up for or log in to AI Studio
2. Go to the Content tab and check you’re on the Flows tab
3. Create a new flow called ‘Ask NPS score’
4. Add a Question: ‘How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend?’
5. Add Valid options 1-10
6. Click Show options to user (so they can quickly choose a response)
7. Hit Publish

Once you’ve set up a new flow for NPS score, you can link it to any of your other flows, which means your AI assistant will automatically ask for the NPS rating at the end of those sequences:

• Go to any of your existing Flows and select Link to flow