Gauging Customer Satisfaction:
(Relational) Net
Promoter Score

01.22.2024

"The key tenet to psychology is this: everybody wants to feel special." One of my university psychology professors started our class with this sentence, and it's something I've never forgotten. I think about this when I think of The Starfish Story, and Maya Angelou ("I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel"). In the professional realm, I think about this with every customer interaction, because Customer Satisfaction strongly correlates to customer loyalty, retention, and spending. 

If you're not already running customer sat surveys, when you go to research how to write your survey, you'll see hundreds of articles and websites about different survey methodologies. I'm a strong proponent of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey method, which asks the critical question: 

On a scale of 0 - 10, how likely are you to recommend ________ to a friend or colleague? 

This 1 question strongly correlates to customer engagement, satisfaction, loyalty, and enthusiasm. NPS is measured on a 0-10 scale, with 0 being the lower/worse end of the spectrum, and 10 being the higher/better end. The scale breaks down like this: 

• 0-6 : DETRACTOR - indicates the customer is not particularly satisfied, and is in danger of cutting business with the company, or potentially spreading negativity by word of mouth (less enthusiastic/loyal)

• 7-8: PASSIVE - indicates the customer is neutral about the company; these scores are left out of the equation calculation for the NPS total.

• 9-10: PROMOTER - indicates strong customer loyalty; can fuel growth through word of mouth (more enthusiastic/loyal)

To calculate your NPS score: NPS = [(# of Promoters/Total Responses) - (# of Detractors/Total Responses)]

or, more simply: NPS = (% of Promoters) - (% of Detractors)

When determining success, here's what your NPS score says about your customer service: 

• Above 0: Good

• Above 20: Favorable

• Above 50: Excellent

• Above 80: World Class 

With Relational Net Promoter Score (rNPS), this 1-question survey is used to gauge customer satisfaction at regular intervals to give you a holistic view of how your customers feel about your company, at any given time. Typically you would send this question to a (returning/regular) customer either quarterly, bi-annually, or annually, just to get an idea of their general relationship with your business. This is different from a Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS), which is tied to a specific event in the customer lifecycle - more to come on this soon! 

tldr: NPS is a great way to start gauging your customer sat if you haven't done so already. If you're a small business, consider using a Google Form to get you started. Below is a sample of an rNPS survey, along with a link to a spreadsheet to get you started with your calculations. If you end up using a Google Form as well, and if you link it to a new Google Sheet, you can directly copy the "nps_calculation" page via the link below, and have a dashboard ready to go for when you get your first response. 

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