The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key figure that has become one of the most important KPIs for many companies. The NPS is impressively simple to collect and evaluate: it is based on a single question, namely: “How likely is it that you would recommend company/brand X to a friend or colleague? The NPS is then calculated as the difference between the proportion of promoters (recommendation very likely: scale score 9+10 on a scale 0-10) and the proportion of detractors (recommendation unlikely: scale score 0-6).

The advantage of the NPS is that it is a standardized value that can be compared and tracked across different industries and different companies in an industry in the benchmark as well as over time.

It is sometimes criticized that the NPS is of little value as a singular indicator and should be embedded in a context or used as a “starting point” for more in-depth analyses. In order to be able to explain the value itself and, above all, changes over time, it makes sense, for example, as with customer satisfaction surveys, to ask the respondents about the reasons for the respective likelihood of recommendation and to be able to “explain” the value in this way.