Market Research: Foundations to Practice · Measuring Customer Sentiment
Net Promoter Score: Origin and Method
NPS has become the most widely adopted customer metric in business history, built on a specific claim about one question's predictive power. This chapter covers where that claim came from.
Fred Reichheld, a Bain & Company fellow, introduced the Net Promoter Score in a December 2003 Harvard Business Review article titled 'The One Number You Need to Grow,' after years of research with Satmetrix testing various candidate survey questions against actual customer behavior, including purchase patterns, retention, and referrals [27].
Key Takeaways
- Reichheld introduced NPS in a December 2003 Harvard Business Review article, based on research testing candidate questions against actual customer behavior.
- The 'likelihood to recommend' question was found to outperform alternatives like satisfaction and repurchase intent as a growth predictor in the original research.
- NPS classifies 9-10 scorers as Promoters, 7-8 as Passives, 0-6 as Detractors, then subtracts Detractor % from Promoter %, excluding Passives from the final number.
- NPS adoption reached more than two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies by the 2010s, an unusually wide scale of adoption for a single business metric.