Introduced by Fred Reichheld in a 2003 HBR article (“The One Number You Need to Grow”) and refined through his book The Ultimate Question (2006), NPS became the dominant satisfaction metric in B2B and B2C product organisations. Scores of 7–8 are “passives” — they don’t count toward either side of the calculation.
Industry benchmarks: B2B SaaS averages around 30–40, consumer tech 20–30, telcos below 10. Comparing your NPS to another industry’s benchmark is almost always misleading — the metric is useful for tracking change within your product and for comparison against direct competitors.
NPS’s staying power comes from three things: it’s a single question (dramatic survey-fatigue reduction), it correlates (loosely) with revenue growth in Reichheld’s original data, and it produces a single comparable number stakeholders can track. The limitations are substantial but the operational utility is real.
Post-transaction surveys (immediately after support interactions, purchases, cancellations). Periodic sampling of active users. Benchmarking across time or against direct competitors. Not useful for diagnosing why users feel the way they do — pair with open-ended follow-up questions.
A SaaS product sampled NPS quarterly across 500 active users. Score moved from +12 to +31 over 18 months as the team shipped onboarding improvements. The team paired every quarter’s NPS with themed analysis of the open-ended “why?” responses from detractors — the pattern of themes drove the roadmap.
Compute it with the NPS calculator, which accepts counts or raw 0–10 responses.
NPS sits alongside SUS (usability), CSAT (post-interaction satisfaction), and CES (customer effort score). Each measures a slightly different thing; teams tracking all four get a layered picture.
Reviewed 2 October 2026 · Editorial standards