Net promoter Score: Useful or Useless?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most widely used customer experience metrics in the world. It’s a simple, standardized, and easy to benchmark survey question:
“On a scale from 0–10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”
But despite its popularity, NPS remains controversial. Most companies use it as their standard customer experience metric. Many CX Consultants actually dismiss it as oversimplified and misleading.
So… is NPS useful or useless?
Here’s my honest answer: it depends on how you use it.
why & When NPS can be useful
1. It’s simple and easy to implement
One of NPS’s biggest strengths is its simplicity. It’s easy to roll out, easy to explain internally, and easy for customers to answer. In fast-growing SaaS companies especially, simplicity matters.
Because it’s lightweight and widely used already, you can:
Launch it quickly
Track it over time
Benchmark against industry peers
This makes NPS a practical starting point for companies building their Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.
2. It gives a directional health signal
NPS can act as a high-level pulse check on customer sentiment.
Are we improving over time? Did our recent onboarding changes affect satisfaction?
Is one segment significantly more negative than others?
While it won’t tell you why customers feel the way they do (on its own), it can signal where to look deeper.
Used properly, NPS is not a diagnosis — it’s a barometer and customer sentiment health check.
3. It creates a feedback loop
When combined (which it always should!) with an open-text follow-up question (“What’s the reason for your score?”), NPS can become a rich source of qualitative insight.
Even more powerful: closing the loop with respondents.
Reaching out to unhappy customers to understand and resolve their concerns can:
Improve relationships
Reduce churn risk
Show customers that their voice matters
In this sense, the real value of NPS often lies less in the score — and more as a door opener and in the conversations it creates.
why & When NPS can be Problematic
1. The score can be misleading
An NPS number without context is dangerous.
A score of 30 — is that good?
It depends on your industry, geography, customer segment, and business model.
Many companies obsess over increasing the number without addressing the underlying experience. The metric becomes the goal — instead of customer value. And this has the real danger of the NPS becoming a vanity metric.
NPS is a lagging indicator. It reflects how customers feel after experiencing your product or service. It doesn’t tell you which operational improvements to prioritize.
2. It oversimplifies loyalty
The assumption behind NPS is that likelihood to recommend equals loyalty.
But in B2B environments, especially in SaaS scale-ups:
Customers may recommend you but still churn due to budget or strategic shifts.
Customers may not actively recommend, but remain long-term because of integration depth.
Customer loyalty is complex and reducing it to one question can miss nuance and context.
3. It can create internal misalignment
When NPS becomes a KPI tied to bonuses or performance reviews, unintended consequences can emerge:
Teams pressure customers for higher scores.
Focus shifts to “saving the score” rather than improving the experience.
Short-term fixes override long-term improvements.
If NPS becomes too political, it loses its value as an honest feedback tool.
So what should the NPS be used for?
NPS works best when it is:
1. A directional sentiment barometer
Use it to track trends over time and compare segments — not as an isolated performance badge.
2. A trigger for qualitative insight & door opener for conversations with your customers
Pay more attention to open-text responses than the number itself. Patterns in feedback often reveal more than the score.
3. A prioritisation input
Combine NPS results with churn data, support tickets, usage metrics, and customer interviews. NPS should inform decisions — not drive them alone.
4. Part of a broader VoC program
NPS is not a full Voice of the Customer strategy. It should sit alongside:
Other VOC metrics like CSAT, CES
Customer interviews
Behavioral data
Business data like churn and retention
When integrated into a structured CX strategy, NPS becomes useful. In isolation, it risks becoming vanity reporting.
What Most Companies Actually Need
In many SaaS scale-ups, NPS is already in place.
The survey is running. The score is being reported. The dashboard exists.
But what’s often missing is structure and clear intent on what to do with the data and insights:
Who owns the follow-up?
How are insights categorised, synthesised and shared?
How do the insights translate into roadmap decisions systematically?
How does NPS connect to retention and expansion goals?
When NPS lives in isolation, it doesn’t add value at all.
When it’s embedded into a broader, intentional CX strategy, it can become useful.
That’s where many growing companies reach an inflection point: they don’t need more surveys — they need clarity on how feedback connects to business outcomes.
If your team is collecting NPS but unsure how to turn it into action, it may be time to step back and design a more structured Voice of the Customer approach — one that aligns directly with your CX strategy and growth goals.
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