The Net Promoter Score (NPS) revolutionized customer engagement measures when Bain & Company introduced it in 2003 – but is it all it’s cracked up to be? The promise was simple. The NPS is a single-question metric meant to quantify customer loyalty and predict business growth. How likely are you to recommend this company? Thousands of executives embraced the measure, aligning incentives and strategies around NPS. Still, many have now challenged the claim that NPS correlates to success.
Imagine sitting at your desk, reviewing your latest Net Promoter Score survey results. They’ve gone down, but you’re clueless as to why. Worse, you don’t know how to reverse the trend. Frankly, you’re not even sure the trend matters. Sales are up, and other symptoms of brand health are positive. But for some reason, your bonus is tied to positive NPS results.
By asking customers only one question (how likely they were to recommend a brand to others), the Bain score measured interest in a brand, before subtracting what it labelled “detractors” from what it called “promoters.” This way, organizations believed they could determine general sentiment and predict the likelihood of future sales.
However, research published in the Harvard Business Review found that high NPS scores do not consistently translate into positive financial performance. Likewise, a 2020 Journal of Marketing study revealed that some firms with modest or low NPS still achieved significant growth. The big problem is that NPS does not account for important variables, such as market share, pricing, distribution, product differentiation, and operational execution, all of which can impact growth.
Today, the NPS has changed. Go to Bain’s website and you’ll discover the “S” in their acronym no longer stands for “Score” but a broader term: “system.” Bain now advises clients to layer in employee engagement indices, product usage analytics, qualitative feedback, and journey mapping to provide greater context. The added complexity undermines the original premise of simplicity, and gives rise to what practitioners call “NPS fatigue”.
The limits of NPS have prompted many businesses to abandon it and broaden their measurement frameworks. More granular customer experience metrics like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) are now increasingly favored for their ability to highlight specific touchpoints hampering transactions. The American Marketing Association underscores that the correlation between NPS and retention or profitability varies widely by industry. In many sectors, product quality, brand reputation, and value proposition display a much stronger influence on loyalty and long-term performance than NPS.
For brand leaders, the lesson is clear: overreliance on NPS will mislead your investment and strategic priorities. Several alternative approaches exist, such as customized Customer Emotional Quotient (CEQ) studies by Cult Collective, and category leader rankings like Brand Key’s “Customer Loyalty and Engagement Index”. Many high-performing organizations are synthesizing both quantitative and qualitative inputs, such as behavioral data, emotional drivers, usage patterns, and competitive intel, to create a much more meaningful picture of customer engagement. Each of these methods is more resource-intensive than a lone NPS score, but all yield richer, more actionable insights that better inform go-to-market strategies.
It might be time to get off the NPS bandwagon and embrace a broader, more beneficial view of customer engagement and brand attachment.
Chris Kneeland is the co-founder of Cult Collective, The Gathering Festival, and the Brand Hall of Fame, all headquartered in Calgary, AB.
