How to Create an NPS Survey: Question Design, Aggregation, and Connecting It to Improvement

"I want to measure customer satisfaction with numbers, but I'm not sure what kind of survey to create." That's exactly when NPS (Net Promoter Score) comes in handy.

An NPS survey is appealing for how easily it measures customer loyalty from just one core question, but if you get the question design or aggregation method wrong, the hard-won data goes to waste. In this article, we explain how to create an NPS survey in three steps: question design, aggregation method, and connecting it to improvement.

What Is NPS? What an NPS Survey Tells You

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a metric that quantifies how much customers want to recommend a product or service to others. It is widely adopted across many companies as an indicator of customer loyalty and intent to keep using a product or service.

Whereas a general customer satisfaction survey asks whether someone was satisfied, NPS is distinctive in asking whether they would recommend it to others. Because recommending is an action that signals support beyond mere satisfaction, it is said to correlate highly with future revenue and retention.

The main things an NPS survey lets you grasp are as follows.

• The overall level of customer loyalty (the score)
• The proportion of customers who will recommend you versus those at risk of churning
• The reasons for recommendation or criticism (improvement hints gained from free-text responses)

Designing the NPS Survey Questions

An NPS survey is built around two questions: the core question and the reason question. Precisely because it is simple, the precision of how you ask determines the results.

The Core Question (Ask Recommendation Likelihood from 0 to 10)

At the heart of NPS is a question that asks recommendation likelihood on an 11-point scale. The standard way to ask it is as follows.

"How likely are you to recommend this product (service) to a friend or colleague? (0 = not at all likely to 10 = extremely likely)"

The key is to ask on the 11-point scale of 0 to 10. If you switch to a 5-point or 7-point scale, the basis for the aggregation described later breaks down, and you can no longer compare against other companies or past data.

The Reason Question (Free Text)

The score alone won't tell you why someone rated as they did. Place one free-text question asking for the reason right after the core question.

"Please tell us the reason for the score you gave."

This free-text response is the single most important source of information for improvement. Rather than chasing only the ups and downs of the score, pick up concrete issues from people's own words.