How high can your NPS score be?

So how high can your NPS score be? Is achieving a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 100 achievable? Almost every company that calculates an NPS score wants to know the answer to two questions:

How does our NPS score compare against others?
How high can our NPS score be?

At the recent excellent Customer Engagement Summit in London a number of presenters pre-empted the revealing of their NPS score with statements on how high it was, so setting an expectation for everyone in the room. What would have been fascinating would have been to carry out a straw poll of what number people had in their minds before the great reveal.

Considerations

So what do you need to consider when setting goals for a higher NPS score when examining other companies NPS scores:

Is it even fair to compare NPS scores across industries? For example are customers more likely to recommend an enjoyable experience such as holidays, than customers of a more mundane experience such as the weekly shop?
Can you compare B2B and B2C scores? Recommending in a business environment is very different to recommending in your own personal life. There are also certain industries where recommendation is not an appropriate behaviour
Third party influencers will impact customers’ overall perceptions of a market. Their starting point before even considering an individual supplier is likely to be more negative. Two recent examples are the very high negative media coverage given to both Banking and the Utility markets
What is driving recommendation, and can that be repeated for all customers? A key driver for recommendation within the insurance market will be price, yet the premium available for one customer may not be appropriate and available for another customer. Therefore the key reason for recommendation has been removed
How do you know that other published NPS scores are accurate. There is no formal auditing of them as there are with other more traditional financial KPIs
Are you sure that your own NPS score is accurate? We have come across companies who have been told their NPS score but upon interrogation of their data the score has been incorrectly calculated!
Are the numbers of customers that have been interviewed representative of that customer base? We all assume that just because a figure is published it is reflective of the customers’ views, but if small sample sizes are involved this may not be so true.

What is high, and does it matter?

So what were those high NPS scores being presented at the Customer Engagement Summit in London? Well the majority were in the +60s, which is good, but is it as high as you would have hoped for?

Perhaps the focus shouldn’t be on achieving a certain NPS score, but on understanding its drivers and what corrective actions should be in place to improve the score.

How high can your NPS score be?