What is a good NPS score? How do I compare? There are two primary ways to benchmark your NPS performance. You can assemble a panel of your key decision makers and conduct a competitive benchmark, or you can assess your performance relative to available industry benchmarks.
Satmetrix has been benchmarking NPS performance across multiple industries for many years. Once a year we use consumer panels to better understand NPS performance across 19 industry sectors for a total of 183 brands. As you can see by our industry benchmarks, scores range from 80 to -27. Different industries create different levels of customer advocacy so it’s best to understand your performance relative to your industry and ideally relative to your competitors. However, for some context, we have provided a PowerPoint with ranges by industries and highlight the NPS stars.
What I find particularly interesting is the trends from the past 3 years. With so much focus on NPS, organizations still struggle to get breakthrough results. Here are some of my observations.
- The average NPS improvement in the past year was 2 points, with some categories such as financial services and insurance seeing gains as big as 30 points.
- Technology and retail saw some of the largest declines over 2012, with computer software declining 20 points.
- NPS leaders continue to lead with brands such as USAA, Costco and Apple maintaining their leadership.
- Looking at 3 year trends we see a modest 6 point improvement across all sectors, showing the hard work needed to achieve transformative gains
- This 3 year trends also shows the financial services sector recovering after the 2008 crisis, with several brands achieving improvements over 30 NPS points.
It’s interesting to see that the biggest gains come from industries adopting Net Promoter. These industries typically have a recurring revenue models such as insurance, telecommunications and banking where client retention is critical to business success. To achieve NPS leadership you must maintain focus on taking action, create a customer centric culture and break through the challenges of balancing short term financial decisions with long term customer decisions. Best of luck on your journey.