What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become one of the most widely adopted metrics in customer experience. Its strength lies in its simplicity: a single, standardised question designed to capture how customers feel about a product or service at a given point in time.

Used well, NPS provides a clear, directional view of customer sentiment. It allows leadership teams to track trends, compare cohorts, and maintain a shared language around customer advocacy. For this reason, NPS continues to play an important role in executive reporting and CX benchmarking.

However, as customer relationships become more continuous, conversational, and interaction-driven, many organisations are beginning to ask a deeper question: What does the score actually tell us—and what does it leave out?

To understand both the power and the limitations of NPS, it’s worth grounding ourselves in what the metric is designed to measure.

Understanding the Foundation: What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score is a market research metric designed to gauge customer loyalty and the likelihood of brand advocacy. It is based on a single, direct question:

“How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague?”

Customers respond on a scale from 0 to 10 and are categorised into three distinct groups:

• Promoters (9–10): Your most loyal advocates who actively recommend you and help drive growth through referrals.
  
  

• Passives (7–8): Generally satisfied customers who are not enthusiastic enough to promote you and are vulnerable to competitive alternatives.
  
  

• Detractors (0–6): Unhappy customers who may churn and can damage your brand through negative word-of-mouth.
  
  

The NPS score itself is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

This simplicity—both in question design and scoring—has made NPS a universal language for CX benchmarking and a convenient way to track high-level sentiment trends over time.

What NPS Is Designed to Do

At its core, NPS measures stated intent. It tells you whether customers say they would recommend you and broadly how that sentiment is distributed across promoters, passives, and detractors.

This makes NPS particularly effective for:

• Monitoring shifts in customer perception over time

• Identifying macro-level changes in sentiment

• Providing a simple signal that is easy to communicate across the organisation

Importantly, NPS was never designed to be a diagnostic or predictive tool on its own. Expecting it to explain why customers feel a certain way or what will happen next often leads to over-interpretation.

Where NPS Reaches Its Limits

Because NPS is survey-based and periodic, it offers a snapshot, not a continuous view of the customer relationship. A score alone does not reveal:

• What customers are experiencing between survey cycles

• Whether engagement is strengthening or quietly eroding

• Which specific accounts require immediate attention

As customer relationships become more ongoing and interaction-driven, especially in B2B and services contexts, these gaps become more visible.

From Sentiment to Context

This has led many teams to rethink how NPS fits into their broader customer intelligence stack. Rather than treating it as a standalone measure, they increasingly view NPS as one input among many, most useful when interpreted alongside behavioural and operational signals.

The question shifts from “What is our score?” to “What does this score, combined with how customers are actually interacting with us, tell us about customer health right now?”

A Glimpse of the Next Layer

This is where platforms like Chetto.ai come into focus.

Chetto.ai operates in the space between formal surveys and day-to-day customer reality. By analysing everyday customer conversations and interactions, where much of the real relationship work happens, it helps surface early signals that traditional metrics often miss until later.

For founders, this means fewer surprises at renewal time.
For CX leaders, it means more context between survey points and earlier visibility into emerging risk or friction.

The opportunity is not to replace NPS but to augment it, using richer, real-time signals to understand what sits behind the score and act before sentiment hardens.

NPS remains the beginning of the story.
What organisations do with the context around it increasingly determines how the story ends.