NPS (Net Promoter Score)

The NPS survey asks one question, "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?", on a 0 to 10 scale. Responses fall into three standard buckets: 9 and 10 are promoters, 7 and 8 are passives, and 0 through 6 are detractors. The score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. It is reported as a plain number, not a percentage, and it can run from -100 to +100.

Worked example. You survey your customer list and 60 people answer. Twenty-seven of them score you 9 or 10, nineteen score you 7 or 8, and fourteen score you 6 or below. Promoters are 27 of 60, which is 45 percent. Detractors are 14 of 60, which is 23.3 percent. NPS is 45 minus 23.3, so 21.7, reported as 22.

The passives are the part people get wrong. Those nineteen 7s and 8s never appear in the subtraction, but they sit in both denominators, so they drag both percentages down. Converting one passive into a promoter in that example raises the score by 1.7 points, while converting one detractor into a passive also raises it by 1.7. A 7 is not a neutral vote, it is a vote that quietly costs you.

Which leads to the caution that matters most for a team of two to ten people: at 60 responses, every single answer is worth 1.7 points, so a five-point move quarter to quarter is arithmetic noise, not a trend. Companies your size usually cannot collect enough responses for the number to be stable. Published benchmarks are worse, because they compare you against companies surveying tens of thousands of customers in a different industry with a different survey design. Treat a small-sample NPS as a way to generate a list of names to call, not as a scoreboard.

NPS is a relationship metric, and that is the whole difference from CSAT. It reflects how someone feels about your company, so it moves on product quality, price, reliability, and the last thing that went wrong, not just on whether your last reply was helpful. That is why it is collected periodically or at lifecycle moments rather than after every ticket, and why a support team should never be held to an NPS target it does not control. Sending an NPS survey immediately after a support interaction quietly turns it into a slow, badly scaled CSAT.

Support does move NPS in one specific, well-documented way: a customer who had a problem and got it fixed quickly often scores higher than a customer who never had a problem at all. That is the recovery effect, and it is the honest business case for answering fast. For a small team, the practical version is that your response time and the completeness of your first reply are the two parts of NPS you actually own.

AcornReply does not run NPS surveys and does not report an NPS figure. What it reports is closer to the ground: the analytics overview shows median time to resolution split between AI-handled and human-handled conversations, the share of conversations the AI handled, and volume by channel and time of day. If you want NPS, run it in a dedicated survey tool and use AcornReply for the speed half of the equation.