What is a Good NPS Score?

A Net Promoter Score (NPS)® is a number your company can use to measure customer satisfaction and a valuable piece of the puzzle when it comes to customer insights. It’s popular because it’s simple to calculate, easy to understand, and paints a clear picture of how your company is doing with its customers. The NPS value, however, doesn’t mean much on its own. It’s important to have NPS benchmarks in mind so you can start making effective changes based on your score.

Benchmarks allow you to figure out when your score is good, when and where there’s room for improvement, and how you might compare to other competitors in your industry. You can implement both external and internal benchmarks to gain a deeper understanding of your score.

What does a Good NPS look like?

NPS scores range from -100 to +100 with any positive value being typically considered good. What seems like a good or bad NPS score can vary across industries, but there are some basic numbers that  can be helpful to keep in mind when looking at your own score. They’ll provide a general understanding, and a good sense of the direction your score might be taking.

• 40 is considered a solid positive score
• 50+ would be considered an extremely positive score
• 65+ are typically considered milestone scores for where organic growth starts developing rapidly
• 70+ are rare and exceptional scores

External NPS benchmarks

The basic numerical values above are one type of external NPS benchmark, meaning a point of comparison you can find outside of your own company. These external benchmarks might shift when you take your industry into account.  While a good NPS score can vary widely from industry to industry, there do seem to be some general patterns: critical service companies (eg. utilities, cable providers) can thrive despite low scores, but experiential companies (eg. hotels) and competitive industries (eg. luxury consumer products) will lose to competition without a high NPS.

It’s worth spending some time to research and learn about the patterns in your industry and where exactly your company falls in relation to those NPS benchmarks. If you have a score higher than your competitors within your same industry, you’re more likely to grow faster. It’s impossible to make the same prediction when comparing to another business outside of your industry.

What is a good NPS for SaaS?

A good NPS score for SaaS hovers somewhere around 28. This is clearly a case in which industry standards and comparisons matter more than basic, general benchmarks. If a SaaS company were to compare their NPS to an overall good NPS score of 40, they might feel that their customer satisfaction is sorely lacking. But if their competitors all have similar, lower scores, that’s the NPS benchmark that really matters.

Internal NPS benchmarks

NPS benchmarks become more useful the more specific and applicable they are to your company. There are a lot of extra details and questions that external benchmarks might not be able to address. Internal benchmarks can help your company pay attention to the particular touchpoints or customer cohorts that are important and relevant to your organization.

Internal benchmarking generally refers to tracking your historical NPS values and comparing them over months, quarters, or years. This way you can figure out what a good NPS looks like for you and whether or not there are any significant trends in your NPS. 

Usually, you should stick to a window of at least 30 days between comparisons of scores. This ensures that the score retains its significance, while avoiding possible complications like recency bias.

You can even break it down further and look at how your NPS changes when you view it through the lens of different categories. You can analyze various segments of your customer base, or divide the responses by topic to address certain concerns.

Keep an eye on NPS benchmarks

Your NPS might change, and therefore your NPS benchmarks might change too. It’s always good to be on top of those shifts. It can be useful to keep looking for new internal benchmarks that might give you even more insight into your NPS. Grab our NPS Cheat Sheet to learn how to break down your NPS into segments and recommended follow-up actions.