NPS vs CSAT: Which Survey Metric Should You Use?

What does NPS measure?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer-loyalty metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend your company, on a 0–10 scale. It comes from a single question: "How likely are you to recommend [company] to a friend or colleague?" Respondents are split into three groups: promoters (9–10), passives (7–8), and detractors (0–6). The score is %promoters − %detractors, which produces a number from −100 to +100. Passives count toward the total respondent count but don't add or subtract from the score.

The metric was introduced by Fred Reichheld with Bain & Company and Satmetrix, and popularized in the 2003 Harvard Business Review article "The One Number You Need to Grow." Because the question asks about recommending the company, not about any single purchase or support ticket, NPS reflects the cumulative effect of every interaction a customer has had with you. It's a relationship metric, not a transaction metric.

What is a good NPS score?

Any NPS above 0 is generally considered good: it means you have more promoters than detractors. As a rough industry guide:

• Above 0: good; more customers promote you than criticize you.
• 30 or higher: favorable; you're doing clearly better than most.
• 50 or higher: excellent.
• 70 or higher: world-class, and rare.

The important caveat: what counts as "good" varies enormously by industry. Some sectors average negative scores across the board, so a −10 might be above average in one industry and alarming in another. Benchmark against your own trend over time and against direct competitors, not against a single universal number.

What does CSAT measure?

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a metric that measures how satisfied someone was with a specific thing that just happened: a support conversation, a checkout, an onboarding step. It typically uses a 1–5 scale ("Very dissatisfied" to "Very satisfied"), reported as the percentage of respondents who answered in the top range.

CSAT is deliberately narrow. It won't tell you whether someone likes your company overall. It tells you whether the thing you just asked about went well. That narrowness is the point: it isolates one moment, so you can act on that moment specifically.

NPS vs CSAT: what's the difference?

When should you use NPS vs CSAT?

Use NPS when you want to:

• Track whether your business is getting more or less loved over time
• Benchmark against competitors or industry averages
• Identify at-risk accounts before they churn (detractors are your early warning system)

Use CSAT when you want to:

• Know whether a specific support interaction, feature, or checkout flow is working
• Catch a process problem quickly: CSAT responses come in fast enough to act on within days
• Give a frontline team a metric they can directly influence (unlike NPS, which reflects everything, not just one team's work)

Whichever you run, the wording of the question around the score still matters. A leading or double-barreled prompt will bias the result. See how to write survey questions that get honest answers.

Can you use NPS and CSAT together?

Yes, and most teams that take measurement seriously do. A common setup: CSAT surveys fire after specific touchpoints (a support ticket closes, an order ships) to catch operational problems fast, while NPS runs on a slower cadence (quarterly, or after a renewal) to track the relationship as a whole. They answer different questions, so neither one alone gives you the full picture.

Either way, the score is only as reliable as the number of responses behind it. If you're not sure how many you need, see how many survey responses you need for reliable results.

Frequently asked questions

SurveyService supports both NPS and CSAT as built-in question types. The score is calculated automatically and included in your AI-generated summary, whichever one you run. Try it free.