NPS: How one question helps you understand what customers really think about you

Financial reporting shows what has already happened, but it rarely reveals what’s coming next. While profits may look strong, the NPS loyalty index can already be warning of future issues.That’s why businesses need a clear, reliable indicator of customer loyalty — Net Promoter Score.

NPS isn’t just another trendy number on a dashboard. It’s a metric directly tied to a company’s future growth, customer retention, and service quality. One well-designed question with meaningful feedback delivers more truth than a dozen “averaged” charts.

Let’s start with the basics. NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a customer loyalty index that shows how likely people are to recommend your company.

The Net Promoter Score methodology is built around one simple question in a customer survey:

“How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague on a scale from 0 to 10?”

This isn’t about “Did you like everything?” or “Were the managers polite?” It’s specifically about willingness to recommend. That’s the essence of trust and Word of Mouth — the kind of advocacy that either brings in new leads or quietly pushes them away.

The formula is extremely simple:

NPS = % of promoters – % of detractors.

If 60% of responses are promoters and 20% are detractors, the NPS score is 40. The index can range from –100 (all detractors) to +100 (all promoters).

The value of this metric lies in its consistency across different types of businesses, its ease of interpretation at the executive level, and its ability to be directly linked to CRM analytics, customer lifetime value (LTV), and sales performance trends.

NPS is often treated as just another KPI in a spreadsheet — something to “report once a quarter.” In reality, it’s closer to a medical record of your service. It shows where the business is already unwell, even if everything looks healthy on the surface.

From an economic perspective, the difference between promoters and detractors is enormous.

That’s why the NPS loyalty index is not just an abstract measure of “satisfaction” — it’s a fairly accurate predictor of future business performance. If NPS consistently declines, there’s a high likelihood that sales will drop within 3–6 months.

The effect is especially pronounced in subscription-based products and service models, where customer retention drives the business. With CRM analytics, it’s possible to see directly that segments with high NPS demonstrate longer customer lifespans, higher average order values, and a greater share of repeat purchases.

In theory, you could manually send customer surveys from a personal email or ask managers to “call and ask” clients. In practice, this almost guarantees a distorted picture — human factors often override methodology.

Managers may hesitate to bother difficult clients or those who recently had issues with the company. As a result, the responses often include too many promoters and too few detractors. Sometimes loyalty surveys are only sent to clients who already said, “Thanks, everything’s great.” The data may look good, but making business decisions based on it is risky.

Automating feedback through a CRM solves this problem. The system itself identifies the trigger and sends the question, without asking the manager’s judgment. To avoid running NPS manually, Uspacy makes it easy to build logic around contacts. In the contact card, it’s useful to create a custom field, for example, “Date of last successfully closed deal.” This field is not filled out manually: it is updated by configured automation in the CRM each time a related deal moves to the “Successfully closed” status. This way, the contact always “knows” when the last business transaction was completed.

Next, a segment is created based on this field. For example: “all contacts whose date of last successfully closed deal falls within this month.” This filter is saved as a segment and used as the audience for the NPS campaign. The survey is sent automatically to the segment (or on a schedule, e.g., monthly), pulling only current clients, while managers don’t have to decide manually whom to ask and whom to “leave for later.”

Frequency is just as important as the question itself. It’s not advisable to survey the same client every time they place a small order. Ideally, NPS surveys are conducted monthly or quarterly for active clients, or after key events: the first delivery, completion of a major project, or onboarding of a new service.

Uspacy, as a single platform for CRM, communications, and tasks, allows you to keep the entire cycle in one place: questions, responses, follow-up tasks, and analytics by segment. Less chaos, more transparency in understanding how the client truly experiences the collaboration.

Collecting NPS is only half the job. The real value lies in what happens next. Closing the loop means every score triggers an action. No more “looked at the dashboard and forgot until next quarter,” especially if the client left a detailed written comment.

The worst-case scenario: a client honestly explains what went wrong, hits “submit,” and then hears nothing from anyone. This is when trust breaks down. The company is effectively saying: “Your opinion doesn’t matter to us.”

Working with detractors: firefighting and the Service Recovery Paradox

If a client gives a “3” on NPS, it’s not just a bad number on a report — it’s an opportunity. In many service businesses, the Service Recovery Paradox applies: a client whose issue is addressed quickly and honestly often becomes more loyal than one who never had a problem.

A poor response looks like this:

A good response could be:

In the case of an NPS campaign via email, the client’s response comes as a standard message: in the subject line or body, they leave their score and comment. In Uspacy, this email doesn’t get “lost” — if we see a 0–6, a manager or senior manager can create a task with one click: “Call back, investigate, propose a solution.” From there, everything follows the team’s workflow: such tasks should be addressed, for example, within 24 hours. This way, closing the feedback loop stops being a nice idea on a slide and becomes a concrete daily action.

Working with promoters: activating your fans

Promoters are gold — yet businesses often ignore them. A client gives a “10,” writes “It was great,” and… no one asks them to take the next step. This is exactly where additional value is created.

All of these steps can be easily systematized in a CRM: tag clients as “Promoter”, group them into a dedicated segment, and run a targeted campaign or create tasks for personalized follow-ups. This way, NPS stops being just an “interesting number” in a report and becomes a real engine for word-of-mouth marketing and organic growth.

NPS is simple, but it’s easy to get it wrong in the details. Some companies try it once, get “strange” results, and conclude that the methodology “doesn’t work for our business.” In most cases, the problem lies in the implementation.

To avoid these mistakes, NPS must be embedded in regular processes: automated survey triggers, tasks for responsible team members, integration with segmentation and CRM analytics. That way, every client response turns into a concrete action rather than “noise” in a spreadsheet.