Look beyond the score
Net Promoter Score has survived more than two decades of management fashion, which is no small thing. It still turns up in board packs, quarterly reviews and client dashboards. Most firms, including many of our clients, continue to use it.
Its appeal is obvious. NPS gives teams a simple way to sort customers into promoters, passives and detractors. It is easy to explain, easy to track over time and relatively easy to compare across parts of the business.
That simplicity is the reason it spread so widely. It is also the reason it can get overstretched.
The weakness shows up particularly clearly in B2B. A £200k outsourcing contract, with a two-year delivery cycle and several people involved in the decision, is not the same kind of customer moment as buying a £1 chocolate bar.
Treating both as if they generate the same signal is tempting, but not especially realistic and, to some extent, risky. In B2B, a single score can overlook important differences in the nature, timing and complexity of customer decisions.
A client might give you a low NPS score because of a problem with one recent interaction, even though they have a strong relationship with the account team and intend to renew. Another might give you a positive score while quietly considering alternative suppliers for the next major contract.
The commercial implications are very different.
This is where many NPS programmes become less useful than they should be. The score lands, the dashboard updates, and the follow-up conversations either happen quickly, or they don’t happen at all.
Yet closing the loop is arguably the important bit.
When detractors are contacted promptly, their feedback can become insight the business can act on. It can identify a service issue, an account risk or a problem that might otherwise affect retention or future revenue.
If the score simply sits with Marketing while the client team looks on from a distance, it becomes another reporting ritual.
A more useful way to think about the client relationship is through Customer Relationship Quality.
The idea is simple. Rather than treating the relationship as one number, look at it through several layers.
- Relationship strength: Does the client trust you and want to keep working with you?
- Value differentiation: Do they see your offer as sufficiently different or valuable to justify the price?
- Delivery experience: Do you respond well day to day and deliver what you said you would deliver?
NPS may reflect aspects of these questions, but it does not explain them.
A score can tell you that something has changed. It cannot necessarily tell you why, what it means commercially, or what you should do about it; and the problem starts even earlier in the B2B buying journey.
Bain’s work on B2B growth highlights the importance of getting onto the buyer’s shortlist before the formal process begins. A deal marked as “lost” may never have been properly available in the first place.
NPS can tell you something about existing clients, particularly when it comes to relationship health and potential retention risk. It cannot tell you whether you are being considered for the next opportunity, whether you are differentiated in the market, or whether a prospective client will put you on the shortlist.
Match the measure to the moment
This is also why different customer measures have different jobs.
NPS can be useful for understanding the broader relationship. For a specific interaction such as onboarding, resolving an issue or completing a transaction, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) or Customer Effort Score (CES) may give you a more relevant signal.
The important point is not to find one perfect metric. It is to understand what question you are trying to answer. So, the sensible position is not to abandon NPS, but to stop pretending it can do more than it can. Use it as an opening question, not the final answer.
In B2B, NPS should sit alongside a broader view of relationship quality, account-level nuance, revenue at risk and clear ownership for follow-up. Track the score, benchmark it where the comparison is meaningful. Use it to identify where a conversation might be needed, but don’t confuse the score with the relationship and don’t confuse measuring the customer experience with improving it.
The follow-up question matters as much as the score itself. Asking, “What’s the main reason for your score?” gives the number some meaning. But the real test is what happens afterwards.
Most clients see little value in being asked how likely they are to recommend a supplier if nothing visibly changes as a result.
NPS is a useful signal. The value comes from understanding what sits behind it and deciding what to do next.
If you are reviewing your own client listening program and want to benchmark it against what we are seeing across law firms, accounting firms and financial services organizations, let’s connect and compare notes.