Detractor

Satisfaction used to be reported as a single average. An average of 7.2 out of 10 sounds acceptable, and it tells you nothing about what to do next.

What the average hides is the distribution. Half the respondents scoring 9 and half scoring 5 also averages about 7, yet those are two groups with nothing in common inside one company. The first half introduces the product to colleagues; the second half tells their successor to use something else. Both sit behind the same reassuring figure in the same report. Cover both with one number and there is no way to decide what to do for either.

So the scale was cut into three groups with names attached, and the lowest group is the detractors. Naming it turns a distribution into something a team can act on.

Every response from 0 through 6 counts in this group. That 6 belongs here is the part people most often get wrong. On a ten-point scale 6 looks like more than halfway, but this classification reads it as dissatisfaction, on the grounds that behavior afterwards diverges between people who answer 7 or above and people who answer 6 or below.

The group sits in the subtraction. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the share of promoters, who answered 9 or 10, minus the share of this group; the passives who answered 7 or 8 are left out of the arithmetic entirely. With 200 responses and 50 of them between 0 and 6, this group is 25 percent.

That makes shrinking this group the fastest route to a better score, which is not how most teams instinctively approach it. Adding five promoters and removing five detractors move the number equally, but the second has free-text answers attached to it, so what to fix is already written down. Responses from this group also feed predictions about churn, the departure of users or accounts. A customer sitting in here with a renewal coming up becomes an account someone manages by hand, usually with a call rather than an email.

"Detractors are 25 percent. I'll start with the reasons they gave."

Read what the low scorers wrote before spending any time on the score itself.

"A 6 is a detractor. It doesn't get counted as neutral."

The classification is being applied incorrectly, which quietly inflates the score.

"This account is a detractor and their renewal is two months out."

Reading the score as a signal for handling one customer.

Pagedeck reviews this share quarterly and reads every free-text answer. Last quarter, 19 of 31 detractor responses named search as the reason. Sofia reached out directly to the four largest of those accounts to hear what had been getting in the way, and Mia brought those answers, quoted as written, to the next quarter's prioritization meeting.