Promoter

Reading satisfaction as an average erases the part you need. An average of 7.4 looks identical whether everyone answered 7 or 8, or half answered 10 and half answered 4. The first is a product nobody is angry about and nobody mentions to anyone; the second has enthusiasts and people about to leave sitting side by side. The work to do is completely different, and the number is the same.

Pagedeck sat in exactly that spot after its first survey. Two hundred people answered and the average was 7.4. When Mia opened the distribution, 90 people had answered 9 or 10 and 50 had answered between 0 and 6. One average hid both groups. That's why Net Promoter Score (NPS) never averages anything — it cuts the scale into three blocks and names each one. Promoters are the top block.

Only respondents who answered 9 or 10 count as promoters. Their share of all respondents is the promoter percentage: 90 out of 200 is 45 percent. Nothing about the answers themselves gets weighted or averaged.

Leaving 8 out is the whole point of the cut. It comes from the observation that someone answering 8 has no complaint but won't bring the product up unprompted, so 7 and 8 are grouped as passives — customers with no complaint who stop short of recommending. Anything from 0 to 6 is a detractor, the side that may speak negatively.

The score is the promoter percentage minus the detractor percentage. With 90 promoters and 50 detractors, 45 percent minus 25 percent gives 20. Passives drop out of the arithmetic, which isn't the same as being ignored: a passive who becomes a promoter leaves the subtracted figure alone while raising the added one, so the score rises.

Some teams separate 9 from 10. Where customers who answered 10 agree to case-study interviews or referrals noticeably more often than those who answered 9, the two get managed apart. Most teams start without that split and add it once the referral numbers justify it.

"Promoters went from 45 percent to 52 percent this quarter."

The share answering 9 or 10 grew.

"Pull the free-text answers from the promoter side. The quotable lines are in there."

A request to use high scorers' comments as marketing material.

"The score held steady but promoters and detractors both grew."

Opinion is splitting toward both ends inside the same score.

Pagedeck does two things with customers classified as promoters. Sofia picks the enterprise accounts off that list and asks for case-study interviews, and Ravi uses the same list as the audience for the referral program. Most of the lines on the customer stories page since then came out of that survey's free-text field.