Whilst a customer service score or percentage based on a series of questions can be useful internally, it offers little in the way of benchmarking against your competitors as the scores are not directly comparable and the questions are of course subject to manipulation.

To address that, you can instead use the Net Promoter Score or NPS. It is intended to be an objective measure of a company’s customer service, and works on the likelihood of the customer recommending you to other individuals –a question that can be applied to every business type, and a useful measure; after all, we all know that ‘word-of-mouth’ is the most effective form of advertising.

NPS asks customers to rate their likelihood on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being least likely to recommend and 10 being most likely. It works as follows:

• Scores of 1 – 6 – Detractors; these individuals are likely to advocate against you
• Scores of 7 – 8 – Passives; these individuals with neither promote nor detract
• Scores of 9 – 10 – Promoters; these individuals will recommend you to others

You score -100 for each detractor, 0 for each passive, and +100 for each promoter. Your score is then your total divided by the number of responses. A score above 50 is therefore considered excellent, and you have a reliable benchmark to use against competitors!