NPS from the customer’s perspective: The influence of the recent experience

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular metric for measuring customer loyalty and is claimed by Reichheld to predict a company’s growth. However, various academic studies provide controversial results regarding its reliability and prediction powers. This study analyzes how respondents answer the likelihood-to-recommend (LTR) question in different predescribed and validated situations. One thousand participants are presented with situation descriptions that consist of previous and recent experiences with a bank and are asked how they would respond to the LTR question after such an experience. The results indicate that respondents do not always give a high score for good experiences, and a low score for bad experiences. However, with a high number of respondents, the different answering approaches even out, and the NPS results are higher for good than for bad experiences. Additionally, we notice that whereas negative experiences are evaluated as low by all respondents, Generation X and Boomers tend to give lower scores for neutral and positive experiences. Those with lower income and basic education give lower scores for neutral experiences. The recent experience influences the customer’s likelihood of recommending more than the previous experiences with the company.