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Your Net Promoter Score® Isn’t Telling You What You Think It Is

NPS® isn't lying to you. It's just answering a different question than the one you think it's answering.

Net Promoter Score® measures one thing: how likely someone is to recommend you. That’s not the same as satisfaction. And it’s definitely not the same as retention.

We’ve seen loyal, satisfied customers give low NPS® scores — not because they’re unhappy, but because recommending you means competing for something scarce, like limited inventory or capacity, and they’d rather keep their edge to themselves.

We’ve also seen customers hand out high scores and happily recommend you to a competitor — because they’re confident enough in the relationship that a little competition doesn’t scare them. Right up until it does.

NPS® can’t tell the difference between those two customers.

We can.

Trusted by B2B organizations to uncover hidden revenue risk and protect millions in revenue—typically delivering 2:1 to 10:1 ROI.

The Dunvegan Group examining financial data

Why Choose The Dunvegan Group?

Most companies chase the wrong number. We built the right one.

The Business Retention Index™ isn’t a survey question or a proxy. It’s 25+ years of proprietary research into why customers actually leave — research that started as a hard problem my late husband and business partner, Olev Wain, and I couldn’t stop pulling on, and became the book I later edited and still teach from today.

Here’s what it found: customers who score D-E-F on the BRI™ are retained only 67% of the time — even with remediation programs already in place. That means roughly one in three of your lowest-scoring customers will leave no matter what you do once they’re already there. The intervention that matters happens before the score drops that low, not after. Customers scoring A-AAA, by contrast, are retained 94% of the time. The gap between those two numbers isn’t a curiosity — it’s the difference between catching a customer while they can still be kept, and finding out after they’re gone.

BRI™ isn’t a 0-10 score. It’s a grade — AAA down to F — built from what customers tell us in their own words, run through a proprietary model that scores three things: Service Excellence, Pain Tolerance (how hard switching would actually be), and Competitive Offerings (how customers rate their alternatives to you). We call it the SPC model. It’s built to surface risk while it’s still early enough to act on — not to confirm, after the fact, who was already safe.

NPS® and CSat ask how someone feels or whether they’d recommend you. Neither one is built to catch a customer on the way down. BRI™ is. Treating those as the same kind of measurement is how “satisfied” customers leave without warning.

I don’t license this out or hand it to a team of analysts. I hold the measurement. I apply it myself, in every engagement, because I built it and I know exactly what each grade is telling you — including which of your customers are already sliding and haven’t said so yet.

Olev had a name for what this work ultimately builds: Competitor Resistant Customer Relationships™. Not customers who are satisfied today. Customers a competitor can’t take from you tomorrow.

Give me 15 minutes, and I’ll show you how this research applies to your business — and what a BRI™ assessment would likely reveal about the customers you think are safe.

Schedule a conversation with Anne

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