How many respondents do I need for my NPS to be relevant?

The Net Promoter Survey is unlike a traditional survey or traditional research in that it’s NOT an exercise in statistical analysis.

Or stated another way, the relevancy of your overall NPS score is much less important than the individual scores and opportunities uncovered. And equally as beneficial is the ability to tie those opportunities to the individual customer and not a statistical subset.

With Net Promoter, your goal should be to hear from as many customers as humanly possible without concerning yourself as to whether their answers are relevant as a whole.

Thinking about statistical viability within NPS can sometimes do more harm than good. In many cases, companies will limit the number of customers they survey to prevent being overwhelmed with responses, believing that they only need a certain percentage of responses to extrapolate the data.

There isn’t a diminishing value scale to additional responses like traditional surveys, it’s actually the opposite. With NPS, the more customers you survey, the more results you get, the more the value of the survey increases.

With all of that said, if your overall NPS score is important to your business, it is not difficult to reach statistical relevancy.

One of the biggest reasons why so many companies are attracted to NPS is due to the average response rate (30–40% for Promoter.io customers) compared to a traditional survey response rate of maybe 3–5%.

As long as you’re surveying all of your customers on a consistent basis throughout the customer life-cycle and closing the loop with each response you receive, statistical relevancy will happen naturally.

Hopefully this was helpful. If you’re interested in hearing more, I’ve written a post that goes more in-depth on this exact topic.