High Net Promoter Scores are certainly better than low ones. They indicate that a company has earned more promoters than detractors. But how do we interpret the scores these companies are reporting? What is a good score? How should we set goals and targets for improvement?

To begin, we should make sure we look at the right sort of Net Promoter Score—one that allows us to compare apples to apples (pun intended). Seasoned practitioners of the Net Promoter System℠ gather feedback from their customers in three different ways (see Figure 1):