NPS: What is a Net Promotor Score

NPS blog image

Share This Post

Net Promotor Score, or NPS, is a score to measure customer loyalty. The NPS was created in 2003 as a business tool to gauge the likelihood of customer referrals. Measuring NPS has become a standard across industries, including healthcare.  

Of course, any practice would prefer loyal patients. However, carefully listening to unhappy patients can be crucial to evaluating your practice’s strategies and operations that directly impact patients. 

Net Promotor Score: How is it calculated?

You can measure NPS with one simple question: “How likely you are to recommend (insert company here)?”
Customers rate their likelihood of promoting the company on a scale of 1 to 10.  

Based on their rating, customer loyalty levels are grouped into three general buckets: promoter (9-10), passive (7-8), and detractor (6 and below). To calculate the net score, you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of the promoters. This score gives you insight into how many promoters you have compared to detractors.  

example nps net promoter score question

The NPS question asks the patient to not only think about the quality of their personal experience, but how confident they are in the practice to provide an excellent experience to someone they trust.  

A personal recommendation holds a lot of weight. In this way, the NPS can help practices understand not only whether or not patients are satisfied with their services, but how satisfied they are. 

4 Reasons Why Net Promotor Scores Are Important

In the healthcare industry, the patient’s opinion and feelings about their care is a large part of their overall experience. You can be an excellent doctor in terms of competence and skill, yet if a patient does not feel cared for, your practice will lose business. 

NPS can be a great metric for evaluating those feelings. Understanding where your practice currently stands with NPS and tracking it over time can help you measure your improvements. 

Include the NPS question along with other questions in your customized survey to help your medical practice find patterns in patient feelings towards different elements of your practice’s services.

1. Resolve Detractors and Increase Patient Satisfaction

The NPS survey question helps identify and distinguish happy customers from unhappy customers. If your medical practice’s NPS is high, that means your services often meet and exceed expectations. A low or negative NPS indicates a gap between services and expectations with room for improvement. These findings help give you an idea of how well you’re meeting your patient’s needs and open the door for more detailed discussions around areas of potential improvement. 

2. Evaluate and Increase Patient Loyalty

As with any business, your medical practice likely has both strengths and weaknesses operationally. You don’t want to spend all your resources focusing on detractors. You will also want to evaluate and build upon what your practice is doing well. By focusing on this, you can improve your patient retention and loyalty while also working towards future goals.  

3. Emphasizes A Patient-Centric Medical Practice

Asking the NPS question will help communicate that the quality of patient experience is paramount to your practice. When you communicate that patient feedback is important to you, patients will be more inclined to give honest and constructive feedback about their experiences with your practice’s medical services. It will also create an open channel for communication between you and your existing patient customers. Open communication can boost patient trust and retention. 

4. Patient Loyalty and Referrals Lead to Gaining New Patients

eing able to identify your practice’s promoters through the NPS survey allows your practice to politely request patients to share testimonials about your practice or refer your practice to others.  

Whether through online platforms or by classic word-of-mouth, patient referrals are huge for any medical practice and are a key component to growing and expanding your medical practice.  

Get Your NPS with ClearSurvey

The NPS question is great to include as a standard question in your patient satisfaction surveys. It cultivates trust and enables patients to communicate actionable feedback. 

ClearSurvey is a best-in-class survey system focused on helping medical practices offer the best patient satisfaction in healthcare. We can help you develop a custom survey question-set based on your goals so you can gather data for useful insights. Learn more about how ClearSurvey can elevate your practice or schedule a demo today

Related Posts