You pick up a click and collect order and the receipt asks how satisfied you are. You ring your broadband provider about a fault and a text afterwards asks how easy it was. Once a year your bank wants to know whether you would recommend it to a friend. Three questions, three metrics, and all of them get filed under customer satisfaction.
NPS, CSAT and CES are the three most widely used metrics for measuring how satisfied and how loyal customers are. The NPS (Net Promoter Score) asks about recommending you, the CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) about satisfaction with one experience and the CES (Customer Effort Score) about the effort a request took. Here you’ll see at a glance what the three share, where they part company and which one to use when.
📌 Key points at a glance
- Each of the three metrics rests on one core question.
- NPS measures loyalty, CSAT satisfaction, CES effort.
- NPS looks at the whole relationship, CSAT and CES at single contacts.
- You learn most by combining them.
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What NPS, CSAT and CES have in common
The three questions sound quite different, yet they are built on the same idea: a short question, worded the same way every time, that lots of people can answer in seconds. What comes out is a number you track over time. That gives them five things in common:
- One core question: each metric comes from exactly one question on a fixed scale.
- An open follow-up: only the reason underneath turns the number into something you can act on.
- Consistent measurement: wording, scale and timing have to stay put, or the comparison falls apart.
- Trend before benchmark: your own previous score tells you more than other companies’ figures.
- Limits to interpretation: none of the three explains on its own why it goes up or down.
For your own staff there is a separate version of the NPS, the Employee Net Promoter Score. It asks whether employees would recommend the organisation as a place to work.
NPS, CSAT and CES compared
The differences lie in the detail: the question, the scale, the sum and the right moment to ask. The table below lines them up column by column.
| NPS | CSAT | CES | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical question | How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or a colleague? | Overall, how satisfied are you with our service? | How easy was it for you to get your issue resolved? |
| Measurement | willingness to recommend | satisfaction with one experience | effort needed for a request |
| Scale | eleven points, 0 to 10 | five labelled points, 1 to 5 | seven points, 1 to 7 |
| Calculation | % scoring 9 or 10 (promoters) − % scoring 0 to 6 (detractors) | answers of 4 and 5 ÷ all answers × 100 | sum of all ratings ÷ number of responses |
| Range | −100 to +100 | 0 to 100 per cent | 1.0 to 7.0 |
| Perspective | whole relationship, looking ahead | single contact, looking back | single process, looking back |
| When to ask | on a fixed rhythm, such as quarterly | straight after a purchase, delivery or appointment | straight after an order, return or support case |
| Strength | one figure for loyalty overall | pinpoints the touchpoint that is letting you down | uncovers friction in processes |
| Weakness | does not show where the problem lies | says little about loyalty | sees the process, not the product |
| Origin | Fred Reichheld, Harvard Business Review 2003 | no single source, the classic satisfaction question | Corporate Executive Board, Harvard Business Review 2010 |
You can work out all three with our free calculators: calculate the NPS, calculate the CSAT and calculate the CES.
Which metric to use when
It is rarely a case of one or the other. Each metric answers a different question and does its best work at a different point:
- Go for the NPS when you want to keep an eye on customer loyalty as a whole and follow it over months.
- Go for the CSAT when you want one particular touchpoint rated, such as a delivery, an appointment or an event.
- Go for the CES when you want to improve a process and need to find out where customers get held up.
In practice they complement each other well: CES and CSAT straight after important contacts, the NPS at longer intervals for the overall picture. When the NPS drops, the other two will often already show you where the trouble started. How to put a survey like that together is covered in our guide to customer surveys.
Want to survey your customers with NPS, CSAT or CES?
With empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, you can build your customer survey in a few minutes. Ready-made templates for all three metrics are waiting in our customer feedback templates.