Financial & Cost Signals
Net Promoter Score
Also known as: NPS
A loyalty metric derived from one question — "how likely are you to recommend us?" — scored from -100 to +100 as promoters minus detractors.
Origin: Introduced by Fred Reichheld with Bain & Company and Satmetrix in "The One Number You Need to Grow," Harvard Business Review (2003).
Definition
Net Promoter Score (NPS) reduces customer loyalty to a single question: "How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend or colleague?" answered on a 0-10 scale. Respondents are grouped into promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6). NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, yielding a number from -100 to +100.
Its appeal is simplicity and comparability — one number, trackable over time and benchmarkable across a category. Its critics note that collapsing a rich signal into one score hides why customers feel as they do, and that scores vary by industry and culture, so absolute values matter less than trend and relative standing against competitors.
For competitive intelligence, relative NPS — yours versus a rival's — is a proxy for who is building more advocacy, which tends to lead retention and word-of-mouth growth. A competitor whose NPS is climbing is often converting customers into a distribution channel.
Why it matters for competitive intelligence
NPS is most meaningful in comparison. A competitor's rising advocacy is a leading indicator of word-of-mouth growth that will show up in share before it shows up in your pipeline.
How Rivalize helps
Rivalize tracks the sentiment signals around competitors — reviews and reception — so a rival building advocacy registers as a trend you can watch, not a surprise you absorb.
Related terms
Customer Lifetime Value
The total net profit a business expects from a customer over the whole relationship — the ceiling on what it can afford to spend acquiring one.
Churn Rate
The rate at which customers (or revenue) leave over a period — the leak in the bucket that caps growth and signals competitive or product pressure.
Win-Loss Analysis
The practice of systematically interviewing won and lost prospects to learn why deals were really decided — often revealing competitive dynamics the CRM misses.
Product-Market Fit
The point at which a product satisfies a strong market demand — the moment demand starts to pull the product rather than the team pushing it.
See it in practice on Rivalize
Why not just use ChatGPT?
Prompts guess. Rivalize knows.
15-25% of teams use AI prompts for competitive research. Here is why that approach falls short.
Real scraping, not hallucination
We scrape 40+ actual pages per competitor. AI prompts guess from training data that may be months or years out of date.
Source attribution on every claim
Every data point links to where we found it. Prompts cannot cite sources because they do not access real-time data.
Monitoring, not one-shots
Rivalize tracks changes over time and scores momentum trends. Prompts give you a snapshot that is already stale by the time you read it.
Real data, real sources, real intelligence.
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Sources
- Fred Reichheld, "The One Number You Need to Grow," Harvard Business Review (2003)
This definition is an educational summary of an established concept, written by the Rivalize team. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the originators of the framework.