54 CHAPTER 4 Did We Meet or Exceed Our Goal? WHAT IS A GOOD NET PROMOTER SCORE? Evidence from 17 Consumer and Productivity Software Products From the files of Jeff Sauro The appeal of top-box scoring approaches like the Net Promoter Score is that they appear easier to interpret than a mean. Many executives are comfortable working with percentages. So knowing there is a higher per- centage of customers likely to recommend your product than dissuade others from using it may be more helpful than just knowing the mean response is a 7.5. Despite this appeal, one still needs to know what a "good" score is beyond a negative versus positive proportion. A leading competitor, the industry average, and historical data for the same product are all helpful-- but all usually difficult to obtain. One of the first adopters of the Net Promoter Score was Intuit, the software company that makes QuickBooks and TurboTax. It's not surprising that many software companies now use the NPS as a key corporate metric. I commissioned a study in March 2011 to survey the sentiments of customers of 17 consumer and productivity software products. I found the average NPS score was a 21% with a range of -26% to 56%--with the best showing coming for customers of TurboTax. For more details on the study see www.measuringusability.com/software-benchmarks.php. The average and high NPSs for your industry can be used as valid benchmarks if the comparisons are meaningful for your product.