Quick confession: for about a year I used NPS and CSAT interchangeably in my head. Same thing, I (wrongfully) thought. Ask people how happy they are, get a number, feel good or bad about it. Then I actually built the scoring logic for both into a survey product and realized they do genuinely different jobs, and mixing them up means acting on the wrong signal.
Here's the short version. Perhaps this can help someone or at least start a chain of thoughts ¯_(ツ)_/¯
NPS: how much do people love you, generally
Net Promoter Score comes from one question: "how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" on a 0 to 10 scale. Score 9 to 10 and you're a promoter, 7 to 8 you're a passive (politely shrugging), 0 to 6 you're a detractor. The score is percent promoters minus percent detractors, so it lands somewhere between -100 and +100.
It's a relationship metric. It doesn't ask about today's checkout or last week's support ticket, it asks about the whole... "vibe" (for lack of better words) of the company.
And it is reductive, honestly. Collapsing an entire relationship into one number from -100 to 100 loses a lot. But I've come around on it, mostly because the alternative most teams reach for is "no number at all, just vibes from the lastest (cherry picked?) support emails," which is worse.
CSAT: how did that one specific thing go
CSAT asks about one moment. A support chat, a checkout, an onboarding step. Usually 1 to 5 stars, reported as the percentage who picked the top options. It's deliberately narrow, and that narrowness (is that a word?) is the whole point: it won't tell you if someone likes your company, it will tell you if the thing you just asked about went... fine.
The difference, if you only remember one table
| NPS | CSAT | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Loyalty overall | One interaction |
| Scale | 0-10 | 1-5, usually |
| When | Quarterly-ish | Right after the thing happens |
| Range | -100 to +100 | 0% to 100% |
So which one do you actually need
If you're trying to know whether the business as a whole is getting more or less loved, or you want an early warning system for churn, that's NPS. If you want to know whether your new checkout flow is actually better than the old one, that's CSAT, and you'll know within days instead of waiting for the next quarterly wave.
Most teams that care about this run both, which sounds like a uncomitting answer but is genuinely correct, I found. Or at least should be.
Ofc question wording matters more than which metric you pick, by the way. A leading question wrecks either one equally. But you already knew that. I'm sure.
I build SurveyService, mostly because I got tired of doing this scoring math by hand in spreadsheets. Free NPS calculator if you just need the number: https://surveyservice.app/nps-calculator. Longer version of this, with more on what counts as a "good" score: https://surveyservice.app/guides/nps-vs-csat
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