Useful if you have no NPS® benchmarks for your company – Please help me to improve this ACSI to NPS converter

As many of you know, public competitive NPS benchmarks are exceedingly rare. The only large-scale public customer satisfaction data I know of is the American Customer Satisfaction Index. So… the question I asked myself is whether it would be better than nothing to design a method of converting an ACSI score into an NPS number. I have found a solution. The challenge is that I don’t know whether the solution is any good or not. And by ‘any good’, I mean I don’t yet know whether it is better than having no solution at all.

Temkin and ACSI data

Bruce Temkin publishes NPS benchmarks. You have to pay to have the full database. However, the summary by industry is free. The American Customer Satisfaction Index people publish satisfaction benchmarks for hundreds of large US companies that sell to consumers. Access is free, and they also summarize the data by industry sector. So, I took both sets of industry results for 2015, 2016 and 2017, and mapped them against each other. It gives the graph at the top of this article. You can see the equation of the trend line too.

Examples

Chick-fil-A has a 2017 ACSI score of 87. Applying the y = 1.5314x – 87.684 equation means they have an approximate NPS of 46. Facebook has an ACSI score of 68. That translates to an approximate NPS of 16.

Next steps

Is this useful? If you think at least the principle is useful, I would welcome any knowledge you may have about public sources of competitive benchmark NPS data. One important point here is that we need competitive benchmarks, meaning a set of NPS results for multiple companies that has been developed using a single method for all companies covered. This excludes self-announced results for a single company. At the moment, the only thing I can think of to refine the equation is to go back to the 2016 and 2015 Temkin and ACSI results and add them to the data set used for the graph.

Please let me know what you think.

Maurice