Net Promoter Score is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty

Loyalty

Loyalty is faithfulness or a devotion to a person, country, group, or cause There are many aspects to...

 of a firm's customer relationships

Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...

. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, a term frequently used in marketing, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation...

 research.
Net Promoter is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld

Fred Reichheld

Frederick F. Reichheld is a United States business author and business strategist best known for his research and writing on the loyalty business model and Loyalty Marketing. His books include The Loyalty Effect , Loyalty Rules! , and The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth...

, Bain & Company

Bain & Company

Bain & Company is a global management consulting firm headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Bain is considered one of the most prestigious consulting firms in the world, with 47 offices in 30 countries and over 5,500 professionals on staff globally...

, and Satmetrix. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review is a general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing, owned by the Harvard Business School. A monthly research-based magazine written for business practitioners, it claims a high ranking business readership among academics, executives,...

article "The One Number You Need to Grow".
The most important proposed benefits of this method derive from simplifying and communicating the objective of creating more "Promoters" and fewer "Detractors" — a concept claimed to be far simpler for employees to understand and act on than more complicated, obscure or hard-to-understand satisfaction metrics or indices.