The competitive benchmark Net Promoter Score is often overlooked or undervalued. Yet it adds an important level of information the other two are likely to miss and should serve as a keystone of your broader market research efforts. Double-blind, competitive benchmark NPS compared with your competitors' double-blind scores is the best way to understand where you truly stand to make informed, strategic decisions. It allows a company to learn what respondents think about an entire value proposition, not just their relationship with one particular company.

Competitive benchmarking also eliminates the responder bias that’s likely to crop up when you survey only your own customers. In your surveys, people who don’t like doing business with you may decide that it isn't worth their time to participate. With a third party doing the asking, you’re equally likely to hear from everyone on the love-you/hate-you spectrum.

Relationship and experience Net Promoter Scores fuel continuous improvement and are the primary inputs into the Net Promoter System's high-velocity closed-loop feedback practices (i.e., inner loop, huddle, and outer loop). In both types of NPS feedback requests, best practice recommends that a company follow up with customers whose feedback merits its employees take the opportunity to learn and improve, thereby "closing the loop". Both types of scores can also be supplemented with predictive NPS using operational signals and data about the customer’s history. That said, there are also a few key differences between the two scores, and the two should not be compared directly.

Relationship NPS is solicited when there is no initiating trigger. It is the way a company can ask for feedback, often once or twice a year, to get a general sense of customer sentiment. Since it is known who the respondents are (unlike competitive benchmark NPS), relationship NPS is also often used for loyalty economics. In some industries where double-blind competitive benchmark data is hard to collect, relationship NPS can serve as an imperfect proxy.

Experience NPS, in contrast, is triggered by the completion of specific customer actions, such as making a transaction online or finishing a call with the customer service rep. Since it is triggered by a specific interaction, experience NPS is a great opportunity to immediately recover service. While these experiences can be very frequent, a company should make sure not to overload customers with too many feedback requests. For example, best practice recommends focusing only on the experiences that are most impactful for a customer and applying rules to survey software to ensure that customers are solicited a maximum of once every three months.