How to run an NPS survey in Google Forms

No. Google's own list of question types has no NPS option. It has two scale-shaped questions, and only one of them works. The Linear scale question can start at 0 or 1 and end at any whole number from 2 to 10, with a label on each end. Set it to 0–10 and you have the 11-point scale NPS is defined on.

The newer Rating question (stars, hearts or thumbs) is the wrong choice. Its range is 3 to 10 and it has no zero, so the bottom of the scale is missing. A 1–10 scale is not NPS either: the promoter, passive and detractor bands are defined against 0–10, and moving the floor makes your number impossible to compare with anyone else's or with your own past results.

Net Promoter Score comes from Fred Reichheld's 2003 Harvard Business Review article, "The One Number You Need to Grow". The standard question is "How likely are you to recommend [company] to a friend or colleague?" Scores of 9–10 are promoters, 7–8 are passives, and 0–6 are detractors. NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, so it runs from −100 to +100 and is written without a percent sign. Net Promoter and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, NICE Systems and Fred Reichheld.

Many Google Forms NPS guides skip this. "Go to section based on answer" is only available on Multiple choice and Dropdown questions. A Linear scale question cannot send a detractor to one section and a promoter to another, whatever the settings look like.

The workaround is to build the score question as a Multiple choice question with eleven options, 0 through 10, and route each option to a section. The data is the same, and the Sheets formulas are unchanged, with one check described under the formula table. The cost is how it looks: eleven radio buttons stacked vertically instead of a horizontal scale. On a phone that is arguably easier to tap. On a desktop it looks less like the NPS scale people are used to seeing.

NPS is a difference between two percentages, so it is noisier than a single percentage. An approximate 95% margin of error is 1.96 × √((P + D − (P − D)²) ÷ n) × 100, where P and D are the promoter and detractor shares as decimals.

In the example above (P = 0.45, D = 0.20, n = 100), that works out to about ±15 points. The honest statement is that the true score is somewhere between roughly +10 and +40. At 400 responses with the same mix it narrows to about ±7.5. Quadrupling the sample halves the error.

In practice: always print the response count next to the score, don't react to a single wave's movement of a few points, and read the trend across three or more waves. If you want to plan the sample before sending, our sample size calculator at /tools/sample-size-calculator and margin of error calculator at /tools/margin-of-error-calculator do the arithmetic for a single percentage, which is a reasonable lower bound for NPS.

For a quarterly survey to a few hundred customers, nothing on this list matters much, and Google Forms is free with no response cap. It starts to hurt when NPS becomes an ongoing program.

The Summary tab shows a bar chart of how many people picked each number. It never classifies promoters or detractors, so anyone who wants the score has to open the spreadsheet or rebuild the formula.

You can have the horizontal 0–10 scale or section branching, not both. There is also no "less than 7" rule. Every value has to be routed one by one.

If you turn on file uploads or restrict the form to your organization, respondents must sign in with a Google account. For a customer NPS survey, keep both off.

Zunoform has NPS as a native question type: a fixed 0–10 scale, and the form's summary tab shows the score with the detractor, passive and promoter split already calculated. Logic rules on an NPS answer can use "is less than" and "is greater than", so "if score is less than 7, show the what-went-wrong question" is one rule rather than eleven, and the scale stays horizontal. Responses can also go to Google Sheets on the free plan if you still want your own formulas.

The catch: the NPS question is one of three field types (with e-signature and payment) that need the Pro plan, $14.99/month, to publish. You can build and preview it on Free. The Free plan also caps responses at 500 a month, while Google Forms has no response limit.

So, if you run NPS a few times a year and are comfortable in a spreadsheet, stay on Google Forms and use the formulas above. If NPS is a number someone reports every month, and you want per-segment follow-ups without eleven routing rules, a native question saves the rebuild each time. If you want to avoid paying anything, a 0–10 Rating question in Zunoform collects the same numbers on Free, and you can score them in Sheets exactly as described here.