Why is NPS important?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) remains one of the most widely used customer experience and benchmarking KPIs.
Developed by Fred Reichheld and popularised through The Ultimate Question, NPS measures the likelihood that customers will recommend a brand, product or service to peers. Customers who award a score of 9 or 10 are considered “promoters” and are generally viewed as loyal advocates.
The underlying idea is simple: organisations that create better customer experiences generate more promoters, stronger loyalty and ultimately stronger business performance.
But does the relationship actually exist in practice?
Can NPS predict market share growth?
To explore this question, Across Health collaborated with a pharmaceutical client who provided twelve-month market share evolution data for three specialty brands across seven countries.
The analysis combined this market performance data with brand-level NPS scores from a recent Navigator365™ Benchmark study. To account for differences in scoring behaviour between countries, NPS scores were adjusted by comparing each brand’s score against the average NPS observed within that specific country.
The objective was straightforward:
Do brands with higher customer loyalty scores also achieve stronger market growth?
What the data revealed
The chart shows a clear positive relationship between benchmark NPS scores and market share evolution.
The pattern is particularly visible for the two established growth brands included in the analysis. Brands with stronger NPS scores generally demonstrated more favourable market share trends over the following twelve-month period.
For the recently launched brand, represented in orange, the relationship appears less consistent. This is not entirely surprising. New products often have relatively small numbers of loyal users and promoters during the early stages of the product lifecycle, making NPS patterns less stable. Similar dynamics are frequently observed across Navigator365 Benchmark studies involving launch brands.
What drives higher NPS scores?
The next question is equally important:
What actually creates promoters?
Previous Navigator365 Benchmark analyses suggest that customer experience plays a more important role in driving promoter behaviour than brand attributes alone. Brands that deliver relevant, coordinated and valuable interactions across channels are more likely to generate customer advocacy and loyalty.
This finding reinforces an important strategic principle:
Improving customer experience is not simply a customer satisfaction initiative. It is a commercial growth opportunity.
Why this matters for pharmaceutical brands
Healthcare professionals increasingly judge brands based on the quality of their engagement experience, not only on the products themselves.
Competitive benchmarking helps organisations understand:
- How customer loyalty compares with competitors
- Which aspects of customer experience drive advocacy
- Where engagement strategies create competitive advantages
- Which improvement opportunities are most likely to influence future growth
Rather than relying on assumptions, pharmaceutical organisations can use benchmark evidence to prioritise investments that strengthen customer experience, customer loyalty and commercial performance.
About Navigator365 Benchmark 4D
Navigator365 Benchmark 4D is a brand-level competitive diagnostic that connects four critical dimensions of performance:
- Omnichannel execution
- Customer experience
- Brand perception
- Adoption dynamics
By connecting these dimensions across the competitors that matter most, Navigator365 Benchmark 4D helps pharmaceutical organisations understand not only where they stand, but also which actions are most likely to improve customer engagement, loyalty and business outcomes.
Want to understand how healthcare professionals rate your brand relative to competitors?
Book a conversation with one of our experts to discover how Navigator365 Benchmark 4D can help shape your customer engagement strategy.