NPS Detractors: What They Are and What to Do About Them

NPS detractors are customers who give a score of 0 to 6 on the Net Promoter Score question: "How likely are you to recommend [product] to a friend or colleague?" On the 0-10 NPS scale, these customers are classified as unlikely to recommend your product and are considered at risk for churning. Detractors may also actively discourage others from using your product through negative word-of-mouth, reviews, or social media.

But here is what most companies get wrong about detractors: the score itself is not the insight. A "4" tells you a customer is unhappy. It does not tell you why, what would fix it, or whether they are about to cancel. The real value of identifying detractors is the conversation that should follow.

This guide covers what detractors signal, why the score alone is insufficient, and practical strategies for converting detractors into retained (and even loyal) customers.

After listening to 50,000+ customer conversations, I have learned that a detractor score of 3 can mean five completely different things depending on the person behind it.

Key takeaways:

• The score identifies who to talk to, not what to do. Two customers who both score a 3 may need completely different responses: one has a support problem, the other has a product-market fit issue. Only a follow-up conversation distinguishes the cause.
• Not all detractors are equally unhappy. Scores of 0-2 indicate severe dissatisfaction and likely active competitor evaluation, while 5-6 scores often signal mild disappointment or indifference, and your response strategy should differ for each range.
• Detractors above 40% signal a structural problem. Average B2B SaaS NPS sits around 41, so a detractor percentage consistently above 40% points to fundamental product-market fit or pricing issues rather than isolated customer complaints.
• Closing the loop converts detractors into advocates. Customers who see their specific feedback result in tangible action can become stronger advocates than those who never had a problem, a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox.

Understanding the NPS Scale

Before diving into strategy, let us make sure the fundamentals are clear.

The NPS question asks customers to rate, on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely they are to recommend your product. Responses are grouped into three categories:

• Promoters (9-10): Enthusiastic customers who will actively recommend you
• Passives (7-8): Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offers
• Detractors (0-6): Unhappy customers who may damage your brand through negative word-of-mouth. Bain & Company research shows detractors account for more than 80% of negative word-of-mouth, while promoters drive more than 80% of referrals

Your NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. If 50% of respondents are Promoters and 20% are Detractors, your NPS is +30.

You can calculate your exact score and see the breakdown using the NPS Calculator.

What Detractors Actually Signal

A detractor score is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Different scores within the 0-6 range signal very different situations.

Severe Detractors (0-2)

These customers are actively unhappy. They have likely had a negative experience significant enough to rate your product near the bottom of the scale. Common drivers:

• A critical feature broke and was not fixed promptly
• A support experience that left them feeling ignored
• A billing issue that created frustration and mistrust
• The product fundamentally does not solve their problem

Scores in this range often correlate with customers who are already looking for alternatives or have decided to cancel.

Moderate Detractors (3-4)

These customers are disappointed but not hostile. They may have started with higher expectations that were not met, or they may have experienced a gradual decline in satisfaction.

Common drivers:

• Features they expected are missing or incomplete
• The product works but feels clunky or inefficient compared to alternatives
• They feel like they are overpaying for the value received
• Support is adequate but not responsive enough

Moderate detractors are often your best conversion opportunity. Their dissatisfaction is real but potentially addressable.

Mild Detractors (5-6)

These are the trickiest to interpret. A score of 5 or 6 is below the "passive" threshold, but it is not strongly negative. These customers might be:

• Generally fine but hit a recent friction point that colored their response
• Indifferent rather than actively dissatisfied (they would not recommend, but they would not warn against either)
• Using a small portion of your product and not seeing enough value to recommend it enthusiastically

Some companies argue that 5-6 scores should be treated more like passives. For follow-up purposes, they are worth contacting, but the conversation should be different from how you approach a 0-2 score.

Why Is the NPS Score Alone Not Enough?

Here is the core problem with NPS detractors: the number tells you that a customer is unhappy, but it does not tell you anything actionable.

Consider two customers who both score you a 3:

Customer A loves your core product but had a terrible support experience last week. Their issue took four days to resolve, they had to repeat their problem to three different agents, and the final resolution was a workaround, not a real fix. Their 3 is about support, not your product.

Customer B has been a customer for a year and has gradually realized your product does not handle their most important use case well. They have tried workarounds. They have submitted feature requests. Nothing has changed. Their 3 is about product-market fit.

These two customers need completely different responses. Treating them the same because they share a number is a waste of both your time and theirs.

This is why the follow-up conversation matters more than the score. The score identifies who to talk to. The conversation reveals what to do about it.

Following Up With Detractors: A Practical Framework

Most companies collect NPS scores. Far fewer follow up systematically. And the follow-up is where the value lives.

Step 1: Follow Up Quickly

Timing matters enormously. Follow up within 24-48 hours of receiving the detractor score. The experience that drove the rating is fresh in the customer's mind. Waiting a week means they have moved on emotionally, and your outreach feels like a checkbox exercise rather than genuine concern.

Step 2: Ask, Do Not Assume

Your follow-up should start with an open-ended question, not a defense or a solution. Start with something like:

"Thank you for your feedback. You rated us a [score], and we would like to understand what is driving that. Can you tell us more about your experience?"

Do not lead with "We are sorry you had a bad experience." You do not know what their experience was yet. Do not jump to offering a discount. That signals you think the problem is price when it might be something else entirely.

Step 3: Listen Without Defending

This is the hardest part for most teams. When a customer says your product is hard to use or your support is slow, the instinct is to explain or justify. Resist that instinct.

Your goal in the follow-up conversation is to understand the customer's perspective completely. Ask clarifying questions. Acknowledge what they are telling you. Take notes.

Common follow-up questions that work well:

• "Can you tell me more about what happened?"
• "How long has this been an issue for you?"
• "What would make the biggest difference for you?"
• "Is there anything else we should know?"

Step 4: Commit to Action (or Honesty)

After understanding the issue, be direct about what you can and cannot do.

If you can fix it: "This is helpful. We are going to [specific action] and I will personally follow up with you when it is done."

If you cannot fix it soon: "I hear you. This is on our roadmap but not in the next quarter. In the meantime, here is what we can do to help."

If you cannot fix it at all: "I appreciate your honesty. Unfortunately, [specific limitation] is a constraint of our current product. I want to be upfront about that."

Honesty, even when the answer is not what the customer wants to hear, builds more trust than vague promises.

Step 5: Close the Loop

When you take action based on detractor feedback, tell them. This is the step most companies skip, and it is the one that converts detractors.

"Hi [Name], you told us [issue] was a problem. We shipped [fix/improvement] last week. I wanted you to be the first to know."

This single message does three things: it shows you listened, it shows you acted, and it makes the customer feel valued. Research from Bain & Company suggests that customers who have issues resolved can become more loyal than customers who never had problems, a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox.

How Do You Scale Detractor Follow-Up?

The framework above works well when you have a handful of detractors per month. But what happens when you have 50 or 100?

Automate the Initial Outreach

Trigger an automated email within 24 hours of any detractor score. Keep it personal in tone but automated in execution.

The email should:

• Reference their specific score (shows you are paying attention)
• Ask one open-ended question about what drove the rating
• Come from a real person (not "noreply@")
• Be short (under 100 words)

Triage by Score and Value

Not every detractor warrants the same level of attention. Use this triage matrix to match your response to the score range and customer value.

| Score Range | High-Value Customer | Standard Customer | | --- | --- | --- | | 0-2 (Severe) | Personal call or video from CS within 24 hours | Personal email from CS with an offer to schedule a call | | 3-4 (Moderate) | Personal email from CS with specific follow-up questions | Automated email with follow-up survey or open-ended question | | 5-6 (Mild) | Automated email with a brief follow-up question | Automated email with a brief follow-up question |

Use Conversational Follow-Up for Depth

When you need to understand the "why" at scale, traditional follow-up methods have limitations. Email follow-ups get low response rates. Manual calls do not scale.

This is where AI-powered follow-up conversations become valuable. Instead of sending a follow-up email that most detractors will not answer, you can offer an opt-in voice conversation that adapts to their specific concerns. A 3-minute conversation about why they scored you a 3 yields far more actionable insight than a text box in a follow-up email.

For more on how this approach works for post-cancellation conversations specifically, see our guide on NPS detractor follow-up. You can also evaluate your current NPS survey response rates using the NPS Response Rate Calculator.

Strategies for Converting Detractors

Beyond individual follow-up, here are systematic strategies for reducing your detractor percentage over time.

Fix the Systemic Issues

Individual follow-ups address individual customers. But if the same issues keep creating detractors, you need systemic fixes.

Aggregate your detractor feedback monthly. Identify the top 3 themes. Prioritize them by frequency and revenue impact. Assign ownership for each. Track progress.

If 40% of your detractors cite "too slow" and 25% cite "missing reporting features," those are your top two priorities. Not abstractly. Concretely. Put them on the product roadmap with dates.

Segment Your NPS Analysis

Overall NPS can mask segment-specific problems. Break down your NPS by:

• Customer tenure: Are new customers or long-tenured customers more likely to be detractors?
• Plan tier: Is your free tier dragging down NPS while enterprise customers are happy?
• Use case: Are customers using Feature A satisfied while customers relying on Feature B are not?
• Company size: Do SMBs have different satisfaction drivers than enterprise?

Segment-level analysis often reveals that your "detractor problem" is actually concentrated in one specific group, which makes it much more tractable.

Create a Detractor-to-Promoter Pipeline

Track individual customer journeys from detractor to passive to promoter (or from detractor to churn). This longitudinal view shows you:

• Which interventions actually move the needle
• How long conversion takes
• What percentage of detractors can be converted vs. what percentage will churn regardless

Over time, this data tells you where your follow-up investment has the highest return.

Address the Passives Too

Passives (scores 7-8) are often neglected because they are not as alarming as detractors. But passives are the easiest group to move: a small improvement in their experience can push them to promoter status, directly improving your NPS.

The effort required to move a passive to a promoter is typically much less than converting a detractor. Do not ignore this opportunity.

When Detractors Signal Something Bigger

Sometimes a surge in detractors is not about individual customer issues. It signals something structural.

Product-Market Fit Problems

For context, Retently's 2025 NPS benchmarks put the average B2B SaaS NPS at 41, so a detractor percentage above 40% is far outside the norm. If your detractor percentage is consistently that high, the issue may not be execution. It may be that your product is not solving the right problem for the right audience. No amount of follow-up calls will fix a fundamental product-market fit gap.

In this case, the detractor feedback is a research goldmine. It tells you exactly where your product and your market's expectations diverge. Use it to make strategic decisions, not just tactical fixes.

Pricing Misalignment

A spike in detractors after a price increase is a clear signal. But pricing-related detraction can also build slowly: customers who were happy at $X/month become detractors at $X/month as competitors enter the market or as their usage patterns change.

If price-related themes dominate your detractor feedback, it does not necessarily mean your price is too high. It may mean your product is not communicating its value effectively. Or it may mean you need a lower-cost entry tier.

Support or Reliability Failures

Detractor surges that correlate with outages, support staffing changes, or response time increases are the most fixable. They point to operational problems with clear solutions.

Track your NPS scores against your operational metrics. If you can map detractor spikes to specific incidents, you can quantify the cost of those incidents in customer satisfaction terms, which helps justify investment in reliability and support.

How Are NPS Detractors Connected to Churn?

Detractors churn at significantly higher rates than promoters. This relationship is well-documented, though the exact multiplier varies by product and industry. Research from Bain & Company suggests detractors churn at roughly 3x the rate of promoters, with the multiplier ranging from 2-6x depending on industry.

But the relationship is not deterministic. Not all detractors churn, and not all churned customers were detractors. Many cancellations come from passives who quietly outgrew the product or from customers who never responded to the NPS survey at all.

This means NPS detractor tracking should be part of your churn intelligence system, not the whole thing. Combine NPS signals with:

• Product usage data (declining engagement)
• Support ticket patterns (increasing frequency or severity)
• Payment data (failed charges, downgrades)
• Exit interview insights from churned customers

Together, these signals give you a much more complete view of retention risk than any single metric. For a comprehensive approach, see our guide on how to reduce churn in SaaS.

Measuring Your Detractor Follow-Up Program

How do you know if your detractor follow-up program is working? Track these metrics:

Follow-up rate: What percentage of detractors receive a follow-up within 48 hours? Target: 100% for automated outreach, 80%+ for personalized follow-up.

Response rate to follow-up: What percentage of detractors respond when you reach out? If this is below 20%, your follow-up is not compelling enough.

Issue resolution rate: Of the detractors who respond, what percentage have their issue addressed? Track both "resolved" and "acknowledged but cannot fix."

Score change rate: Of the detractors you follow up with, what percentage show an improved score in the next NPS survey? This is the ultimate conversion metric.

Churn rate by follow-up status: Do detractors who receive follow-up churn at a lower rate than detractors who do not? This validates the ROI of your follow-up program.

Getting Started

If you do not have a systematic detractor follow-up program, here is how to start this week.

Day 1: Review your current NPS data. How many detractors do you have? What is the score distribution? Calculate your NPS using the NPS Calculator.

Day 2: Set up an automated follow-up email triggered within 24 hours of any detractor score. Keep it simple: acknowledge the score, ask one open-ended question, send from a real person.

Day 3: Create a simple tracking sheet. Log every detractor, their score, the follow-up action taken, and the outcome.

Week 2: Review the first batch of follow-up responses. Identify the top 3 themes. Share them with your product and CS teams.

Month 1: Assess whether the themes are systemic or isolated. For systemic issues, create a plan to address them. For individual issues, ensure the follow-up process is consistent.

The gap between companies that collect NPS and companies that act on NPS is enormous. Most of the value of Net Promoter Score is not in the score itself. It is in the conversations the score triggers and the actions those conversations drive.

Start this week: set up automated follow-up for every detractor score, then add conversational depth to understand the reasons behind the numbers. Quitlo's free trial bundles NPS surveys with AI voice conversations, no credit card required, so you can collect the score and the story in one workflow. For a full framework on turning those conversations into retention outcomes, see our guide to NPS detractor follow-up.