"What Is the Primary Reason for Your Score?" — The NPS Question, Explained

“What is the primary reason for your score?” is the standard follow-up question in a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. You’ve just rated a company 0–10 on “how likely are you to recommend us,” and now they’re asking for the one factor that drove your number.

The score tells them how you feel. It doesn’t tell them why. That’s the whole job of this question.

If you just hit this question mid-survey and wondered whether it’s a trick — it isn’t. And if you’re the one building the survey, there’s a right way to ask it. This post covers both.

What the question means

“What is the primary reason for your score?” means: of everything that shaped your rating, name the biggest single factor. Not a full review. Not a list of everything you liked and disliked. The one thing that, if it changed, would move your number.

The 0–10 scale gives the metric; the open text box underneath is where the useful data lives.

The word “primary” is doing real work. Companies phrase it that way because a focused answer is more actionable than a rambling one. A 6 with the reason “your checkout crashed twice” points at a specific fix. A 6 with “it was okay I guess” points at nothing.

The question is almost always an open text box, and in a well-built survey it’s optional. You can skip it. But a skipped box wastes the most useful part of the survey — for both sides.

How to answer it

Write one or two honest, specific sentences that name the factor behind your number. That’s it. You’re not writing an essay, and nobody scores your grammar.

The difference between a useful answer and a useless one is specificity:

• Useless: “Good service.” Useful: “Support replied in an hour and actually fixed the billing issue.”
• Useless: “Too expensive.” Useful: “The price doubled at renewal with no notice.”
• Useless: “The app is buggy.” Useful: “The export button has failed three times this month on Safari.”

Name the feature, the interaction, or the moment. If a person helped you, name what they did. If something broke, say what broke and when. A specific sentence gets read by a human and routed to the team that can act on it. A vague one gets binned into a “misc” category and ignored.

One more honest note: if you genuinely don’t have a reason — you picked a 7 because 7 felt safe — skip the question. A made-up reason is worse data than no reason.

Why every NPS survey asks this follow up question

The 0–10 score is a metric; the reason is the roadmap. NPS alone can tell a company that satisfaction dropped from 42 to 31 this quarter. It cannot tell them whether that’s pricing, a buggy release, or a slow support queue. The follow-up question is where the diagnosis lives.

In practice the answers split into two piles, following the promoter and detractor categories defined by Bain & Company’s Net Promoter System:

Detractor reasons (scores 0–6) are the fix list. When thirty people write some version of “checkout crashed,” that’s not sentiment — that’s a bug report with thirty confirmations. Across client projects I’ve seen a single week of detractor comments reorder an entire quarter’s roadmap.

Promoter reasons (scores 9–10) are marketing copy. When a customer writes “support replied in an hour,” that sentence is better copy than anything the marketing team will draft, because it’s true and it’s in a customer’s own words.

Passives (7–8) tend to write the vaguest reasons, which is itself a signal: nothing stood out enough to name.

This is why a company that runs NPS without the follow-up is measuring a number it can’t act on.

How to ask it if you’re building the survey

Put one open text field directly after the 0–10 scale, make it optional, and stop there. That’s the whole pattern, and every part of it matters.

One question only. The temptation is to add “and what could we improve?” and “anything else?” Every extra field cuts completion. The primary-reason box already captures both praise and complaints; let it.

Immediately after the scale. The respondent just committed to a number. Their reasoning is loaded in their head right now. Put a page of demographic questions in between and the reasoning evaporates.

Open text, not a dropdown. A dropdown of preset reasons (“Price / Support / Features”) only ever confirms the categories you already suspected. The surprises — the reasons you didn’t know existed — only show up in free text.

Optional, not required. Force the field and you get “asdf” and “good.” Roughly a third of respondents will fill an optional box; nearly all of those answers are real.

In Core Forms this is a radio group styled as a 0–10 scale plus one textarea — the form templates include an NPS survey you can start from instead of building the scale by hand. Reading the responses afterward is the other half of the job; submissions land in the submissions inbox where you can scan detractor comments in one pass instead of digging through notification emails.

Variations that work better for some audiences

“What is the primary reason for your score?” is the neutral default, but it reads slightly corporate. Depending on who’s answering, a reworded version pulls better responses:

• “What’s the main thing we could improve?” — better for detractors. It signals you expect criticism and want it, which loosens people up.
• “What did we do well?” — better for promoters. It invites the specific praise you can quote later.
• “What’s the one thing behind your rating?” — plainer English for consumer audiences. Same question, less survey-speak.

The strongest setup shows a different follow-up based on the score itself: detractors get the “what could we improve” wording, promoters get “what did we do well.” Core Forms handles this with conditional logic — show one textarea when the score is 0–6, a different one when it’s 9–10. Same form, two conversations.

You can also pipe the score into the follow-up text (“You gave us a 4 — what’s the main reason?”), which I covered in the data variables piece. Echoing the number back makes the follow-up feel like a conversation instead of a form.

Build an NPS form in WordPress

The whole survey is three parts: a 0–10 radio scale, one optional textarea, a submit button. In Core Forms that’s a form template away, or about 25 lines of HTML if you’d rather write it yourself.

The parts most plugins get wrong are the ones after the markup: making the follow-up conditional on the score, and having somewhere sane to read the answers. Conditional logic covers the first. The submissions inbox covers the second — every score and reason in one table, filterable, no email archaeology.

Who this isn’t for: if you’re running NPS across a 50,000-customer SaaS with cohort tracking and automated churn alerts, use a dedicated NPS platform. A WordPress form is the right tool for the site-embedded survey, the post-purchase check-in, and the client project that needs NPS this week — not for enterprise-scale longitudinal analysis.

FAQ

Is “what is the primary reason for your score” required to answer?

Almost never. In a well-built NPS survey the follow-up text box is optional, and you can submit with it blank. If a survey forces the field and you have nothing to say, a short honest sentence (“nothing stood out either way”) is better than filler text.

How long should my answer be?

One or two sentences. Name the single biggest factor behind your number — a feature, an interaction, a price change. Specific beats long: “support replied in an hour” is a complete, useful answer. Anything past three sentences usually means you’re listing multiple reasons instead of the primary one.

What are the standard NPS survey questions?

Two: the 0–10 rating question (“How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”) and the open-ended follow-up (“What is the primary reason for your score?”). Some surveys add a third permission question (“Can we contact you about this?”), but two questions is the classic format.

Does my written reason affect the NPS calculation?

No. NPS is calculated purely from the 0–10 scores — the percentage of promoters (9–10) minus the percentage of detractors (0–6). Your written reason never changes the number. It’s read separately, usually to sort feedback into themes the company can act on.

Should the follow-up question change based on the score?

It’s the strongest version of the pattern. Ask detractors “what’s the main thing we could improve?” and promoters “what did we do well?” — each wording matches the mindset of the person answering. In Core Forms you’d build this with conditional logic on the score field.