An NPS detractor is a survey respondent who answers the Net Promoter Score question with a 0 to 6, signaling they are unlikely to recommend the company, and whose response is counted against the overall score. Promoters (9 to 10) add to NPS, passives (7 to 8) are ignored, and detractors subtract. A detractor is not a lukewarm customer: a 0 to 6 usually means someone at risk of leaving, and inclined to tell others why.
The common response to detractors is damage control. Teams run close-the-loop outreach, apologize, offer a credit, and hope the next survey wave reads better. That is the framing this page rejects: treating detractors as a PR problem and chasing the survey number instead of the causes. Outreach can rescue one relationship. It does not stop the next detractor from being created the same way.
Detractors are a demand signal, not a reputation stain. Behind almost every 0 to 6 is an intent that failed somewhere: a question that looped without an answer, a handoff that dropped context, a policy that made a simple request hard. Mining detractor conversations and tracing each back to the intent and contact driver behind it tells you which resolution paths to fix at the root. Fix those, and the detractor count falls as a consequence, not as a campaign.
Detractors vs passives vs promoters at a glance
| Dimension | Detractor | Passive | Promoter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Score band | 0-6 | 7-8 | 9-10 |
| Effect on NPS | subtracts | not counted | adds |
| What they signal | churn risk, negative word of mouth | indifference, open to switching | advocacy and referrals |
Aide, the agentic AI platform for customer experience, makes that mining systematic. Every conversation is classified by intent, so detractor feedback maps to the specific intents where resolution broke down instead of dissolving into sentiment averages. Automation is held to the same evidentiary standard: an intent moves to automated handling only after verification, never on promise, which keeps automated paths from quietly manufacturing the next wave of detractors. And each failure pattern stays on record as a named intent, so what the operation learns about its detractors compounds instead of resetting with every survey wave.
Frequently asked questions
- What score makes someone a detractor?
- Any response from 0 to 6 on the 0 to 10 NPS question. Only 9s and 10s count in your favor; everything from 0 through 6 counts against.
- How do you reduce NPS detractors?
- Fix the causes, not the score. Mine detractor conversations for the intents that failed, trace them to their contact drivers, and repair those resolution paths at the root. Close-the-loop outreach helps individual customers, but the count only falls durably when the failures stop recurring.