Partner NPS: how to measure your supplier relationships with one question

The question

“As a supplier or partner, how likely are you to recommend [company] as a customer to another business?”, from 0 to 10. As with standard NPS, 9 and 10 are promoters, 7 and 8 are passives, and 0 to 6 are detractors; the index is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. What changes is the respondent: here, it is the person who sells to you.

PosRank adds a second required question based on the score: for low scores, what you should improve as a customer (payments, communication, transparency); for high scores, what works best about doing business with you. That comment turns a number into an action.

Whom to ask and when

Ask all active suppliers, not a selection. A good time is at the end of each billing cycle or project; another option is a fixed quarterly survey that allows comparisons. If you have a supplier portal, install the PosRank widget there; otherwise, send the widget’s direct link by email.

• Measure recurring suppliers and one-off projects separately: their expectations differ.
• Never make anything depend on the response: orders, payment terms, or renewals.
• Respond to detractors privately first; publish your response later, backed by action.

How it becomes a star rating

PosRank converts each score from 0 to 10 into 1 to 5 stars on a linear scale (0 → 1★, 5 → 3★, 10 → 5★), so partner NPS and supplier reviews share the same scale in the profile’s “Suppliers and partners” category. The aggregate is published anonymously only if the business enables it and after at least ten responses; comments are published only with their authors’ permission, under their names or as Anonymous.

How to read the result

A positive partner NPS with detractors concentrated on one issue (usually payments) points to a process problem rather than a relationship problem: a clear payment schedule and a single contact often resolve it. A negative NPS with comments about scope changes points to the contracting process. The useful part of the indicator is not the number itself but how it changes quarter by quarter and what the comments say.

What stays separate

Partner NPS never feeds into the customer or employee score. All three measurements coexist in the dashboard with their own results and filters, and each category displays its own star rating on the public profile. This is why PosRank can claim to be the only platform with a business’s reputation as a customer: it measures it with its own tool and does not dilute it with other scores.