It is better to accept the standard approach and understand and educate others that scores can vary by culture. This means that some scores will always be lower than others.

Passives do carry weight – and any organisation that ignores them should change their approach and focus on them as well as their Detractors and Promoters. Just because the percentage of Passives is not used in the score calculation, does not mean that they are not important.

My last point – and another reason why creating a European NPS score would be irrelevant is due to the fact that you are still grouping too many cultural differences together. People from Southern Europe are far more likely to give much higher scores than people in Northern Europe – particularly Netherlands, Belgium, Finland etc. And the younger/emerging markets in Europe – such as Turkey, Russia, Georgia etc – give extremely high scores. A European NPS would not provide an answer to this.

However, I think benchmarking is more important than lowering the promoter and passive score. As explained in the book, scores can often vary in certain regions. There is a danger in comparing regions, because cultural differences are often a huge influencer. Part of the solution is benchmarking locally and comparing local scores. Try to get your score up in your country or region and strive to become the top NPS company in your area.

My opinion is: Focussing on the detractors to get them up (perfectly to promotors, but good if they become passive too) is a good alternative strategy.