I work in a not for profit functional monopoly space. A member body distributing resources according to policy.<p>I can get why we do satisfaction scores, but NPS never made sense to me. Like, does the justice system do NPS for family law cases? It's not like you can get divorced in a 7-11 by the clerk, and even mediation is a process inside the model so NPS in a non competitive self-regulated monopoly.. what does it even mean to recommend to others?
> I need you to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another<p>Maybe you are in the wrong crowd, but the crowd that does do recommendations on operating systems it is rarely windows that is recommended
In stead of asking “would you reccomend”, shouldn’t you rely on “how did you learn about us?”, or “why did you buy our product”, the first one being the most reliable, as it is a neutral question about a fact.
At scale, a relevant number of your customers talk. One example in TFA is that customers do not have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to each other. Well, I'm sorry, but in my bubble they certainly do. I have recommended more operating systems than car models to others.<p>The other thing the article misses IMO is that detraction is also growth, albeit negative growth (and additionally, people are in my experience much more likely to passionately recommend _against_ something they hate than recommending something they love).
So the NPS tells you a thing or two about:
- Your potential to utilise whichever chance you have to grow via word of mouth
- Your potential to squander that same chance due to people hating your product
- Your potential to have negative growth because your customers are leaving in droves.
I never understood the logic behind that asymmetric ranking scale.<p>Around 16 years ago our CEO was talked into using this. After 3 quarters of using it, he killed it because it wasn’t making any visible change in sales; the only metric he cared about.
I occasionally answer a customer support survey, just because I know the person on the other end probably gets to keep their job or not based on some average score, but I am not wasting my time answering a NPS survey for some random app or company that I've used. It's just not worth my time and I get too many surveys to care.
Every time you get one of those surveys rank them at zero, then add "Net Promoter Score is a flawed vanity metric and shouldn't be used for business purposes" in the comment box. Sometimes I link the Wikipedia NPS "Criticism" section as well.<p>Most places don't care about the results from an actual customer service perspective. The above gets crickets, not even an auto responder.<p>For companies that do care (tiny startups, mostly) I've gotten IMMEDIATE personal email responses from CEOs and founders asking what they can fix for a zero NPS. That's a great place to link the criticism section if not done previously, and to provide useful, raw feedback on what you love/hate about their products.
I always find this metric bizarre when companies ask about it. Everything is in either a category of things I’m not going to bother talking about, or I’ve already recommended it to people who might care, or I’ve already anti-recommended it to those people. Those are 0, 10, 0 I guess. I’m never like “well I haven’t mentioned it yet but there’s a 60% chance I’ll recommend it at some point”<p>From when I worked at a company that used it I seem to recall it was actually just used as binary too. 8+ is good and everything else is bad or something like that. So it’s weird that they collect it with such fake precision.
I work in a company where they try NPS both with customers and staff. Both of these NPS results were available in very fine grained (anonymous) reports... That is until quite recently.<p>Previously we had access to all the freeform comments, such as "as a customer we need feature X", or "as a staff member we want to see more transparency around Y".<p>Today, after a few particularly turblent quarters including layoffs, all we get to see are summarized versions of the staff NPS.<p>Vanity project indeed.
NPS is very useful at millions of customers scale provided you don't conduct the research yourself and pay for it to be done correctly by a firm who knows how to extract the information fairly. Basically: NPS is a solid late stage business tool but isn't applicable until your customer base is sprawling and you want to understand the mechanics of your brand more.
NPS: Net promoter score.<p>Expand your initialisms, folks.<p><<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score</a>>
My answer is usually I think your product is great but I'm not going to recommend it to anyone.<p>So you get a zero even though you're product is great.<p>Ask the right question!
I would go a step further: NPS is a garbage metric.<p>First, you start by assuming your customers can even reasonably ascertain their likelihood to recommend. They can't; there are people who answer 10 but will never recommend, and there are people who answer 0 but already have and will again.<p>Next, you assume your customers are idiots and don't know how an 11-point scale works by adjusting the midpoint: Instead of 5, the middle is now 7 and 8.<p>Then you realize there are two many numbers, so you throw several out by reducing your 11-point scale to a 3-point scale, after which you re-interpret "unlikely to recommend" as "likely to snag some other customers on my way out the door."<p>Finally you calculate your 'net promoters' by subtracting the percentage of low scores from the percentage of high scores to give you a nice round number that doesn't correlate with what's actually happening in the real world.<p>And this is just what happens when you do it 'the right way.'<p>NPS is said to measure growth using loyalty as a proxy. But then, what does that have to do with recommendations? Nothing.
I’m inferring that NPS here refers to “Net Promoter Score” [0]. Presumably within his niche, the author can assume his readers already know that.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score</a>