I hate NPS. You know what makes it shit? It requires your customers to fill it out. So then your bugging them to complete it
NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
21–30 of 83 posts
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#22My "problem" with NPS is when essential services, which I have next to no choice over using, ask me if i would recommend them to others. No, IRS, I would never recommend your service to friends or family. That's not really indicative of anything.
Ah, like the good old > How likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend or colleague? Please explain why you gave this score. > I need you to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend operating systems to one another
But they do - people ask each other if it's worth updating macOS for example - I've literally been asked if I'd recommend updating many times - I've asked people if they'd recommend a Linux distribution - etc.
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#23My "problem" with NPS is when essential services, which I have next to no choice over using, ask me if i would recommend them to others. No, IRS, I would never recommend your service to friends or family. That's not really indicative of anything.
You need to pay taxes. It's conceivable that the IRS could have a system that at least made it easy and painless. Compared to alternative tax filing methods, you might recommend a really easy way to file taxes to a friend.
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#24> (The most irritating — and by far the most common — reason companies seem to measure NPS is that it’s standardized, but more importantly that everyone else does it. Which is fine for one-time-use benchmarking, but not a good basis for internal KPIs.)
Except the alternative isn't to stop tracking NPS the alternative is to use unstandardized customer survey metric's, this is worse because you have no true industry comparison & can be gamed more easily since they define the formula!
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#25Yes, NPS is an imperfect measure, as all are. What I’ve never seen is a great argument for what one should use instead.
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
No PatientCo, I did not enjoy paying my medical bills through your system. I have no intention of recommending your bill payment system to my family. Why is this even asked?
I switched doctors when their billing became impossible to deal with. Assuming they gave a shit, that survey response would have been useful to the practice.
It's still useless. You don't choose the payment processor of your doctor, and you certainly do not recommend it to anybody.
They should be asking doctors. And if they want your point of view, they should ask something minimally reasonable (like, did you have any problem using it?), not some crazy hypothetical.
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#27The point of NPS vs free cash flow or operational metrics is that it is in theory a leading indicator instead of a trailing indicator. It's nice (but a bit too late) to know that your business is screwed because your customers left, it's another to know that your business is about to be screwed because your customers are on the verge of leaving if an opportunity appears. The criticisms of NPS pointed out (that it's a…
What exactly would you suggest it's a leading indicator of? Churn? Ultimately if it matters, it should have to be an input to the cash flow time series -- mediated by churn -- no? (Article means to frame free cash flow as a series rather than a point-in-time value). If you're interested in forecasting, as a company, you should know the things that mean your customer is not doing well within the specific context of yo…
I'd expect it to be a leading indicator of user growth / churn, yes.
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#28I suspect the concept of NPS is, if not the source of, a major driver of the whole "anything less than 10/10, 5 stars, etc. is basically a fail" meme. There seem to be signifiant toxic effects from this on customer-facing employees, in my experience.
This is absolutely a massive issue with it. Apple did this with retail employees back in the day and it was terrible. Employee reviews were based on it, managers had to call customers and apologize if the customer didn't leave a 9 or 10 rating, it was absolutely awful. One of the biggest problems with it is that an average person, unaware of what NPS is, doesn't understand that giving any rating less than a 9 is esse…
I remember when I worked my first job as tech support for an ISP our entire performance was measured by NPS. The company had a question asking 'how would you rate the rep' and 'how would you rate the company'. But, the rep question was a decoy, and the company question actually counted in my personal NPS stats.
I would get so many 10s for the rep (which does not count at all) and 1s for the company which would obliterate my stats. And, only the last person who spoke to the customer was rated, so this encouraged meaninglessly transferring people around like a hot potato.
Number of times I would get a customer who had issues for weeks, and then I take a look at their issue, resolve it in 15 minutes, they would be ecstatic on the call and then the NPS survey comes back, 10 for me and 1 for the company. Then I would get a tap on my shoulder from the supervisor asking me to explain the detractor.
I almost got fired after about 6 months due to my NPS being too low, until I made friends with one of the vets, and one evening in the pub with couple beers too many in him he explained to me that the only way to survive is to game the system. He told me how to crash the call client to prevent it from sending surveys to angry callers, how to transfer people to infinite hold queue which does not result in survey when they hang up, and how to trick the system into thinking that I had and inbound call when I did not (which gave me time to actually do my work, like performing relocations and resolving complex provisioning issues since any time not spent on inbound call was considered to be not adhering to schedule). I went from less than +40 NPS to +90 NPS in one month, so most of the NPS feedback was fake anyway.
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly would you suggest it's a leading indicator of? Churn? Ultimately if it matters, it should have to be an input to the cash flow time series -- mediated by churn -- no? (Article means to frame free cash flow as a series rather than a point-in-time value). If you're interested in forecasting, as a company, you should know the things that mean your customer is not doing well within the specific context of yo…
My own understanding is that it’s supposed to be a prediction input organic growth and nothing more. All it’s really telling you is whether a customer is likely to provide you with another customer, which is why only really high values answers matter, because “hell yeahs” are all that really matter. I’m skeptical as to its usefulness even for this, but most companies I’ve worked for use it as a general KPI which is e…
If you go into the trouble of collecting it, it's reasonable to use as a KPI, as it carries useful information.
I imagine you are annoyed that they optimize for it. And yes, it's not reasonable to optimize for it. Why do people optimize every KPI?
Re: NPS doesn’t say anything particularly useful
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
This, to me, is a general problem with a purely quantified, metrics driven approach to management, not just limited to NPS. I'm not demonizing these approaches, just saying that you have to balance humanity with data. I like to look at this kind of thing as the one of the dark sides/dark patterns of using data for decisionmaking. Qualitative measures are important, as is maintaining as much humanity as possible, to h…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy “The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to s…
Related is Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
My favorite story related to this, because the managers thought LoC would be a good measure of productivity, is "-2000 lines of code": https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...